Kasparov, "Pursuing transparency and accountability for both humans and machines"

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

> https://blog.avast.com/pursuing-transparency-accountability-for-humans-and-machines
>
>
> In his latest post for Avast, Garry Kasparov examines the intersection of privacy, transparency, security, human 
> rights, and institutions in the age of AI.
>
> Pursuing transparency and accountability for both humans and machines
>
>  by Garry Kasparov
>
>
> I was honored recently to be one of the recipients of the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s (EPIC) 2017 
> Champions of Freedom award. Tech and privacy giant Bruce Schneier was among the presenters, and my fellow 
> recipients—attorney Carrie Goldberg, Ron Rivest, and Judge Patricia Wald—are all doing important work in protecting 
> privacy online and off in an age where it feels like we are always being watched. EPIC president and executive 
> director Marc Rotenberg made a powerful statement about the vital, and often unsung, role that transparency has in a 
> healthy democracy.
>
> Privacy and transparency—2 sides of the security coin
>
> Users are concerned as well, and that is an understatement. The term “privacy” currently has 58,400,000 Google News 
> mentions, enough to where it’s worth pointing out that the term means different things to different people in 
> different frameworks. As EPIC well understands, the issue isn’t just end-user privacy and oversharing on social 
> media; it’s also what happens at the top levels of the governments and corporations that have the capabilities to 
> monitor our actions.
>
> This is why privacy and transparency are two sides of the security coin. Companies need to know something about us to 
> provide services we want. Government agencies need to monitor to provide essential security services. The eternal 
> question is how to balance these needs with the rights of citizens to maintain their privacy and control over their 
> own data even as we produce more of it every day. Transparency is required to establish limits—and accountability for 
> overstepping them.
>
> This adversarial process is part of the checks and balances that democratic republics are based on, especially in the 
> United States. The idea is to use pressure and conflict to expose and fix the cracks in the system, to shine light 
> and take gradual steps for the greater good. It’s important to contrast this with the nature of surveillance and 
> privacy in the unfree world. The method, motive, and mission behind data collection and violations of privacy cannot 
> be ignored. In authoritarian regimes, privacy is only for the rulers while the people have none. The behavior of the 
> regime and its most powerful citizens is shielded from the people. Data collection is used for repression and 
> persecution of innocent citizens. Real people are in real physical danger when privacy protections fail in an 
> autocracy; it’s not a legal exercise, or done to protect people from hackers or terrorists. There could be no 
> organization like EPIC in Putin’s Russia—and if there were, it would just be another branch of the security services.
>
> "Watching the watchers"
>
> Our desire to maintain privacy is inseparable from our concerns about the ethical underpinnings of our institutions. 
> If we believe the motivations of authorities are morally sound, and operating in our interest, and the interests of 
> society, we are more comfortable relinquishing a degree of privacy. You might call this “watching the watchers;” 
> those who are in charge of establishing surveillance protocols must be monitored themselves. Their justifications 
> must be subject to scrutiny and there must be a chain of responsibility and accountability. Ideally, we want a system 
> that allows for the collection of information needed for economic, security, sociological, and other purposes, but 
> deters arbitrary collection that does not serve a specific and well-articulated need. Governments and corporations 
> must be transparent in expressing their goals and strategies, and consumers have the duty to question any that make 
> them skeptical.
>
> Where does AI fit in?
>
> I am, of course, always interested in how AI comes into the picture. We worry about internal decision-making 
> processes in bodies that are hidden from the public eye. How can we be sure that the motivations giant corporation, 
> deciding how much user information to disclose to foreign governments, has the best interests of its users in mind? 
> If we worry about this, and rightly so, we ought to think carefully about how we will delegate similar tasks to AI in 
> the future. Increasingly, algorithms are making decisions with weighty consequences for individuals, companies, and 
> societies. With the field of machine learning growing at a rapid pace, we will often find ourselves in the position 
> of having to evaluate the results of processes that are unknowable to humans. A neural net that reached a particular 
> endpoint did so through a series of steps that its human designers did not engineer, but through self-coding. These 
> trends are leading us toward a future of unpredictable results and even less clear chains of responsibility for those 
> results.
>
