Tuesday, September 18, 2018

And my students wonder why I don’t have a cellphone.
Report – Almost half of US cellphone calls will be scams by next year
Cision Newswire: “First Orion, a leading provider of phone call and data transparency solutions, today announced their inaugural 2018 Scam Call Trends and Projections Report, detailing the need for new, adaptive technologies to combat the exponential increase in scam calls. First Orion powers call protection solutions to tens of millions of mobile subscribers in the U.S. market and has carefully analyzed over 50 billion calls made to these customers over the past 18 months. By combining specific call patterns and behaviors with other phone number attributes, First Orion now predicts that nearly half of all calls to mobile phones will be fraudulent in 2019 unless the industry adopts and implements more effective call protection solutions. To combat this rapidly growing epidemic, First Orion will fully deploy its groundbreaking, in-network technology known as CallPrinting™—which quickly and accurately identifies new scam techniques and thwarts fraudulent calls—into a Tier-One U.S. carrier’s network this fall where the company projects it will significantly mitigate the volume of scam traffic beginning in the 4th quarter of 2018. Over the past year, First Orion’s data shows a drastic increase in mobile scam calls—from 3.7% of total calls in 2017 to 29.2% in 2018—and that number is projected to reach 44.6% by early 2019…”




Automated policing…
Artificial Intelligence and Policing: Hints in the Carpenter Decision
Joh, Elizabeth E., Artificial Intelligence and Policing: Hints in the Carpenter Decision (August 24, 2018). __ Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law __, 2018. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3238212
“In the 2018 Carpenter case, Chief Justice Roberts focuses on the quality of the information sought by the police as a means of deciding the case in Carpenter’s favor. Less obviously, however, the majority opinion also stresses the nature of the policing involved in Carpenter’s case: new technologies that do not just enhance human abilities. The majority makes no explicit clams about this focus. But the Carpenter decision reveals the Supreme Court’s first set of views on how it might evaluate police use of artificial intelligence. That contention, and the questions it raises, form the subject of this essay.”
[From the article:
In these ways the tools of artificial intelligence are changing the nature of policing itself.
Another way to think of this development is that policing is becoming increasingly automated.
today the increasing interest in social network analysis, locational predictive policing, and threat analysis means that even those the task of assessing suspicious behavior is subject to automation as well.
In finding that we possess Fourth Amendment protections in locational data even when recorded by third parties, the Court chose to describe the data collection technique in Carpenter as superhuman, passive, and automated. This is noteworthy: these descriptions also characterize the very technologies of artificial intelligence that are becoming more commonplace in policing.


(Related)
UK Serious Fraud Office trialling AI for data-heavy cases
naked security – sophos: “The BBC says it looks like a kids’ digital game: a mass of blue and green rubber balls bounce around the screen like they’re on elastic bands in a galaxy of paddle balls. It’s no game, however. It is a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool that connects, and then visualizes, the parties and their interactions in a complex fraud inquiry. The UK’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) recently gave the BBC a look at the system, called OpenText Axcelerate, which staff have been training on Enron: a massive corporate fraud case from 2001 that’s no longer actively being investigated. The lines between the colored balls represent links between two people involved in the fraud inquiry, including the emails they sent and received, the people they carbon-copied, and the more discrete messages in which nobody was cc’ed. SFO investigator Edgar Pacevicius told the BBC that a major advantage of the AI is that it can spot connections between individuals far more quickly than humans can. It’s designed to help investigators keep track of all the parties involved in a given, wide-scale fraud, with all their communications, along with individuals’ interactions with each other. The tool also groups documents with similar content, and it can pick out phrases and word forms that might be significant to an investigation…”




This should be useful.
LII Announces U.S. Constitution Annotated
U.S. Constitution Annotated – “This edition of the Congressional Research Service’s U.S. Constitution Annotated is a hypertext interpretation of the CRS text, updated to the currently published version. It links to Supreme Court opinions, the U.S. Code, and the Code of Federal Regulations, as well as enhancing navigation through search, breadcrumbs, linked footnotes and tables of contents… The content of the U.S. Constitution Annotated was prepared by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) at the Library of Congress, and published electronically in plaintext and PDF by the Government Printing Office. Dating back to 1911, the initial online annotations were published in 1992. This edition is a hypertext interpretation of the CRS text, updated to the currently published version. It links to Supreme Court opinions, the U.S. Code, and the Code of Federal Regulations, as well as enhancing navigation through linked footnotes and tables of contents. LII is grateful to Professor William Arms and the CS 5150 “Save the Constitution” team: Anusha Chowdhury, Garima Kapila, Tairy Davey, Brendan Rappazzo, and Max Anderson for their work on the project. Special thanks go to Josh Tauberer of GovTrack and Daniel Schuman of Demand Progress for their help with the data.”




I suppose that’s one way to save on your Christmas shopping.
A man is wanted by police after being filmed sending his daughter inside a BarBerCut Lite cabinet, where she was able to get her tiny hands on some prizes and retrieve them before the pair (and another child, believed to be the man’s son) left the scene.
… You can see footage of the incident, uploaded and modified by the Salem PD, below:




For my students.




Student researchers should look at these too.
10 Investigative Tools You Probably Haven’t Heard Of
Global Investigative Journalism Network: “Investigations, the saying goes, are just regular stories with a lot more labor put in. Investigative reporters spend inordinate amounts of time sifting through documents, verifying sources and analyzing data — and that’s if they can even get the data. As an investigative reporter with way too many stories I want to do, these are the tools I use to keep up with sources, stories and leads at a rapid rate. Let’s take a look at 10 of the best new tools for unearthing, accelerating, and keeping track of investigations…”


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