Javier Milei’s government will monitor social media with AI to ‘predict future crimes’

The adjustment and streamlining of public agencies that President Javier Milei is driving in Argentina does not apply to the areas of security and defense. After restoring the State Intelligence Secretariat and assigning it millions of reserved funds —for which he does not have to account— the president has now created a special unit that will deal with cyberpatrolling on social media and the internet, the analysis of security cameras in real time and aerial surveillance using drones, among other things. In addition, he will use “machine learning algorithms” to “predict future crimes,” as the sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick once dreamed up, later made famous by the film Minority Report. How will Milei do all that? Through artificial intelligence, the executive announced.

Among his plans to downsize the State, President Milei has been saying that he intends to replace government workers and organizations with AI systems. The first role that he will give to this technology, however, will be an expansion of state agencies: on Monday his government created the Unit of Artificial Intelligence Applied to Security.

The new agency will report to the Ministry of Security. “It is essential to apply artificial intelligence in the prevention, detection, investigation and prosecution of crime and its connections,” states the resolution signed by Minister Patricia Bullrich, who cites similar developments in other countries. The belief behind the decision is that the use of AI “will significantly improve the efficiency of the different areas of the ministry and of the federal police and security forces, allowing for faster and more precise responses to threats and emergencies.”

The Artificial Intelligence Unit will be made up of police officers and agents from other security forces. Its tasks will include “patrolling open social platforms, applications and websites,” where it will seek to “detect potential threats, identify movements of criminal groups or anticipate disturbances.” It will also be dedicated to “analyzing images from security cameras in real time in order to detect suspicious activities or identify wanted persons using facial recognition.” The resolution also awards it powers worthy of science fiction: “Using machine learning algorithms to analyze historical crime data and thus predict future crimes.” Another purpose will be to discover “suspicious financial transactions or anomalous behavior that could indicate illegal activities.”

The new unit will not only deal with virtual spaces. It will be able to “patrol large areas using drones, provide aerial surveillance and respond to emergencies,” as well as perform “dangerous tasks, such as defusing explosives, using robots.”

Rights at risk

Various experts and civil organizations have warned that the new AI Unit will threaten citizens' rights.

“The government body created to patrol social networks, applications and websites contradicts several articles of the National Constitution,” said Martín Becerra, a professor and researcher in media and information technology. “The government of Milei (and Bullrich) is anti-liberal. It decrees new regulations, reinforces the state’s repressive function, increases the opacity of public funds and eliminates norms that sought to protect the most vulnerable,” he warned on his social media accounts.

For Natalia Zuazo, a digital policy specialist, the initiative essentially means “illegal intelligence disguised as the use of ‘modern’ technologies.” Among the implicit risks, she explained that there will be little control and many different security forces with access to the information that’s collected.

The Center for Studies on Freedom of Expression and Access to Information at the University of Palermo said its research on cyber-patrolling practices in Argentina and other Latin American countries indicates that “the principles of legality and transparency are often not met. The opacity in the acquisition and implementation of technologies and the lack of accountability are worrying. In the past, these technologies have been used to profile academics, journalists, politicians and activists.” In that context, “without supervision or checks and balances, privacy and freedom of expression are threatened.”

The Argentine Observatory of Information Technology Law pointed out that the Security resolution “justifies the measure by invoking comparative experiences, of which the slightest analysis is never carried out.” It asked: “Are the security systems of China or India really comparable with those of France or Singapore and, at the same time, all of them with that of Argentina?”

The researcher Becerra particularly questioned the function of predicting crimes assigned to the new unit, noting that it is “something in which the use of AI has explicitly failed and which, therefore, must be avoided.”

The Philip K. Dick story that gave rise to the Steven Spielberg film warned about the problems of predicting crimes. “We stopped them [future criminals] before they could commit any act of violence,” said one of the characters in the story. “So the commission of the crime itself is absolutely a metaphysical question. We claim that they are guilty. And they, in turn, constantly claim that they are innocent. And in a certain sense they are innocent.”

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