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Friday, September 26, 2008

Future Crime Predictor - Minority Report-Style

The film Minority Report sparked a series of stories about attempts to predict future crimes before they happen. Most of the stories are more about data mining then cross referencing that data to predict high crime areas and times -- now scientists are going a lot farther.

New Scientist wrote a story about the U.S Government making progress on a high tech device called FAST a pre-crime detector - F.A.S.T stands for "Future Attribute Screening Technologies".

The F.A.S.T system is designed to spot "suspicious - devious" people who might be about ready to commit a crime of some type. The scientists behind F.A.S.T say that the early tests are overwhelmingly effective - "We have it at about 78% accuracy on mal-intent detection, and 80% on deception". I'm sure there will be many questions related to privacy issues on this equipment .

1 comments :

Anonymous said...

The government can't even figure out when people have or haven't committed crimes already, much less whether or not somebody will. The government will screw this up worse than it's ever screwed up anything else, which is saying a lot.