Homeland Security moves forward with ‘pre-crime’ detection
An internal U.S. Department of Homeland Security document indicates that a controversial program designed to predict whether a person will commit a crime is already being tested on some members of the public, CNET has learned.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Department of Homeland Security has spent years expanding its surveillance toolkit while documenting the expansion itself: its annual privacy reports to Congress, dating back at least to September 2009, have catalogued social-media monitoring and airport image-screening technology, and a leaked set of post-underwear-bomb TSA security rules showed in December 2009 how quickly new screening layers get deployed.
What changes with this story is the target: an internal DHS document obtained by CNET indicates a program meant to predict whether a person will commit a crime is already being tested on some members of the public. That moves the department from screening for objects and watching communications to scoring intent — and it surfaced through a leaked document rather than a public announcement, which is precisely the kind of technology the department's own privacy reporting apparatus exists to flag.
First-order effects
- Members of the public are being subjected to a crime-prediction test whose existence became known only through an internal document, putting DHS's disclosure practices under immediate scrutiny from the reporters and readers CNET reached.
- DHS's privacy office, which has reported annually to Congress on monitoring technologies since 2009, now faces the question of whether pre-crime testing on live subjects is covered by the safeguards it has been describing.
Second-order effects
- Congressional oversight channels built around DHS's annual privacy reports become the obvious venue for challenge, since the program's classification as a security tool rather than a law-enforcement one determines who gets to review it.
- Other DHS components such as TSA, which has already layered behavioral and image-based screening onto air travel, face pressure to adopt similar predictive tools if the program is judged effective — spreading the model across the department.
Third-order effects
- If prediction becomes a basis for security action, the burden of proof shifts toward individuals flagged by a system before any act occurs, a due-process question the existing privacy-report framework was not designed to adjudicate.
- The pattern points toward predictive surveillance becoming standard government security infrastructure, with civil-liberties contestation moving from whether such systems exist to how their outputs are used against people.
The trend: Government security agencies are shifting from detecting acts to predicting intent, with DHS's privacy reporting to Congress serving as the main documented check on that shift.