In the past two decades, the United States has applied a growing number of foreign and security measures directly targeting individuals — natural or legal persons. These individualized measures have largely been designed and carried out by administrative agencies. Widespread application of individual economic sanctions; security watchlists and no fly lists; detentions; targeted killings; and action against hackers responsible for cyber attacks have all become significant currencies of U.S. foreign and security policy. While the application of each of these measures in discrete contexts has been studied, they have yet to attract an integrated analysis.
This article examines this phenomenon with two main aims. First, it documents what I call “administrative national security”: the growing individualization of U.S. foreign and security policy, the administrative mechanisms that have facilitated it, and the judicial response to these mechanisms. Administrative national security encompasses several types of individualized measures that agencies now apply on a routine, indefinite basis through the exercise of considerable discretion within a broad framework established by Congress or the President. It is therefore best understood as an emerging practice of administrative adjudication in the foreign and security space.
Second, the article considers how administrative national security integrates with the President and the courts. Accounting for administrative national security illuminates the President’s constitutional role as chief executive and commander-in-chief, and his control of key aspects of administrative foreign and security action. It also challenges deep-rooted doctrines underlying foreign relations and national security law, including the portrayal of the President as the “sole organ” in international relations. Administrative national security further informs our understanding of the role of courts in this context. It renders more foreign and security action reviewable in principle under the APA, and provides a justification for the exercise of robust judicial power in this category.
I'm underwhelmed by 'Deep neural networks are more accurate than humans at detecting sexual orientation from facial images' from Wang and Kosinski in (2018) 114(2) Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 246–257, which claims
We show that faces contain much more information about sexual orientation than can be perceived or interpreted by the human brain. We used deep neural networks to extract features from 35,326 facial images. These features were entered into a logistic regression aimed at classifying sexual orientation. Given a single facial image, a classifier could correctly distinguish between gay and heterosexual men in 81% of cases, and in 71% of cases for women. Human judges achieved much lower accuracy: 61% for men and 54% for women. The accuracy of the algorithm increased to 91% and 83%, respectively, given five facial images per person. Facial features employed by the classifier included both fixed (e.g., nose shape) and transient facial features (e.g., grooming style). Consistent with the prenatal hormone theory of sexual orientation, gay men and women tended to have gender-atypical facial morphology, expression, and grooming styles. Prediction models aimed at gender alone allowed for detecting gay males with 57% accuracy and gay females with 58% accuracy. Those findings advance our understanding of the origins of sexual orientation and the limits of human perception. Additionally, given that companies and governments are increasingly using computer vision algorithms to detect people’s intimate traits, our findings expose a threat to the privacy and safety of gay men and women.
Determining whether you are gay on the basis of nose shape? And what could possibly go wrong!
