Big Data, Crime and Social Control

Aleš Završnik is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Criminology at the Faculty of Law and Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

"Data science is having profound effects on public and private life. However, thanks to a combination of technical complexity, proprietary privilege, and secretive state practice, both policy makers and the public remain largely in the dark about its uses and implications. This book offers desperately needed insights into the ways that Big Data analytics are being developed and applied in the domains of law enforcement, crime control and criminal justice. Alex Završnik has compiled a critically important collection of essays that shed light on the profound changes afoot in the way societies define, investigate, prosecute, and punish crime and criminality. These scholars are sounding the alarm about the major challenges that Big Data poses to civil rights and social justice, unpacking some of the ways that new systems of data analytics are undermining legal concepts and tenets that are fundamental to democratic governance. The volume covers considerable ground: how predictive policing and algorithmic sentencing exacerbate racial and class-based discrimination; how data analytics not only fails to prevent but enables financial crimes and tax evasion among economic elites; how "informed consent" morphs into "forced consent" with ubiquitous data tracking; how automated policing pushes toward total information capture; how different legal concepts of privacy have shaped the possibilities of judicial oversight of mass data collection; how international law addresses cyber-espionage; and more. It is a must-read for anyone concerned with how Big Data and predictive analytics are disrupting and destabilizing the institutions and ideals of democracy." – Kelly Gates, Department of Communication and Science Studies Program, University of California San Diego, USA

• Foreword, Katja Franko, Part I: Introduction. 1. Big Data: What Is It and Why Does it Matter for Crime and Social Control?, Aleš Završnik, Part II: Automated Social Control. 2. Paradoxes of Privacy in an Era of Asymmetrical Social Control, Frank Pasquale, 3. Big Data – Big Ignorance, Renata Salecl, 4. Machines, Humans, and the Question of Control, Zoran Kanduč, Part III: Automated Policing. 5. Data Collection Without Limits: Automated Policing and the Politics of Framelessness, Mark Andrejevic, 6. Algorithmic Patrol: The Futures of Predictive Policing, Dean Wilson, Part IV: Automated Justice. 7. Algorithmic Crime Control, Aleš Završnik, 8. Subjectivity, Algorithms, and the Courtroom, Katja Šugman Stubbs and Mojca M. Plesničar, Part V: Big Data Automation Limitations. 9. Judicial Oversight of the (Mass) Collection and Processing of Personal Data, Primož Gorkič, 10. Big Data and Economic Cyber Espionage: An International Law Perspective, Maruša T. Veber and Maša Kovič Dine