Javier Milei’s government will monitor social media with AI to ‘predict future crimes’
Javier Milei’s government will monitor social media with AI to ‘predict future crimes’
Argentina’s new Artificial Intelligence Unit Applied to Security will be tasked with surveillance in the real and virtual worlds. Experts warn about privacy violations
The Artificial Intelligence Unit will be made up of police officers and agents from other security forces. Its tasks will include “patrolling open social platforms, applications and websites,” where it will seek to “detect potential threats, identify movements of criminal groups or anticipate disturbances.” It will also be dedicated to “analyzing images from security cameras in real time in order to detect suspicious activities or identify wanted persons using facial recognition.” The resolution also awards it powers worthy of science fiction: “Using machine learning algorithms to analyze historical crime data and thus predict future crimes.” Another purpose will be to discover “suspicious financial transactions or anomalous behavior that could indicate illegal activities.”
The new unit will not only deal with virtual spaces. It will be able to “patrol large areas using drones, provide aerial surveillance and respond to emergencies,” as well as perform “dangerous tasks, such as defusing explosives, using robots.”
A digital policy specialist says, the initiative essentially means “illegal intelligence disguised as the use of ‘modern’ technologies.” Among the implicit risks, that there will be little control and many different security forces with access to the information that’s collected.
