Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Israeli spyware vans infiltrate American streets and your phones

cybernews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 51 posts

Re: Israeli spyware vans infiltrate American streets and your phones

#12

Post by notnaut »

roenxi wrote: post #6

As I follow the stats, somewhere between 20-40% of the US public seems to be open to the idea that Israel is a genocidal ethnostate. I have a low opinion of the US State on the best of days but it actually seems quite remarkable that they would be buying from them given where public opinion seems to be at. The US public is tolerant of a lot of things but the political cost-benefits surely can't make sense for that.

The outcry has RAPIDLY changed in the last few years and the corpses being propped up in our government buildings by deep-seated corrupted interests have long gone deaf.

Re: Israeli spyware vans infiltrate American streets and your phones

#14

Post by dumberquestions »

roenxi wrote: post #6

As I follow the stats, somewhere between 20-40% of the US public seems to be open to the idea that Israel is a genocidal ethnostate. I have a low opinion of the US State on the best of days but it actually seems quite remarkable that they would be buying from them given where public opinion seems to be at. The US public is tolerant of a lot of things but the political cost-benefits surely can't make sense for that.

Do you really think popular opinion always gets reflected on policy?

Re: Israeli spyware vans infiltrate American streets and your phones

#15

Post by NitpickLawyer »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #4

>Cognyte sells a lot of snake oil – for instance, the company claims to have created software that predicts where crime is likely to occur in the future. So they claim to implement machine learning which is snake oil?

> snake oil – [...] predicts where crime is likely to occur in the future.

Speaking strictly in the abstract here: I'm not sure this is as impossible or snake-oily as the quoted bit implies. From a technical perspective, as long as you're willing to put a lot of data in (unknown how much data about this is collected), and have a good pipeline, I'm sure a model can find enough correlations to get some accuracy better than random chance. Tracking movement patterns, events where lots of people gather, events where lots of tourists are present, temperature, employment stats, housing stats, etc. could all lead to some freaky "predictions" that might be way more accurate than a lot of people would guess. You could get a lot of these signals from GSM tracking, tbh.

The problem with this is that even if the implementation is solid (and all the care in the world is taken when curating datasets, ensuring no biases and so on), and even if deployment is solid (say schedule more LE presence in those areas), there will inevitably be situations where things escalate and LE start trusting the system way more than they should, and start harassing bystanders for no reason other than "the AI said so, you must be a criminal". Minority report vibes and so on.

The other problem is that it seems inevitable that some places will develop and deploy these things, and you can be sure that at least some of them will not care about solid implementations, biases and so on (UK is trialing facial recognition in stores, fully private but w/ cooperation from local LE).

Re: Israeli spyware vans infiltrate American streets and your phones

#16

Post by giantg2 »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #4

>Cognyte sells a lot of snake oil – for instance, the company claims to have created software that predicts where crime is likely to occur in the future. So they claim to implement machine learning which is snake oil?

It's not the technology that is snake oil, it's the way it's marketed. Machine learning that predicts where crime might occur is fine. But knowing that isnt going to help any more than just knowing certain neighborhoods are at higher risk.

Then you get into the predictive policing issues if you make this more granular down to individuals. Stuff like a lack of reasonable suspicion or probable cause because police belive the BS sales pitches and take it as truth.

Re: Israeli spyware vans infiltrate American streets and your phones

#18

Post by wk_end »

roenxi wrote: post #6

As I follow the stats, somewhere between 20-40% of the US public seems to be open to the idea that Israel is a genocidal ethnostate. I have a low opinion of the US State on the best of days but it actually seems quite remarkable that they would be buying from them given where public opinion seems to be at. The US public is tolerant of a lot of things but the political cost-benefits surely can't make sense for that.

Are you saying that you expect the Trump regime, which has been otherwise clearly and resolutely pro-Israel, to be implementing BDS policies and refusing to buy anything from Israeli companies? To try to appease 20%-40% of Americans mostly on the opposite side of the aisle of them? The Trump regime?

(OK - this is a state-level thing. The article is vague on details, it mentions Texas and "27 states". But the Texas government at least is blood red Republican and strongly aligned with the Trump Feds, as are about half the states, so depending on which 27 states we're talking hardly a surprise. And you were the one who said "the US State" in the first place.)

Post reply on HN