Week 8: Automated Suspicion and Big Data Policing by Elizabeth E. Joh

Week 8: “The New Surveillance Discretion: Automated Suspicion, Big Data, and Policing” by Elizabeth E. Joh. The author explained that police officers use their camera to send signal to their department to alert the officer if any of the people are identified as suspect. Further elaborate that this type of investigation called ‘surveillance discretion’, which widely acceptable in law enforcement. ‘Surveillance discretion is the task of filtering, identifying suspects from the general population, exemplifying traditional police work. Moreover, the author explained that police officers generate leads through focusing on specific suspect by observation, questioning, and information conveyed by witnesses, victims, or other third parties. Further, the author explained that Technolgies that have altered surveillance discretion will soon be feasible and affordable for the government to record, store, and analyze nearly everything people do. Specifically, police will soon rely on alerts generated by computer programs, which will be an important expansion in the powers of the police. The expansion calls for new tools of police accountability. That said, law enforcement agencies can easily be able to identify suspicions of people/activities on a massive scale by applying computer analytics to a very large collection of digitized data. The author has further explained the process of these programs on targeting words that sound suspicious through social media feeds and explained that soon the police nationwide will use location-based tweets to inform those same predictions. (Main argument/reason support the use/beneficial of these Technologoies in law enforcement) That said, the author explained that the technique of analysis through technology is not about investigating the already identified suspects or crimes, but rather it the indemnification of potentially suspicious persons, places, and events. Me = The author sounds very optimistic regarding the increased use of the technologies alter surveillance discretion because of how easy and fast these technologies are on achieving police accountability. (From the second paragraph) the author discussed some of the questions that were raised regarding the exercise of surveillance discretion. The author also looked at some of the questions that were raised regarding the expansion of surveillance discretion through legal and policies. Which then the author mentioned the Supreme Court’s decision “the Fourth Amendment”. (Page 4, talked about the implication of the Fourth Amendment and changes when it comes to arresting etc; through the technologies alter surveillance discretion) specifically, the explanation of the process is “Surveillance discretion addresses the power of the police at an earlier stage: when the police focus on persons suspected of ongoing or future criminal activity but before any intervention takes place. This preliminary investigative power is essential, since police need to possess some legal means to develop the required Fourth Amendment standard of individualized suspicion for a later search or seizure.” (Joh, 2016, p4). Moving forward, the author explained the challenges that the expansion of surveillance discretion by big data to our usual thinking of police regulation. What is Big Data? “The types of information that are now digitized include ones that once existed in analog format (books, phone call logs, retail purchases) as well as new kinds of information made possible by today’s technologies (internet searches, social media posts, data from the Internet of Things). The Library of Congress, which has archived every Twitter tweet since 2010, receives about half a billion per day....” (Joh, 2016, p6). One important information that the author brought to our attention is that in criminal investigations, the police may not find certain patters of driving, purchasing or movement that are associated with crime necessary, but if the police can claim a high correlation between the two then the police will focus (bring the police attention). Specifically, “a high degree of correlation itself might provide justification for heightened police attention.” (Jon, 2016, p7). The reset of the author consists of multiple questions that the author answered in detailed look at when needed. They are straight forward answer to a question that might be raised on final assignment!! Week 9: