Every day automated algorithms make decisions that can amplify the power of businesses and governments. Yet as algorithms come to regulate more aspects of our lives, the contours of their power can remain difficult to grasp. This paper studies the notion of algorithmic accountability reporting as a mechanism for elucidating and articulating the power structures, biases, and influences that computational artifacts exercise in society. A framework for algorithmic power based on autonomous decision-making is proffered and motivates specific questions about algorithmic influence. Five cases of algorithmic accountability reporting involving the use of reverse engineering methods in journalism are then studied and analyzed to provide insight into the method and its application in a journalism context. The applicability of transparency policies for algorithms is discussed alongside challenges to implementing algorithmic accountability as a broadly viable investigative method.

Algorithmic Accountability: Journalistic investigation of computational power structures

Every fiscal quarter automated writing algorithms churn out thousands of corporate earnings articles for the AP (Associated Press) based on little more than structured data. Companies such as Automated Insights, which produces the articles for AP, and Narrative Science can now write straight news articles in almost any domain that has clean and well-structured data: finance, sure, but also sports, weather, and education, among others. The articles aren’t cardboard either; they have variability, tone, and style, and in some cases readers even have difficulty distinguishing the machine-produced articles from human-written ones.

Accountability in algorithmic decision making

The expansion of the US carceral state has been accompanied by the emergence of what we call the ‘shadow carceral state’. Operating beyond the confines of criminal law and justice institutions, the shadow carceral state expands penal power through institutional annexation and legal hybridity, including: (1) increased civil and administrative pathways to incarceration; (2) the creation of civil ‘alternatives’ to invalidated criminal statutes; and (3) the incorporation of criminal law into administrative legal processes in ways that enhance state carceral power. Although legal doctrine deems civil and administration sanctions to be ‘not-punishment’, we call for a broad understanding of penal power and the carceral state.

Mapping the shadow carceral state: Toward an institutionally capacious approach to punishment

Detention is a pressing empirical, conceptual, and political issue. Detained populations, detention facilities, and industries have expanded globally. Detention is also a fundamentally geographical topic, yet largely overlooked by geographers. We argue that detention be conceptualized as a series of geographical processes. Operating through these processes are contradictory sets of temporal and spatial logics that structure the seemingly paradoxical geographies underpinning detention. These logics include containment and mobility, bordering and exclusion. We trace these logics through an emergent literature, synthesizing and analyzing important geographic themes in the field. We identify contributions by and new avenues of inquiry for geographers.

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Conceptualizing detention Mobility, containment, bordering, and exclusion

I'm indebted to a number of people who were generous with their time in providing feedback and helping me to think through and shape the ideas presented here. I'm grateful to those whom I interviewed about their experience reverse engineering stories, including and Cliff Stein, whose collective feedback greatly improved the work. I've also benefited from the intellectual environment at the Tow Center at Columbia University, created by Emily Bell and Taylor Owen, the helpful feedback from other Tow Fellows, and the copyediting of Abigail Ronck. Any mistakes left are on me. 1 " We should interrogate the architecture of cyberspace as we interrogate the code of Congress. " – Lawrence Lessig

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Algorithmic Accountability Reporting: On the Investigation of Black Boxes

In recent years, scholars have drawn attention to the myriad ways in which the lines between criminal enforcement and immigration control have blurred in law and public discourse. This essay analyzes this convergence in the context of immigration detention. For decades, courts and observers have documented and analyzed a wide range of detention-related concerns, including mandatory and presumed custody, coercion and other due process violations, inadequate access to counsel, prolonged and indefinite custody, inadequate conditions of confinement, and violations of international law obligations. With the number of detainees skyrocketing since the 1990s, these concerns have rapidly proliferated - to the point where some commentators resist the very term “detention” in this context as sanitized and misleading, masking quasi-punitive circumstances that approximate criminal “incarceration” or “imprisonment.” If convergence of immigration control and criminal enforcement more generally has given rise to a system of crimmigration law, as some observers maintain, then perhaps excessive immigration detention practices have evolved into a quasi-punitive system of immcarceration.A recent report by Dora Schriro, a senior Homeland Security official, gives official imprimatur to crucial aspects of this picture, acknowledging explicitly that most detainees are - systematically and unnecessarily - held under circumstances inappropriate for immigration detention’s noncriminal purposes. In response, the Obama Administration has pledged reforms to reconstruct this regime as a “truly civil detention system.” This essay considers the possibilities and limits of these initiatives, which target excessive conditions of confinement but leave other excessive practices intact. Notwithstanding these proposed reforms, the expansion of existing enforcement initiatives means that the government will continue to detain noncitizens, in the words of its own head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, “on a grand scale” - which may constrain its ability to dismantle many of the detention regime’s quasi-punitive features. While excessive detention conditions may well be tempered for many individuals, large-scale immcarceration seems here to stay for the foreseeable future.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID1949214_code88508.pdf?abstractid=1556867&mirid=1&type=2

