Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: law enforcement – Page 6

As impersonation scams in the United States rise, Card’s ordeal is indicative of a troubling trend. Technology is making it easier and cheaper for bad actors to mimic voices, convincing people, often the elderly, that their loved ones are in distress. In 2022, impostor scams were the second most popular racket in America, with over 36,000 reports of people being swindled by those pretending to be friends and family, according to data from the Federal Trade Commission. Over 5,100 of those incidents happened over the phone, accounting for over $11 million in losses, FTC officials said.

Advancements in artificial intelligence have added a terrifying new layer, allowing bad actors to replicate a voice with just an audio sample of a few sentences. Powered by AI, a slew of cheap online tools can translate an audio file into a replica of a voice, allowing a swindler to make it “speak” whatever they type.

Experts say federal regulators, law enforcement and the courts are ill-equipped to rein in the burgeoning scam. Most victims have few leads to identify the perpetrator and it’s difficult for the police to trace calls and funds from scammers operating across the world. And there’s little legal precedent for courts to hold the companies that make the tools accountable for their use.

Read more | >

Chinese geneticist He Jiankui rocked the scientific world with his gene-edited baby experiments back in 2018, a highly controversial use of the technology that ended up sending him to a three-year stint in prison for illegal medical practices.

Now, just under a year after being released, He has some regrets about rushing into the experiments.

“I did it too quickly,” He told the South China Morning Post in a new interview.

Read more | >

After years of delay under government pressure, Apple said Wednesday that it will offer fully encrypted backups of photos, chat histories and most other sensitive user data in its cloud storage system worldwide, putting them out of reach of most hackers, spies and law enforcement.

Maybe a New iPhone is a good idea for a second phone.

The one service Apple offered that could not be encrypted was iCloud. Now that will change.

Read more | >

A robot that can shift between solid and liquid states has been filmed escaping from a miniature jail cell with bars too close together to allow it to leave in solid form. The creators claim they were inspired by sea cucumbers’ capacity to alter their tissue stiffness – but the scene is just a little too similar to Robert Patrick liquifying his way through the mental hospital bars for us to believe them. We even see the famous reabsorption of the little bit left behind.

Hard-bodied robots are common, even if they have yet to reach the capacities of science fiction films. Their soft-bodied counterparts can get into tight spaces, but what they can do there is limited, and they are also difficult to control.

A team led by Dr Chengfeng Pan of the Chinese University of Hong Kong has made a robot that can swap states to whichever is most needed, with a video that sums it up. The prison escape may trigger our fears, but robots like these could also provide lifesaving services others cannot.

Read more | >

Back in 2002, the science fiction film Minority Report once again reignited futuristic imaginations about a world and police state gone too far. At the time, the movie inspired plenty of speculation about the future of our society, how computers would interact with us, and how law enforcement would be carried out proactively based on intent. In the movie, they combined technology with the psychic abilities of the “precogs,” to proactively prevent crimes.

The precogs had the ability to predict when crimes were about to be committed ahead of time, enabling law enforcement to act early.

Twenty years later, in a climate of abundant data, almost limitless processing, and at a point in history where law enforcement is frequently discussed, some of these technologies are beginning to look more feasible than ever.

Read more | >

In this article, let us see how to build a potential darkweb monitoring tool out of ChatGPT

The dark web is a notorious and often misunderstood part of the internet, known for its anonymous communication and the buying and selling of illegal goods and services. It is not indexed by traditional search engines and is only accessible through specialized software, such as the Tor browser.

While the dark web can be a breeding ground for criminal activity, it is also a valuable resource for cyber security firms, law enforcement agencies and cybersecurity and threat intelligence individuals looking to track and monitor illegal activities.

Read more | >

New research suggests that those with psychopathic personality traits are less susceptible to creating false memories of negative events. The findings indicate that individuals high in the psychopathic trait of fearless dominance were less likely to produce false memories when exposed to negative stimuli. Likewise, individuals high in the psychopathic trait of cold-heartedness tended to have fewer true memories of neutral and negative events. These findings may be relevant to law enforcement, mainly when gathering witness or suspect testimony from individuals high in psychopathic traits.

The new study has been published in the British Journal of Psychology.

A significant amount of memory research in the last few decades has focused on memory construction and retrieval. Of particular interest has been the formation of false memories. False memories can have consequences in the justice system, as eyewitness reports are often crucial to investigations and convictions. In addition, individuals with psychopathic personality traits often intersect with law enforcement, making research on how they process memories relevant to determining the reliability of remembered events.

Read more | >

Timetable.
0:00 — AI in our society.
0:46 — Defining Algocracy.
1:00 — Current AI algorithms.
2:20 — Future of AI decision-making.
5:59 — AI governance scenarios.
7:43 — Poll on our opinions of AI
8:35 — What actually worries experts.
10:02 — What now?

Subscribe for more insight on the future of AI in our society.

Written Sources:
Civil society calls on the EU to prohibit predictive and profiling AI systems in law enforcement and criminal justice.
https://www.statewatch.org/news/2022/march/civil-society-cal…l-justice/

Toward a Theory of Justice for Artificial Intelligence, Gabriel.
https://direct.mit.edu/daed/article/151/2/218/110610/Toward-…Artificial.

EUROPEAN TECH INSIGHTS 2021 PART II, IE Center For The Governance Of Change.
https://www.ie.edu/cgc/research/european-tech-insights/?subm…wnload-cgc.

Noble, Safiya Umoja (20 February 2018). Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: NYU Press. ISBN 978–1479837243.

Continue reading “AI might replace democracy soon, w/ experts on AI” | >

Individual ants are relatively simple creatures and yet a colony of ants can perform really complex tasks, such as intricate construction, foraging and defense.

Recently, Harvard researchers took inspiration from ants to design a team of relatively simple robots that can work collectively to perform using only a few basic parameters.

The research was published in eLife.

Read more | >