U.N. Panel: Digital Technology in Policing Can Reinforce Racial Bias – Digitalmunition

Governments need an abrupt change of direction to avoid "stumbling zombielike into a digital welfare dystopia," Philip G. Alston, a human rights expert reporting on poverty, told the United Nations General Assembly last year, in a report calling for the regulation of digital technologies, including artificial intelligence, to ensure compliance with human rights. The private companies that play an increasingly dominant role in social welfare delivery, he noted, "operate in a virtually human-rights-free zone." Last month, the U.N. expert monitoring contemporary forms of racism flagged concerns that "governments and nonstate actors are developing and deploying emerging digital technologies in ways that are uniquely experimental, dangerous, and discriminatory in the border and immigration enforcement context." The European Border and Coast Guard Agency, also called Frontex, has tested unpiloted military-grade drones in the Mediterranean and Aegean for the surveillance and interdiction of vessels of migrants and refugees trying to reach Europe, the expert, E. Tendayi Achiume, reported. The U.N. antiracism panel, which is charged with monitoring and holding states to account for their compliance with the international convention on eliminating racial discrimination, said states must legislate measures combating racial bias and create independent mechanisms for handling complaints.