【開催案内】第67回独立行政法人評価制度委員会評価部会

情報通信審議会　情報通信技術分科会　衛星通信システム委員会（第47回）

茅野市における「地域課題解決のためのスマートシティ推進事業」の交付式の開催

情報通信行政・郵政行政審議会　電気通信事業部会　接続委員会（第70回）

「全国型CTFコンテスト」の開催

特殊切手「2025年日本国際博覧会（大阪・関西万博）（寄付金付）」に付加された寄附金の配分団体等の認可

令和6年度緊急消防援助隊地域ブロック合同訓練の実施

情報通信審議会　情報通信技術分科会　陸上無線通信委員会（第88回）の開催について

夕張市財政再生計画の変更の同意

情報通信法学研究会　メディア法分科会（令和6年度第1回）開催案内

G7デジタル・技術大臣会合の開催結果

第727回　入札監理小委員会（会議資料）

情報通信行政・郵政行政審議会　郵政行政分科会（第94回）配布資料・議事概要・議事録

                        

Governments increasingly rely on algorithmic systems to support consequential assessments and determinations about people’s lives, from judging eligibility for social assistance to trying to predict crime and criminals. Latin America is no exception. With the use of artificial intelligence (AI) posing human rights challenges in the region, EFF released today the report Inter-American Standards and State Use of AI for Rights-Affecting Determinations in Latin America: Human Rights Implications and Operational Framework.

This report draws on international human rights law, particularly standards from the Inter-American Human Rights System, to provide guidance on what state institutions must look out for when assessing whether and how to adopt artificial intelligence AI and automated decision-making (ADM) systems for determinations that can affect people’s rights.

We organized the report’s content and testimonies on current challenges from civil society experts on the ground in our project landing page.

AI-based Systems Implicate Human Rights

The report comes amid deployment of AI/ADM-based systems by Latin American state institutions for services and decision-making that affects human rights. Colombians must undergo classification from Sisbén, which measures their degree of poverty and vulnerability, if they want to access social protection programs. News reports in Brazil have once again flagged the problems and perils of Córtex, an algorithmic-powered surveillance system that cross-references various state databases with wide reach and poor controls. Risk-assessment systems seeking to predict school dropout, children’s rights violations or teenage pregnancy have integrated government related programs in countries like México, Chile, and Argentina. Different courts in the region have also implemented AI-based tools for a varied range of tasks.

EFF’s report aims to address two primary concerns: opacity and lack of human rights protections in state AI-based decision-making. Algorithmic systems are often deployed by state bodies in ways that obscure how decisions are made, leaving affected individuals with little understanding or recourse.

Additionally, these systems can exacerbate existing inequalities, disproportionately impacting marginalized communities without providing adequate avenues for redress. The lack of public  participation in the development and implementation of these systems further undermines democratic governance, as affected groups are often excluded from meaningful decision-making processes relating to government adoption and use of these technologies.

This is at odds with the human rights protections most Latin American countries are required to uphold. A majority of states have committed to comply with the American Convention on Human Rights and the Protocol of San Salvador. Under these international instruments, they have the duty to respect human rights and prevent violations from occurring. States’ responsibilities before international human rights law as guarantor of rights, and people and social groups as rights holders—entitled to call for them and participate—are two basic tenets that must guide any legitimate use of AI/ADM systems by state institutions for consequential decision-making, as we underscore in the report.

Inter-American Human Rights Framework

Building off extensive research of Inter-American Commission on Human Rights’ reports and Inter-American Court of Human Rights’ decisions and advisory opinions, we devise human rights implications and an operational framework for their due consideration in government use of algorithmic systems.

We detail what states’ commitments under the Inter-American System mean when state bodies decide to implement AI/ADM technologies for rights-based determinations. We explain why this adoption must fulfill necessary and proportionate principles, and what this entails. We underscore what it means to have a human rights approach to state AI-based policies, including crucial redlines for not moving ahead with their deployment.

We elaborate on what states must observe to ensure critical rights in line with Inter-American standards. We look particularly at political participation, access to information, equality and non-discrimination, due process, privacy and data protection, freedoms of expression, association and assembly, and the right to a dignified life in connection to social, economic, and cultural rights.

Some of them embody principles that must cut across the different stages of AI-based policies or initiatives—from scoping the problem state bodies seek to address and assessing whether algorithmic systems can reliably and effectively contribute to achieving its goals, to continuously monitoring and evaluating their implementation.

These cross-cutting principles integrate the comprehensive operational framework we provide in the report for governments and civil society advocates in the region.

Transparency, Due Process, and Data Privacy Are Vital

Our report’s recommendations reinforce that states must ensure transparency at every stage of AI deployment. Governments must provide clear information about how these systems function, including the categories of data processed, performance metrics, and details of the decision-making flow, including human and machine interaction.

