“Coded Bias” pushes back the surveillance company | Culture & Leisure

Can a film be deeply disturbing and, at the same time, refreshing? Independent Lens (9 p.m., PBS, TV-PG, check local listings) presents the 2020 documentary Coded Bias. A film brimming with dark ideas and revelations, Coded follows MIT scientist and digital activist Joy Buolamwini as she embarks on a crusade to educate people about the cultural, gender and racial assumptions embedded in digital software and digital media. algorithms that have come to decide and even dictate the future of everyone.

When she arrived at MIT, Buolamwini tried to complete a class project by creating a dream mirror, a digital device that would display her face on a computer screen and overlay her reflection with encouraging images. But his efforts were thwarted by the software’s inability to see his face. He only recognized her when she put on a white mask. As a black woman, she was literally invisible. This revelation inspired her to look into facial recognition software and explore the cultural hypothesis of the largely male and predominantly white scientists behind it.

Buolamwini also meets Cathy ONeil, a mathematician who worked for hedge funds before finding out how they used algorithms to prey on the most financially vulnerable.

His bestselling book, Weapons of Math Destruction, shows how poorly understood algorithms decide how people are treated by schools, financial institutions, and social media, who gets signed up or hired, who gets loans. and who could be fired. ONeil had to leave Wall Street when she saw how she used mathematics to name the poor for subprime loans and created formulas that actively bet on their inability to pay them back. The cumulative result of these cynical bets has been a massive loss of wealth for the most vulnerable Americans. Arcane formulas were used by the rich to steal from the poor.

We also meet activists in London campaigning against that city’s massive surveillance system and the use of facial recognition software to identify possible terrorists. And we meet Brooklyn tenants who are battling a facial recognition program that can lock them out of their homes. As Buolamwini demonstrated, such software cannot read non-white faces.

Coded Bias pulls no punches in its indictment of digital libertarianism and its effects on American society. When some claim China is the model for a digital surveillance state, voices here argue that China is just being honest, while Facebook is not.

Although shrill, Coded is also cheerful, and this is largely linked to Joy Buolamwini, who lives up to her first name. She is likely to break into oral poetry after testifying before Congress. She is the star of this movie in all the best ways.

It’s impossible not to notice just about all of the authoritative narrators and talking heads in Coded Bias are female. A lot of color. This addition by subtraction makes a powerful statement.

A scruffy independent musician follows his elegant diplomatic wife to Paris and finds himself embroiled in dangerous intrigues in the Israeli drama The Attache, which airs on Acorn.

While clearly ripped from the headlines on recent terrorist attacks, Attache has half an hour of runtime and a fish-out-of-the-water plot feature more associated with sitcoms than thrillers. The hybrid approach is interesting.

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