https://beta.washingtonpost.com/pol...links-between-mental-health-violent-behavior/
https://gizmodo.com/the-plan-to-use-fitbit-data-to-stop-mass-shootings-is-o-1837710691
Last week, the Washington Post reported that the White House had been briefed on a plan to create an agency called HARPA, a healthcare counterpart to the Pentagon’s research and development arm DARPA. Among other initiatives, this new agency would reportedly collect volunteer data from a suite of smart devices, including Apple Watches, Fitbits, Amazon Echos, and Google Homes in order to identify “neurobehavioral signs” of “someone headed toward a violent explosive act.” The project would then use artificial intelligence to create a “sensor suite” to flag mental changes that make violence more likely.
According to the Post, the HARPA proposal was discussed with senior White House officials as early as June 2017, but has “gained momentum” after the mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. The latest version of the plan, reportedly submitted to the Trump administration this month, outlined the biometric project called “SAFE HOME,” an acronym for “Stopping Aberrant Fatal Events by Helping Overcome Mental Extremes.” A source told the newspaper that every time HARPA has been discussed in the White House “even up to the presidential level, it’s been very well-received.”
A copy of the plan obtained by the Post characterizes HARPA as pursuing “breakthrough technologies with high specificity and sensitivity for early diagnosis of neuropsychiatric violence” and claims that “a multi-modality solution, along with real-time data analytics, is needed to achieve such an accurate diagnosis.” That’s a lot of vague buzzwords, but the general idea is clear: collect a wealth of personal data in order to flag mental status changes in individuals and determine whether those changes can predict mass violence. It’s an approach that strikes George David Annas, deputy director of the Forensic Psychiatry Fellowship Program at SUNY Upstate Medical University, as ridiculous.
“The proposed data collection goes beyond absurdity when they mention the desire to collect FitBit data,” Annas told Gizmodo. “I am unaware of any study linking walking too much and committing mass murder. As for the other technologies, what are these people expecting? ‘Alexa, tell me the best way to kill a lot of people really quickly’? Really?”
Thanks for posting this. It reveals the utter depravity of mental process in our White House. It defies logic to blame gun violence on mental illness when the incidence of mental illness is quite similar to ours throughout the other nations we regularly compare ourselves to. Yet these other nations experience only a tiny fraction of the gun violence that we do. And they are all nations where private citizens may own guns!