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Full-Text Articles in Law
Machine Learning, Automated Suspicion Algorithms, And The Fourth Amendment, Michael L. Rich
Machine Learning, Automated Suspicion Algorithms, And The Fourth Amendment, Michael L. Rich
Michael L Rich
At the conceptual intersection of machine learning and government data collection lie Automated Suspicion Algorithms, or ASAs, algorithms created through the application of machine learning methods to collections of government data with the purpose of identifying individuals likely to be engaged in criminal activity. The novel promise of ASAs is that they can identify data-supported correlations between innocent conduct and criminal activity and help police prevent crime. ASAs present a novel doctrinal challenge, as well, as they intrude on a step of the Fourth Amendment’s individualized suspicion analysis previously the sole province of human actors: the determination of when reasonable …
Limits On The Perfect Preventive State, Michael L. Rich
Limits On The Perfect Preventive State, Michael L. Rich
Michael L Rich
Traditional methods of crime prevention—the punishment of the culpable and the preventive restraint of the dangerous—are slowly being supplemented and supplanted by technologies that seek to perfectly prevent crime by making criminal conduct practically impossible. For instance, the federal government is developing in-car technology that would prevent vehicle operation when a driver has a blood alcohol level in excess of the legal limit. Less directly, the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 2000 try to prevent copyright infringement by eliminating technologies that enable such infringement. Such structural regulation of private conduct is not new, but few scholars …
Should We Make Crime Impossible?, Michael L. Rich
Should We Make Crime Impossible?, Michael L. Rich
Michael L Rich
Technology often makes possible what once was impossible, but it also can do the reverse: it can make impossible what once was possible. Specifically, technology has opened the door to “impossibility measures,” government programs aimed at making it effectively impossible to engage in certain criminal conduct. But even if we can, should we make crime impossible? This question will soon be before legislators and policymakers, and intuitive reactions to potential impossibility measures are confused and contradictory. Yet until now, legal scholars have failed to provide a satisfactory analytical framework for those decision-makers who will be forced to decide whether making …
Brass Rings And Red-Headed Stepchildren: Protecting Active Criminal Informants, Michael L. Rich
Brass Rings And Red-Headed Stepchildren: Protecting Active Criminal Informants, Michael L. Rich
Michael L Rich
Informants are valued law enforcement tools, and active criminal informants – criminals who maintain their illicit connections and feed evidence to the police in exchange for leniency – are the most prized of all. Yet society does little to protect active criminal informants from the substantial risks inherent in their recruitment and cooperation. As I have explored elsewhere, society’s apathy toward these informants is a result of distaste with their disloyalty and a concern that protecting them will undermine law enforcement effectiveness. This Article takes a different tack, however, building on existing scholarship on vulnerability and paternalism to argue that …