Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.

Airing date: 03/12/2019

Risks Of Government Controlled Artificial Intelligence

Craig Peterson: 0:00
Hey guys, Craig Peterson here. Hope you’re having a great morning. This morning, I got to talk on the Jim Poliito show with Danny, the producer, because Jim is overseas. He’s touring around Italy and France and a few other places, send it in little daily reports. But we talked this morning about the dangers of these new artificial intelligence systems being used by government and now being used by police department in California by the guys that used to be able to set bail and whether you get out on bail. And retailers to kind of save them a few bucks, in fact, billions of dollars by stopping shoplifting. So here we go with Danny.

Danny Farrantino 0:49
Who knows what that music means? It means it’s time to get a little techie. And National Security Agency, the NSA, it appears Craig may be stopping some of these surveillance programs they’ve been doing over the past few years.

Craig 1:05
Yeah, this is a really interesting thing. And by the way, you know, Jim’s over there. And obviously he’s looking to see what are the people thinking in Italy and France? And what did they think of Americans, as you just mentioned, and I’m not sure that anyone’s really thought this through. Because if somehow we’re thinking that Jim is a good representation of your average American, there might be an issue there, Danny.

Danny 1:36
Well, unfortunately, my producer Steve out in Western Mass, told them all he needed to know was Prego, so he texted us this morning. And everyone in Rome thinks he’s pregnant. He doesn’t know what’s going on.

Craig 1:51
Anthony. Alright sounds good. Well let’s about the NSA program because this is astounding. It is not being covered in the general news out there. But it is a very, very big deal because the National Security Agency has been tracking Americans for years and years. That program was substantially increased during the Obama administration. And there were spying on every communication we had. They were collecting metadata, and they could use that to figure out where you were, basically figure out who you were, who you were talking to, they were recording calls, etc, etc. So President Trump comes into office, and all of a sudden the NSA decides what they’ve been doing might have been illegal. And so illegal in fact that some of these records that they knew they had collected that were way outside what the law allowed for. They deleted so they deleted like three years worth of data collection. Well, now, here we are, in 2019, this program, which was authorized under the so called USA Freedom Act, I love it, how they name some of these terrible acts like they’re they’re just wonderful patriotic things. But anyways.

Danny 3:12 
It’s for the people, Craig.

Craig 3:14 
It is for the people. It requires reauthorization of the end of this year. And apparently what’s happened is the NSA has decided that since President Trump doesn’t like this program, and he doesn’t like Americans being spied on illegally, that he is not going to renew this program. Now, this is this whole program that we found out because of the so called whistleblower and all of the data that he had released and very scary thing. But we found out about this and that the NSA is apparently going to dish this whole program, which they apparently have not had a single conviction because of this program. And we’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars and actually, they were collecting so much data. Danny that in drove up the price of hard disks.

Danny 4:12 
Because they were taking them all. Wow.

Craig 4:13
Yeah, because they were taking them absolutely. So we found out about this from a guy named Luke Murray. He’s a national security adviser to the House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. So in other words, we found out about this program going away. We found out that President Trump didn’t like it that it probably wasn’t going to be reauthorized from an assistant here to the House Minority Leader it’s it’s fascinating all the way around. Obviously the democrats have something to do with this as well because they may not pass it through the house President Trump doesn’t like it he’s already had a lot of this stuff shut down. Thank goodness they are finally starting to pay attention to what we the people want which has to be free in our communications in our papers to have privacy. You know we can give it up all we want to go to Amazon and Google and Facebook but that’s us given it up it isn’t our government spying on us?

Danny 5:15
Yeah, you know, some people making the argument well, if you’re not doing anything wrong, who cares? But it’s just kind of the general principle and then not only that, Craig but as you say, if they’ve had zero convictions with all of this data they’ve collected what what good has it done?

Craig 5:28
Yeah, it really hasn’t done any good and when it gets down to that argument of well if you have nothing to hide but take a look at what’s happened with the Mueller investigation where Muller excuse me investigation was thinking Bueller right Ferris Bueller. But with a smaller investigation where they were not investigating a crime they were investigating people and that’s the sort of thing that happens in socialist governments if we know fascist, communist all versions of socialist I’m where you are investigated. And as has been said, show me the person I’ll show you the crime. So if they if the government has all of this information, and with the hundreds of thousands of pages of rules, regulations, laws on the federal level, my goodness, the last half of the last year of the Obama administration we’re talking about 50,000 new pages of regulations. We you know, my wife was a police officer and she said in the academy, she was a state trooper, in the academy they were told before you leave your home in the morning the on average you violated two to three laws having all of this just makes it so they can strong arm anyone and convict anyone of anything and that to me, that’s just very scary.

