The Transform Technology Summits start October 13th with Low-Code/No Code: Enabling Enterprise Agility. In April 2020, news broke that Banjo CEO Damien Patton, once the subject of profiles by business journalists, was previously convicted of crimes committed with a white supremacist group. According to OneZero's analysis of grand jury testimony and hate crime prosecution documents, Patton pled guilty to involvement in a 1990 shooting attack on a synagogue in Tennessee. Amid growing public awareness about algorithmic bias, the state of Utah halted a $20.7 million contract with Banjo, and the Utah attorney general's office opened an investigation into matters of privacy, algorithmic bias, and discrimination. But in a surprise twist, an audit and report released last week found no bias in the algorithm because there was no algorithm to assess in the first place.

In August 2019, lobbyist Bryan Smith told a board of Utah's police chiefs, municipal officials and emergency responders that his company, Banjo, could provide them new insights on where crime was occurring in real time. To be sure, that would require running huge data flows through its proprietary algorithm – CCTV camera feeds, 911 calls, emergency vehicle locations – but Banjo would achieve this without endangering the personal privacy of anyone caught up in this new surveillance dragnet. Armed with a contract allowing Banjo to operate in every county in Utah, by January 2020 the company began to receive data flows from around 70 municipalities, the state's Highway Patrol, and Department of Public Safety. Any optimism among lawmakers as to Banjo's effectiveness, however, was short-lived. In May of that year, the company's CEO resigned after his past as a white supremacist was exposed, prompting the suspension of its contract with the state of Utah and an audit into its practices.

On a semi-weekly basis, we compile a collection of the best long-form stories on tech, tech culture and more. We've collected a list of the best selections from 2020 for you to revisit -- or enjoy for the first time -- as we finish up one dumpster fire of a year. One of the biggest sports stories of the year broke in mid-January. Major League Baseball determined the Houston Astros used various methods, including video feeds, to steal signs from the opposition during the team's 2017 championship season -- including the World Series. MLB found that it continued to do so during the 2018 season, too.

Damien Patton, the CEO of the surveillance company Banjo, has resigned after an investigation last month revealed that he was a former neo-Nazi. In June 1990, when Patton was 17, he and a leader of the Dixie Knights of the Ku Klux Klan took a TEC-9 pistol and drove to a Nashville synagogue. Patton drove, while the Klan member fired on the religious building. No one was struck or killed during the shooting. Patton then hid on a white supremacist training camp before a second Klan member helped him flee the state, according to a report from One Zero. One Zero reviewed transcripts of courtroom testimony, sworn statements, and over 1,000 pages of records.

The sudden suspension of a controversial multi-million dollar surveillance system used by several government agencies in Utah has opened up a debate about the lack of oversight for artificial intelligence systems in law enforcement. Last week, the Utah Attorney General's office suspended a $20.7 million contract with Banjo -- a technology firm using government surveillance data to develop crime detection software -- following revelations of the founder's past membership of a white supremacist group. Damien Patton, who serves as CEO of the SoftBank-backed company, was reportedly an active member of the Ku Klux Klan as a teenager, and participated in a 1990 drive-by shooting of a synagogue in suburban Nashville, according to the tech blog OneZero. In a statement, a spokesperson for Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes said the office would be moving forward an already planned third-party audit of the software to "address issues like data privacy and possible bias." Reyes recommended that other state agencies do the same.

The heads of two prominent artificial intelligence firms came under public scrutiny this month for ties to far right organizations. A report by Matt Stroud at OneZero identified the founder and CEO of surveillance firm Banjo, Damien Patton, as a former member of the Dixie Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, who was charged with a hate crime for shooting at a synagogue in 1990. The report led the Utah Attorney General's office to suspend a contract worth at least $750,000 with the company, and reportedly the firm has also lost a $20.8 million contract with the state's Department of Public Safety. Only a few weeks earlier, Luke O'Brien at the Huffington Post uncovered that Clearview AI's founder, Cam-Hoan Ton-That, affiliated with far right extremists including former Breitbart writer Chuck Johnson, Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich, and neo-Nazi hacker Andrew'weev' Auernheimer. Moreover, the reporters found evidence that Ton-That collaborated with Johnson and others in the development of Clearview AI's software.