It is also essential to disclose important aspects of how they were designed, such as details on the model’s training and testing datasets. Moreover, decisions based on AI/ADM systems must have a clear, reasoned, and coherent justification. Without such transparency, people cannot effectively understand or challenge the decisions being made about them, and the risk of unchecked rights violations increases.

Leveraging due process guarantees is also covered. The report highlights that decisions made by AI systems often lack the transparency needed for individuals to challenge them. The lack of human oversight in these processes can lead to arbitrary or unjust outcomes. Ensuring that affected individuals have the right to challenge AI-driven decisions through accessible legal mechanisms and meaningful human review is a critical step in aligning AI use with human rights standards.

Transparency and due process relate to ensuring people can fully enjoy the rights that unfold from informational self-determination, including the right to know what data about them are contained in state records, where the data came from, and how it’s being processed.

The Inter-American Court recently recognized informational self-determination as an autonomous right protected by the American Convention. It grants individuals the power to decide when and to what extent aspects of their private life can be revealed, including their personal information. It is intrinsically connected to the free development of one’s personality, and any limitations must be legally established, and necessary and proportionate to achieve a legitimate goal.

Ensuring Meaningful Public Participation

Social participation is another cornerstone of the report’s recommendations. We emphasize that marginalized groups, who are most likely to be negatively affected by AI and ADM systems, must have a voice in how these systems are developed and used. Participatory mechanisms must not be mere box-checking exercises and are vital for ensuring that algorithmic-based initiatives do not reinforce discrimination or violate rights. Human Rights Impact Assessments and independent auditing are important vectors for meaningful participation and should be used during all stages of planning and deployment. 

Robust legal safeguards, appropriate institutional structures, and effective oversight, often neglected, are underlying conditions for any legitimate government use of AI for rights-based determinations. As AI continues to play an increasingly significant role in public life, the findings and recommendations of this report are crucial. Our aim is to make a timely and compelling contribution for a human rights-centric approach to the use of AI/ADM in public decision-making.

We’d like to thank the consultant Rafaela Cavalcanti de Alcântara for her work on this report, and Clarice Tavares, Jamila Venturini, Joan López Solano, Patricia Díaz Charquero, Priscilla Ruiz Guillén, Raquel Rachid, and Tomás Pomar for their insights and feedback to the report.

The full report is here.

Young people have a right to speak and access information online. Legislatures should remember that protecting kids' online safety shouldn't require sweeping online surveillance and censorship.

EFF reminded the New York Attorney General of this important fact in comments responding to the state's recently passed Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation (SAFE) for Kids Act—which requires platforms to verify the ages of people who visit them. After New York's legislature passed the bill, it is now up to the state attorney general's office to write rules to implement it.

We urge the attorney general's office to recognize that age verification requirements are incompatible with privacy and free expression rights for everyone. As we say in our comments:

[O]nline age-verification mandates like that imposed by the New York SAFE For Kids Act are unconstitutional because they block adults from content they have a First Amendment right to access, burden their First Amendment right to browse the internet anonymously, and chill data security- and privacy-minded individuals who are justifiably leery of disclosing intensely personal information to online services. Further, these mandates carry with them broad, inherent burdens on adults’ rights to access lawful speech online. These burdens will not and cannot be remedied by new developments in age-verification technology.

We also noted that none of the methods of age verification listed in the attorney general's call for comments is both privacy-protective and entirely accurate. They each have their own flaws that threaten everyone's privacy and speech rights. "These methods don’t each fit somewhere on a spectrum of 'more safe' and 'less safe,' or 'more accurate' and 'less accurate.' Rather, they each fall on a spectrum of 'dangerous in one way' to 'dangerous in a different way'," we wrote in the comments.

Read the full comments here: https://www.eff.org/document/eff-comments-ny-ag-safe-kids-sept-2024

　若い世代に今、戦争を防ぐには「抑止力」を強化するしか道はないというあきらめが広がっている気がする。ウクライナやガザでの戦争を目にすれば、国連や国際法も頼りにならない。やはり軍事力を持つしかないと思うのも自然だろう。その点は理解しつつ「でも、それでいいのか」と対話していくことが大切になっている。戦略の真剣度疑問　政府が「安保３文書」を出した２０２２年12月に私と青井未帆さん（学習院大学教授）が共同座長で平和構想提言会議を開いた。そこでの提言のポイントは「抑止力」で戦争は防げな..

"Egypt and Tunisia have shown little interest in reaching agreements with the EU on migration, mobility, and police cooperation despite receiving hundreds of millions of euros from Brussels for border control, according to EU documents.

The revelation is contained in a paper dated 15 July drafted by the Hungarian government which currently holds the EU’s six-month rotating presidency ahead of a meeting of EU diplomats on migration and asylum policy.

The document is one of several published by Statewatch, a pro-transparency NGO on Monday (14 October)."

Full article here and see our externalisation bulletin here.

This month we present an interview with Eric Velleman, a professor at the HAN University of Applied Sciences and co-founder of the Accessibility Foundation. The university’s department of Inclusive…