> Unsurprisingly, algorithmic transparency and accountability is a growing field in privacy law; EPIC has launched a 
> campaign in this area. If we cannot trace the processes of an AI and ascertain how it reached a certain decision, we 
> must at the very least make transparent all elements of the process that were controlled by humans. As I argued 
> above, we must demand clear and morally-backed justification from the human institutions responsible for broad 
> surveillance. The same is true here: we must demand that AI is programmed according to the most rigorous transparency 
> and ethics standards.
>
> There must also be a framework to determine responsibility—human responsibility. Where does the liability belong when 
> an internet of things connected toaster joins a botnet that brings down a chunk of the internet? Is the manufacturer 
> responsible for making an unsafe product? As with dealing with fake news and other symptoms of our powerful 
> technology run amok, we have to do a better job of assigning sources and responsibility to people instead of blaming 
> technology.
>
> Toward more trustworthy institutions
>
> Government and industry standards can make a big difference, however. After the EPIC award ceremony on June 5, I had 
> a brief chat with encryption pioneer Whit Diffie. He was dismayed by my comment that people should know better by now 
> not to click on unsafe email attachments. He pointed out that it’s ridiculous that users have the option to do 
> something so potentially destructive at all, and he has a point. Modern skyscrapers don’t have windows that can open 
> more than a crack—to avoid accidents and suicides. You can never prevent people from self-inflicted damage 
> completely, but there is clearly a lot that could be done to improve our digital structures in ways that would help 
> protect us from ourselves.
>
> The crucial link is institutions, public and private, and whether there exists enough transparency and accountability 
> in them to trust them with our privacy and other forms of security. Whether we are thinking of a government making 
> decisions about domestic surveillance programs or a company determining how its products will collect information 
> from users, if the values and norms governing human (or machine) action are strong enough, we can be optimistic about 
> reaching favorable outcomes—even if it comes after years of trial and error. If institutions are lacking, we make 
> ourselves vulnerable to threats from nefarious actors or neutral technologies that can cause harm, either by accident 
> or by malicious intent.
>
> In order to be strong, institutions must have continuity across time, and that includes across changes in leadership 
> and party. In today’s hyper-partisan landscape, the latter can be hard to stomach, but I pride myself on being a 
> vocal critic of the hypocrisy that results from political extremism on both sides of the political spectrum. In my 
> acceptance speech at EPIC, I emphasized that if you are okay with surveillance and executive orders when you like the 
> president, but you hate surveillance powers and executive orders when you don’t like the president, then you are part 
> of the problem! Building a system that works for all of its members requires compromise from all sides. A framework 
> complete with common-sense transparency laws and robust checks and balances on monitoring authorities will never 
> materialize from finger-pointing and retreating into the safe, but dead-end, corners of total privacy or unbridled 
> surveillance.
>
> In the meantime, as we work to build the institutions that will shape our personal experiences and interactions in 
> the digital world, we must be responsible as individual users acting within an imperfect system. The online world is 
> far from a civilized one. It’s more like the old American Wild West, where the laws are poorly established and 
> frequently abused. The ideal safeguards do not exist, and so each consumer must be careful of the information he 
> shares and the measures he takes to protect it. Each of us must continue to push for the laws and protections needed 
> for collective security, while reconciling ourselves to the current reality and remaining vigilant.
>
> The lines for accountability are still weakly drawn, so companies have little incentive to put protections in place. 
> And as popular as it is to demonize “big government” as a road to “Big Brother,” and to target ever-expanding data 
> collection by some of the world’s largest companies, these giant institutions are actually the most accountable ones 
> we have. Larger  companies with greater name recognition and a reputation to defend are obliged to concern themselves 
> with public opinion and user satisfaction.
>
> In the same way, many governments simply do not care about the optics of violating their citizens’ privacy while 
> those that are concerned about their standing on the world stage will do better. Protect yourself as best as you can, 
> using the most reputable tools available—the Colt 45s and Winchester rifles of the digital Wild West armory—but do 
> not stop pushing for the broader institutional change that will lead to a safer, fairer, and more transparent online 
> world for everyone—hopefully without a shot being fired.



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