Lex Cybernetica Podcast

Late last year, a Palestinian man was arrested by Israeli police, who found out that he had posted an image of himself on Facebook next to a tractor, a work vehicle weaponized by Palestinian lone wolf attackers to lethal affect in recent years, and captioned it with an a threat of a slaughter, presumably of Jews. What perfect pre-crime profiling. Profiling is something we do all the time. As soon as we see a person (or an animal), we immediately, automatically, subconsciously make a profile in our head – are they a friend or a foe, will they try to kill us, and are they stronger or weaker than us? This is an evolutionary mechanism designed to protect ourselves from possible threats. The science of predictive profiling seeks to analyze data on criminals, identify recurring patterns, then apply them to people who haven’t transgressed yet and obtain threat assessments on them, predicting which of them are most likely to commit such crimes. This information can be utilized by security forces, who use the pre-cri