Rethinking Immigration Detention

This article is an abridged report examining India's ongoing effort to reconcile its post-independence commitment to democracy, fundamental rights, and the rule of law with the inherited institutions of colonialism, focusing on several antiterrorism laws enacted during the past twenty-five years The article arises from a human rights project conducted by several members of the Committee on International Human Rights of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, and was authored by Anil Kalhan, chair of the Association's India Project and Visiting Assistant Professor at Fordham Law School The other project participants, who met with Indian lawyers, government officials, and others in 2004 and 2005, were Gerald P Conroy, Deputy Commissioner in the Office of the Special Commissioner of Investigation for the New York City School District, Mamta Kaushal, coordinator of the visit and then-associate in the law firm of Wachtel & Masyr, LLP, Sam Scott Miller, partner in the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP, and Judge Jed S Rakoff of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York Readers seeking greater detail and more complete citations should refer to the unabridged version, which is also available on SSRN See Anil Kalhan, et al, Colonial Continuities: Human Rights, Terrorism, and Security Laws in India, 20 Colum J Asian L 93 (2006), available at http://ssrncom/abstract=970503 The author of both versions is Anil Kalhan

(Abridged Version) Colonial Continuities: Human Rights, Terrorism, and Security Laws in India

With the deployment of technology, federal programs to enlist state and local police assistance with immigration enforcement are undergoing a sea change. For example, even as it forcefully has urged invalidation of Arizona’s S.B. 1070 and similar state laws, the Obama administration has presided over the largest expansion of state and local immigration policing in U.S. history with its implementation of the “Secure Communities” program, which integrates immigration and criminal history database systems in order to automatically ascertain the immigration status of every individual who is arrested and booked by state and local police nationwide. By 2012, over one fifth of all individuals removed from the United States were initially identified and apprehended through the program, contributing to unprecedented overall numbers of noncitizens who have been removed from the United States.Secure Communities is part of a broader, technology-based shift toward automated immigration policing, the use of interoperable database systems and other technologies to automate and routinize the identification and apprehension of potentially deportable noncitizens in the course of ordinary police encounters and other moments of day-to-day life. In this Article, I analyze the implications of this shift. Automated immigration policing does not simply effect a massive increase in the number of state and local law enforcement officials involved in immigration enforcement — although it certainly does that, on an enormous scale. More fundamentally, the technological architecture of these initiatives radically disrupts the prevailing equilibrium of immigration federalism by effectively mandating state and local participation in immigration policing where previously there had been significant room for voluntary state and local choice along the cooperation-noncooperation spectrum. In the process, these programs also blur the substantive lines between immigration control and criminal justice.As part of a broader, longer term set of developments concerning technology, surveillance, and information sharing across a range of different policy domains, automated immigration policing constitutes a leading edge in a more basic transformation of immigration enforcement, raising questions analogous to those arising from other forms of technology-based surveillance. Accordingly, I assess automated immigration policing in this context, drawing upon technology-, surveillance-, and privacy-based frameworks to complement and refract the insights of existing immigration scholarship. Finally, I advance principles to inform, guide, and constrain the use of these technologies, urging preservation of zones in society where immigration policing does not take place, restoration of greater scope for state and local choice, and improved transparency, oversight, and accountability in their implementation.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2369551_code983042.pdf?abstractid=2316327&mirid=2

Immigration Policing and Federalism Through the Lens of Technology, Surveillance, and Privacy

In 2004, India took a significant step forward for human rights by repealing the Prevention of Terrorism Act of 2002, which had established a permissive set of legal rules to prosecute acts of terrorism largely outside the ordinary rules of the regular criminal justice system. While POTA itself was enacted in the aftermath of the major terrorist attacks of 2001 in both the United States and India, the statute built upon a long tradition of antiterrorism and other security laws in India dating since well before independence. While India has faced serious threats from terrorism and other forms of politicized violence for decades, these special antiterrorism laws have not proven particularly effective in combating terrorism. Terrorism has persisted as a problem notwithstanding these laws, under which few of the individuals charged have been convicted. Moreover, like antiterrorism laws in other countries, including the United States, aspects of India’s antiterrorism laws have raised significant human rights concerns. Some of those concerns have remained even in the aftermath of POTA’s repeal, since the Indian government has preserved many of the law’s provisions in other statutes. Other, similar laws also remain in place at both the central and state levels, such as the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. Attentiveness to these human rights concerns is not simply a moral and legal imperative, but also a crucial strategic imperative. As the Supreme Court of India has recognized, “[t]errorism often thrives where human rights are violated,” and “[t]he lack of hope for justice provides breeding grounds for terrorism.” Since terrorists often deliberately seek “to provoke an over-reaction” and thereby drive a wedge between government and its citizens – or between ethnic, racial, or religious communities – adhering to human rights obligations when combating terrorism helps to ensure that advocates of violence do not win sympathy from the ranks of those harmed and alienated by the state.

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Anil Kalhan

Papers

Rethinking Immigration Detention

(Abridged Version) Colonial Continuities: Human Rights, Terrorism, and Security Laws in India

Immigration Policing and Federalism Through the Lens of Technology, Surveillance, and Privacy

Rethinking Immigration Detention

Colonial Continuities: Human Rights, Terrorism, and Security Laws in India