The state of Utah has given an artificial intelligence company real-time access to state traffic cameras, CCTV and "public safety" cameras, 911 emergency systems, location data for state-owned vehicles, and other sensitive data. The company, called Banjo, says that it's combining this data with information collected from social media, satellites, and other apps, and claims its algorithms "detect anomalies" in the real world. The lofty goal of Banjo's system is to alert law enforcement of crimes as they happen. It claims it does this while somehow stripping all personal data from the system, allowing it to help cops without putting anyone's privacy at risk. As with other algorithmic crime systems, there is little public oversight or information about how, exactly, the system determines what is worth alerting cops to. In its pitches to prospective clients, Banjo promises its technology, called "Live Time Intelligence," can identify, and potentially help police solve, an incredible variety of crimes in real-time. Banjo says its AI can help police solve child kidnapping cases "in seconds," identify active shooter situations as they happen, or potentially send an alert when there's a traffic accident, airbag deployment, fire, or a car is driving the wrong way down the road. Banjo says it has "a solution for homelessness" and can help with the opioid epidemic by detecting "opioid events." It offers "artificial intelligence processing" of state-owned audio sensors that "include but may not be limited to speech recognition and natural language processing" as well as automatic scene detection, object recognition, and vehicle detection on real-time video footage pulled in from Utah's cameras.

The state of Utah has given an artificial intelligence company real-time access to state traffic cameras, CCTV and "public safety" cameras, 911 emergency systems, location data for state-owned vehicles, and other sensitive data. The company, called Banjo, says that it's combining this data with information collected from social media, satellites, and other apps, and claims its algorithms "detect anomalies" in the real world. The lofty goal of Banjo's system is to alert law enforcement of crimes as they happen. It claims it does this while somehow stripping all personal data from the system, allowing it to help cops without putting anyone's privacy at risk. As with other algorithmic crime systems, there is little public oversight or information about how, exactly, the system determines what is worth alerting cops to. In its pitches to prospective clients, Banjo promises its technology, called "Live Time Intelligence," can identify, and potentially help police solve, an incredible variety of crimes in real-time. Banjo says its AI can help police solve child kidnapping cases "in seconds," identify active shooter situations as they happen, or potentially send an alert when there's a traffic accident, airbag deployment, fire, or a car is driving the wrong way down the road. Banjo says it has "a solution for homelessness" and can help with the opioid epidemic by detecting "opioid events." It offers "artificial intelligence processing" of state-owned audio sensors that "include but may not be limited to speech recognition and natural language processing" as well as automatic scene detection, object recognition, and vehicle detection on real-time video footage pulled in from Utah's cameras.

A Utah city police department is considering a partnership with an artificial intelligence company in an effort to help the law enforcement agency work more efficiently. The Springville police may work with technology firm Banjo to help improve the response time to emergencies, The Daily Herald reported. The Park City company can gather real-time data from various sources including 911 dispatch calls, traffic cameras, emergency alarms, and social media posts and report related information to the police, officials said. The Springfield City Council heard a presentation by a Banjo representative during its Jan. 7 meeting but did not immediately make a decision about using the technology. Banjo entered an agreement last July with the Utah Attorney General's Office and the Utah Department of Public Safety to let the agencies use Banjo's technology to "reduce time and resources typically required to generate leads, and instead focus their efforts on incident response," according to a report to the state Legislature.

Provo • A Utah city police department is considering a partnership with an artificial intelligence company in an effort to help the law enforcement agency work more efficiently. The Springville police may work with technology firm Banjo to help improve the response time to emergencies, The Daily Herald reported. The Park City company can gather real-time data from various sources including 911 dispatch calls, traffic cameras, emergency alarms, and social media posts and report related information to the police, officials said. The Springfield City Council heard a presentation by a Banjo representative during its Jan. 7 meeting but did not immediately make a decision about using the technology. Banjo entered an agreement last July with the Utah Attorney General's Office and the Utah Department of Public Safety to let the agencies use Banjo's technology to "reduce time and resources typically required to generate leads, and instead focus their efforts on incident response," according to a report to the state Legislature.