I have wanted for awhile to build a site which trained a machine learning system on the various data made available surrounding Congresspeople and information on members which were eventually found to be guilty of adultery or other similar crimes - then produce a score for every member of Congress rating how likely it is that they are cheating on their spouse, or taking bribes, or similar. Give them a sneak preview into the types of systems they are aiding and abetting in the creation of. I am uncertain of whether it could be considered defamation to have a brainless machine learning system decide there's an 85% chance some random member of Congress is an adulterer. I don't actually believe that any such system could ever reach any reasonable level of actual effectiveness due to the fundamental complexities of human behavior and circumstance, but that's not stopping the law enforcement side of things from moving forward so I don't see why it ought to stop the side trying to point out fundamental flaws in the strategy.
I've considered something like that, but instead of trying to figure out crimes, it would produce a score for bills.
A corruption score for bills, almost like a facebook for bills "This bill is friends with Exxon". It would figure out who spent the most getting the bill passed, and who they bought off to get it.
Just a simple thing for people to point to when they say things are corrupt. Granted in today's environment, that score would be 100% most of the time, but it would be interesting to have some idea just who bought the bill.
Some of the coding-friendly news orgs like ProPublica have done one-off versions of this. It'd be great to have an ongoing tool to check the scores at any time.
I’d take it a step further and ingest all public record data including using FOIA requests to find any behavior that could have a representative charged with a crime (fraud, bribery, etc).
As sibling comment said, don’t generate an adultery score. That’s not productive or decent. Find actual evidence of wrongdoing, not draconian scoring systems.
Some folks in Brazil did something like that, IIRC it's called project Serenata de amor, it uses machine learning to process public government data in search of weird and suspicious expenses and flag it.
People already know who is corrupt, who is sexually harassing, etc.
Certainly their victims and co-conspirators know it. Probably their staffers, friends and family have a pretty good idea.
Often reporters themselves know who is dirty but don't have enough corroborating sources to get past the fact checkers.
So it seems like the Wikileaks model could be improved with a crypto market. Those in the know place bets on who is dirty and get a payoff when the dirt eventually gets disclosed.
It would be a nice incentive to get more disclosure, and it would directly reward the victims and leakers.
Great idea, but let's drop the crypto and drop the gambling. Instead, crowdfund dirt that would constitute grounds for impeachment or recall for politicians.
Credible whistleblowers have additional incentive, and it would serve as a good yardstick for just how much folks detest a given official.
Alternatively we could take the crypto and go full Weimar Republic with a Kickstriker[0] clone for politicians!
Sure let's get John and Jane Doe to acquire a secure crypto, securely access a website over Tor, and manage to maintain OPSEC. Then we can have them setup their own Dropbox clone with rsync and some trivial bash scripts!
Alternatively, we can create an easy-to-use site for the common man who is willing to pony up some petty cash for whatever their version of "justice" is. At sufficiently high levels, in sufficiently corrupt societies they can trace things down and disappear you. This idea isn't for those places, and likely wouldn't even work anyway.
However, in nations with reasonably sound rule of law this could potentially work.
> Note: Minnesota's statute applies to both partners if they are both married. If one partner is unmarried the law only applies to the married woman. The law does not apply to a married man and unmarried woman.
It's disturbing to me that you're so focused on adultery, which isn't a crime in most places and is a personal matter for the couple involved. More than 70% of people cheat on a significant other at some point, so you'd be casting a wide net.
Why not instead look at real crimes like pay-for-play, fraud, sexual assault, etc.?
Everyone seems to be missing the point completely. I am not talking about building an adultery detector. I am talking about an object lesson. I am talking about showing Congress that the systems they are building in order to profile, label, and categorize the public based upon spurious statistical models are dangerous. Congresspeople are myopic, selfish creatures. If it doesn't affect them personally, they see it solely as a matter of "is it more power for us? Then the vote is yes!"
Adultery was picked because it is a very common behavior which is nonetheless viewed very poorly by society. It's the kind of thing which historically gets politicians into trouble. Being named as an adulterer is a realistic thing for a politician to fear, as it could ruin their life - the way getting labelled a terrorist or a pedophile or similar will be a reasonable thing for a citizen to fear when systems are debuted that use the same technology to label people with a likelihood score. That is why adultery was picked. If you wanted to do by pay-for-play where would you get your training data set? Where are the people who have actually lost their office because of that? The others are the same. We have a long history of politicians getting busted for adultery, so we can have a good training dataset. And the results will be garbage and useless. That's the whole and entire point. Once you have an automated system built, it doesn't matter whether its conclusions have any merit. It will hand out judgements, no one will be able to explain what basis they actually have, but investigations will be targetted and reputations will be destroyed.
My intent isn't even to accomplish any of that reputation destruction, it is simply to show Congress the ill use such systems can and will be put to.
Even if only to prove your point correct with 1 or 2 examples, this would be a great system to create! Let congress feel the pain that so many citizens unfairly feel.
There's a non-moralistic reason to be concerned with adultery in the case of politicians and public servants, which is that knowledge of it can be used for extortion.
Well, there's two sides to that. The other being they may be using their position of power to strong arm less powerful people into an affair, then discrediting their lover to cover their ass. Even if you don't care about that person being mistreated, it tells you something about their general priorities and how likely they are to be generally corrupt.
That's only because its a crime striking those laws down and removing them from the military system - would reduce the attack surface for bad actors trying to suborn people in to betraying the USA.
Likewise having a spiff 18 months ago at burning man or glasto isn't really a huge risk to security if its not a crime - would also help with recruitment for TLA's
They wouldn't care if you are gay. But if you are closeted and gay, that becomes something you can be blackmailed over and you will fail to get a security clearance. I don't know what they do when someone who can't get a clearance is elected... but the only reason they ask about lifestyle factors in background investigations is to determine if you're able to be blackmailed. If you're open, then obviously you can't be blackmailed with the fact you're gay or polyamorous or in an open marriage or whatever. It's the secrecy that's the problem. (This is all off-topic though, since I don't actually care about adultery and I don't think the system I'd build could legitimately catch anyone for adultery. It would do nothing but show that peoples reputations can be so easily smeared with basically no evidence using these sorts of systems. That's the point.)
> I don't actually believe that any such system could ever reach any reasonable level of actual effectiveness due to the fundamental complexities of human behavior and circumstance...
Absolutely it could - that would all be factored into the percentage. Human behavior and chance encounters are the exact reason you could never say 0% or 100%, however.
How many nodes do you need in your neural net in order to account for the variation of human behavior, the influence of happenstance, etc? When your model fails to converge, do you tell your government customer that you can't actually produce a score and give back the $200 million or whatever you got for the contract to create such a score?
No, I just want to see who says they are a hard R or D and really vote middle of the road. Perhaps the site could let me vote too to see where and or who I agree with best.
