FreedomWorks Reacts to Orwellian Scoring Systems Used by Law Enforcement

Following a Washington Post report detailing how law enforcement calculates privacy-invasive risk assessments, or scores, on potential threats, FreedomWorks Senior Research Analyst Logan Albright commented:

“They are talking about targeting and scoring people based not on what they’ve done, but on what they might do statistically. Is there anything more Orwellian than that? This really does sound like something that could come out of an authoritarian country. Late last year, it was reported that China is planning a ‘social credit system’ that will score individuals based on social habits, such as what they buy and what they’re looking at online. The system being used by some law enforcement agencies in the United States sounds eerily similar.”

“This is pretty a grey area ending in a very clear red line. It’s one thing to use publicly available data to assess the activities of someone suspected of being involved in a criminal enterprise, but the instant this sort of analysis alone is used to identify and investigate previously unsuspected citizens, we’ve entered the realm of pre-crime.”

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