16 posts tagged with audit.
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The Trick of Orthodoxy
Economics truly is a disgrace - "This is very personal post. It is my story of the retaliation I suffered immediately after my 'economics is a disgrace' blog post went viral. The retaliation came from Heather Boushey–a recent Biden appointee to the Council of Economic Adviser and the President and CEO of Equitable Growth where I then worked. This is not the story I wanted to be telling (or living). Writing this post is painful. I am sorry." (via; previously) [more inside]
The chickenization of everything
How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism (thread) - "Surveillance Capitalism is a real, serious, urgent problem... because it is both emblematic of monopolies (which lead to corruption, AKA conspiracies) and because the vast, nonconsensual dossiers it compiles on us can be used to compromise and neutralize opposition to the status quo."[1,2,3] [more inside]
A blind and opaque reputelligent nosedive
Data isn't just being collected from your phone. It's being used to score you. - "Operating in the shadows of the online marketplace, specialized tech companies you've likely never heard of are tapping vast troves of our personal data to generate secret 'surveillance scores' — digital mug shots of millions of Americans — that supposedly predict our future behavior. The firms sell their scoring services to major businesses across the U.S. economy. People with low scores can suffer harsh consequences."[1] [more inside]
Ethics in AI
DeepMind researchers propose rebuilding the AI industry on a base of anticolonialism - "The researchers detailed how to build AI systems while critically examining colonialism and colonial forms of AI already in use in a preprint paper released Thursday. The paper was coauthored by DeepMind research scientists William Isaac and Shakir Mohammed and Marie-Therese Png, an Oxford doctoral student and DeepMind Ethics and Society intern who previously provided tech advice to the United Nations Secretary General's High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation." [more inside]
On the other hand, auditing the rich is hard.
Until Congress restores the funding it slashed from the agency over the past nine years, the IRS will continue to audit the working poor at about the same rate as the wealthiest 1% because it is the most efficient use of available IRS examination resources. (ProPublica updating their earlier reporting) [more inside]
Democracy dies in daylight, too
With 426 days until the 2020 U.S. Election (days.to countdown), you may be wondering about the state of election systems around the country. If so, NPR recently provided what you need to know about U.S. election security and voting machines, which can be paired with EFF's 2016 general article on e-voting machines and elections around the world. Meanwhile, as FEC nears shutdown, priorities such as stopping election interference on hold (NPR, Aug. 30, 2019). [more inside]
But How Will We Pay For It?
“Now, a Nation investigation has uncovered an explanation for the Pentagon’s foot-dragging: For decades, the DoD’s leaders and accountants have been perpetrating a gigantic, unconstitutional accounting fraud, deliberately cooking the books to mislead the Congress and drive the DoD’s budgets ever higher, regardless of military necessity. DoD has literally been making up numbers in its annual financial reports to Congress—representing trillions of dollars’ worth of seemingly nonexistent transactions—knowing that Congress would rely on those misleading reports when deciding how much money to give the DoD the following year, according to government records and interviews with current and former DoD officials, congressional sources, and independent experts.” Exclusive: The Pentagon’s Massive Accounting Fraud Exposed (The Nation)
Algorithms define our lives
Original Sin
Our Bodies or Ourselves - "The collection and storage of people's biometric data fundamentally changes the relationship between citizen and state. Once 'presumed innocent', we are now, in the sinister words of former UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd, 'unconvicted persons.' " (via)
maybe we should throw an exception here??
ProPublica sought and got access to the source code for the Forensic Statistical Tool, or FST, that NYC's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner created and used till early 2017 to analyze complex DNA evidence in "about 1,350 cases over about 5 1/2 years." Now that a judge has unsealed the codebase, ProPublica's put it on GitHub, and "two newly unredacted defense expert affidavits are also available." From Exhibit C, October 2016: "I have seen no code indicating that any test code has been written for, or automated software testing has been performed on, FST." [more inside]
California v. Johnson
Kern County got a $200,000+ grant and started using closed-source software to perform a new kind of DNA testing for criminal forensics. Now, the principle at stake in California v. Johnson (California's 5th district court of appeals): does due process require that the defendant be able to examine the evidence used to convict them, which includes auditing forensics software to check for bugs? The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, among others, have filed amicus curiae briefs. [more inside]
Through a Glass, Dark Enlightenment
The World's Largest Hedge Fund Is Building an Algorithmic Model of Its Founder's Brain - "Mr. Dalio has the highest stratum score at Bridgewater, and the firm has told employees he has one of the highest in the world. Likewise, Bridgewater's software judges Mr. Dalio the firm's most 'believable' employee in matters such as investing and leadership, which means his opinions carry more weight. Mr. Dalio is always in search of new data with which to measure his staff. He once raised the idea of using head bands to track people's brain waves, according to one former employee. The idea wasn't adopted." [more inside]
Auditing Algorithms and Algorithmic Auditing
How big data increases inequality and threatens democracy - "A former academic mathematician and ex-hedge fund quant exposes flaws in how information is used to assess everything from creditworthiness to policing tactics, with results that cause damage both financially and to the fabric of society. Programmed biases and a lack of feedback are among the concerns behind the clever and apt title of Cathy O'Neil's book: Weapons of Math Destruction." [more inside]
The US military industry _is_ 'complex'
U.S. Army fudged its accounts by trillions of dollars, auditor finds - "The Defense Department's Inspector General, in a [July 26 (pdf)] report, said the Army made $2.8 trillion in wrongful adjustments to accounting entries in one quarter alone in 2015, and $6.5 trillion for the year. Yet the Army lacked receipts and invoices to support those numbers or simply made them up... The report affirms a 2013 Reuters series revealing how the Defense Department falsified accounting on a large scale as it scrambled to close its books. As a result, there has been no way to know how the Defense Department – far and away the biggest chunk of Congress' annual budget – spends the public's money."
An ounce of prevention is an administrative violation
Relieving poverty is charitable, but preventing it is not. Oxfam Canada, while renewing its charitable status, got into an argument with the Canadian Revenue Agency over its purpose. [more inside]
Iraq: Reconstruction Audit
Iraq -
On Auditing the War and Reconstruction.
A Wealth of Facts (.pdf) - worth perusing.
'World Tribunal' Findings.
via
On Auditing the War and Reconstruction.
A Wealth of Facts (.pdf) - worth perusing.
'World Tribunal' Findings.
via
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