State must protect the public from AI abuse by government
The Connecticut legislature last week provided a telling contrast between the temptations of attention-seeking and the imperatives of understanding and addressing change.
The Judiciary Committee held a Wednesday hearing on a proposal to pardon the men and women convicted of witchcraft in the 17th century. The day before, legislators of both parties were engaged in serious discussions of how to protect the data that state government collects about, and from, all of us. One received attention, the other was discussed by serious legislators.
State Sen. James Maroney, D-Milford, and House Republican Leader Vincent Candelora, R-North Branford, want to protect the public while allowing government to employ 21st century advances in the collection and analysis of knowledge.
State agencies purchase computer programs from private companies. The agencies add mountains of data about all of us to those programs to make critical decisions. The programs’ data are often used by algorithms programmed into the software to predict human behavior. To an unnerving extent, decisions are made in full or in part by computers, not by humans. The state voluntarily embraces this Artificial Intelligence — but resists revealing details to the public.
The consequences can be monumental, Colleen Murphy the executive director of the Freedom of Information Commission said Thursday. State agencies must be transparent in their use of algorithms and other forms of artificial intelligence, Murphy insisted. The Connecticut Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights met in January to raise urgent concerns about the misuse of data that can guide government agency decisions about child welfare, law enforcement, and government benefits, the AP reported.
Only meaningful public scrutiny will curb the inevitable abuse.
“There are different instances of unintended consequences, whether it’s discrimination sometimes in hiring,” Maroney pointed out in the same AP report. “It can discriminate against age. We’ve seen other examples where it’s discriminated against people based on basically being poor… And then also there are unfortunately racial disparities in some of the decisions made when using automated decision-making processes.”
The public needs to have the right to know the elements of technology shaping or making decisions about the people government serves. So far, our state government disagrees.
Yale Law School’s Medial Freedom & Information Access Clinic’s Algorithmic Accountability Project undertook “an exhaustive study of the novel challenges to transparency and accountability posed by state agencies’ increasing use of algorithms” in Connecticut state government. Its experience was much like others seeking public information under the Lamont administration.
The most alarming revelations of the Yale project was the refusal of the Department of Administration’s refusal to provide any
information in response to a request for documents under the Freedom of Information Act.
“DAS provided no response to our request for information concerning a new algorithm used in hiring state employees and contractors,” the report reveals. A half-dozen follow-up calls failed to elicit any documents in response to the clinic’s request.
This would be dismaying under ordinary circumstances. This is no ordinary time. We live in an age of technological innovation and the tumult that accompanies it.
Secrecy remains the highest virtue in the Lamont administration. DAS Commissioner Michelle Gilman is the chief keeper of the flame in the temple of the clandestine that the governor has erected. Gilman made repeated claims during her February confirmation hearing that she could not answer some questions posed by legislators because of an ongoing federal criminal investigation into corruption into the agency she heads.
The secrecy that stains DAS may be one reason some agencies have resisted enabling DAS to become the central repository of data. Even Lamont loyalists can see the danger in giving more power to the-politics-before-the-public leadership at DAS.
The legislature should adopt Maroney’s bill to establish and fund a task force to propose detailed and broad legislation to protect the public from AI abuse by government, create a privacy bill of rights, and secure our right to know how our government is using data and technology.
And it should address one more critical issue. Candelora raised an issue that merited more attention than it received during the fraught days of the pandemic. When the state contracted with Sema4 to perform COVID tests, the company included a confusing consent to conduct research with the test sample, including storing the DNA of the people tested. Science did not require option, commerce did. Protecting the public from a similar intrusions should be included in a privacy bill of rights.