Danny 6:50
Well, it brings up a point of you saying the government watching and me trying to find crimes or whatever else moving over to Japan. Now Japan trying to solve crimes before they even take place.

Craig 7:01
Yeah, this is a you know, something that we were warned about. Right. It’s been a theme of, of our science fiction movies for many many years, you know, pre-crime with a Tom Cruise movie and many others that are out there but this is a whole new type of technology. We know that in in socialist China that they’re monitoring everybody they’ve got cameras everywhere. They’ve now got this whole social credit thing. And if you say something negative against the government if you jaywalk, they’re monitoring you. They know who you are, and they’re taking away your right to travel because of what you say, if you’re not politically correct. In China, you can even get on an airplane over there. It’s really gotten bad. We’re now looking at pre-crime in the US where we have  computer programs that have been analyzing all of our violent crime patterns. And the police are are sending police officers excuse me and investigatory teams into areas where the computers are saying, there’s likely to be a crime here. I have real problems with that because, again, it’s a computer. But I have even more problems, Danny, when in California, they’re trying to get rid of bail bondsmen and in fact, they’re trying to get rid of bail entirely. And what they’re doing in California is they said, well, we’ve got a computer program and we’ll just feed in all of the data about you. We’ll feed in your social network comments. We’ll feed in your travel history. We’ll feed in your criminal history, and then the computer is going to come up and decide whether or not we should release you.

Danny 8:58
Oh, that sounds like a smart idea.

Craig 9:00
Isn’t that brilliant? Now, how can you challenge that? You know, the computer program was written by programmers, are you going to be able to hold them into court? Are you going to be below examine every line of code? In fact, the people that wrote the programs are saying no, you can’t have access to our source code, its proprietary. So now you’re going to be judged by a piece of computer software that you cannot bring into court. You know, you can challenge a traffic ticket, but you can’t challenge this in California. And now what you’re talking about, I think in in Japan is this cameras being tied into yet another computer program. And these cameras are deciding whether or not they think to look shifty. Whether they think that you might be a shoplifter. So there they can tie into pretty much any computer or excuse me, any security system that’s out there, and this software, it’s a kind of a machine learning, AI and it’s, again, out of Minority Report. And what they’re saying is that retailers in the US and UK are, are are losing money, right, though they’re losing about $34 billion a year in lost sales because of shoplifting. It accounts for about 2% of revenue. So in an industry where the margins are quite thin, it could save them a whole bunch of money. And so they’re turning to this computer program that’s going to watch you and decide whether or not it thinks you might be a shoplifter. Now, right now, they’re saying the right way to do it is if it’s if it’s identifying someone that’s looking around that that seems to have some body language that might indicate that they’re shoplifter, they’re saying, well, just send security over and ask that person if they need any help. And almost all always just having that person realize that they’re being watched is enough for them not to shoplift. But what’s the next step? You know, Danny, it’s one thing to have socialist countries monitoring us. As President Trump pointed out, we’re not a socialist country, well, at least he has, right? And having these technologies in place just makes it easy, that easy for the government to do things that take it to the next level of private business. Again, it’s one thing for them to monitor you to warn you, but this is really getting me more and more concerned. When should computers be monitoring us? And what should they be doing? I don’t mind them monitoring me for symptoms of a heart attack, because I’m wearing an Apple Watch and it might save my life. But the rest of this I’m I just don’t like.

Danny 1:55
Especially when a lot of it is I guess, per se, at least an Apple Watch that’s giving you a hard target data where something like this machine in Japan is we think maybe might be you might be guilty.

Craig 12:08
Yeah, or the software they’re using a New York City to pre-place the police officers are in California to decide whether or not you might be a flight risk. It’s we’re going that way, Danny, it’s going to be happening more and more. You got to bet that the legislature right here in the Commonwealth is looking at something like this pretty seriously as a way to save money and and track people maybe stop crime. I don’t know where do we draw that line?

Danny 12:37
Unfortunately, you know, you want to keep people safe. But you also want to give people their own personal personal space as well. So and unfortunately, that line is very thin as you say Craig. Craig as always great stuff. Of course, we only got to about half of it. People want to hear more. What do they do?

Craig 12:52
All right, everybody. I am back to working on content here delivering on this huge course on cyber security, DIY cyber security. Anyways, take care. Have a great day. Bye bye.