Dec 27, 16 / Cap 26, 00 20:48 UTC

Re: [OFFICIAL POST] The Court System of Asgardia  

1) Is there any one indisputable reason that any Asgardian citizen should place 100% trust in their laws and those whom uphold them? Therefore any one reason we should not consider all branches responsible for justice in any form an arm of law enforcement as a whole?

2) This feels like planning to fail. As in building a contingency into a system because we know we'll need it. Should we not design a single court where binding decisions can be made reliably, responsibly and understanbly in the first instance? This would increase efficiency and trust would be inherent.

3) Would it be prudent to configure environments for developing, testing and trialling a system of this nature concurrently with implementing the resolution of point 2? We would be able to instil the very same values that our principal system embodies in its foundations.

Dec 28, 16 / Cap 27, 00 15:55 UTC

AI is certianly the "way forwards" with regards to ensuring that the decisions made are free from personal bias, emotional contamination etc.

This could handle the bulk of descisions providing data on how this conclusion was reached at the time of the desicision. This could potentially be a panel of AI each fed different training materials in order it may focus on more specific areas, and majority rule of the panel.

In cases where one or more parties disagree with the AI's descision, then a human panel can assess if the AI made the "correct" descision and rectify if not. The outcome of these trials can be used for further training materials for the AI to assist in making future descisions in the expected manner.

I feel strongly that law enforcement and justice dispensement should be clearly seperated in order to prevent situations where an individual is able to abuse their position at the detriment of another individual for personal reasons.

Assuming they have had say in their formation, then there's no particular reason Asgardians should distrust the law itself, however, undisputedly those who uphold them are fallable. Even without malicous intent, it's possible to make genuine mistakes. As the reality of situations is rarely as black and white as the policies that govern them in the case of such mistakes, there should be some oppertunity afforded to have this corrected.

Dec 29, 16 / Cap 28, 00 00:56 UTC

Not really a part of the legal system but more of the safety and law enforcement side. I would like to see any type of station/colony/base have 24/7 CC surveillance on everything. Nothing monitored by people but everything kept on record for a amount of time to be used in the justice system or in the event of a accident. Privacy would be ensured by the fact that the footage would not be reviewed by a person unless it is needed for a investigation.

Dec 30, 16 / Cap 29, 00 15:27 UTC

Good day,

1) No entity should have more power.

2) & 3) AI/Pragmatic Laws, a Court/if context needed*, and Mass Consensus of x# of briefed citizens + votes by professional Asgardian judges (the ratio should be at least +1% in favor of "citizens votes" in a "50-50" power of definite sentence shared between citizens and the system).

It should be the responsibility of the Ministry of Information and Communications to define platforms that can achieve an impartial and balanced delivery of data for anyone and everyone involved as well as a secured, user-friendly "as it should always be" voting platform and record.

3 levels that are complementary, possible with available technology and the participation and collaboration of multiple ministerys.

"The result of this collaborations can be an effective system that can work for TV Shows, Shops, Municipalities and other massContent/Staff/Clients markets and that can be sold."

Logic and common sense should be the root of every law in order to Increase penalties at every level (if context irrelevant*) to discourage delays in the effect of the sentence and proactively use time in the court system.

Great topic, and would appreciate feedback.

Have a nice day,

Carlitos

Dec 31, 16 / Cap 30, 00 15:09 UTC

Whatever law enforcement we might use I think it's highly appropriate that they would be 100% transparent.

Like Carlitos said, no entity should have more power, and lack of transparency at law enforcement would give them more power.

Jan 13, 17 / Aqu 13, 01 15:26 UTC

1) The answer to that is really contingent upon the backbone of Asgardia's state as a sovereign entity. Is it a city-state, where it is it's own authority? If that answer is yes then it make sense to merge the two insofar as it is effective, as integrative and extensive training is usually more beneficial. If there are lesser governments such as communities, cities, colonies, or localized governments, the question changes. Then we have to address whether or not we allow local laws based on a contained environment versus a universal law system which is observed regardless of location. In the second example, they may decided to employ their own specialized police in which case it may be more beneficial to separate the entities.

Personally I see more benefit in a merged judiciary/enforcement branch where unilaterally trained officers may be stationed or transferred to any location and will have a similar job at any post.

2) I believe appellate courts are mandatory if we're speaking progressively. Appellate courts oversee the protection of the state and citizenry equally, ensuring that the rights of the individual and the society are equally protected and observed. And when law evolves to suit more modern times, they set precedent over outmoded judgments and the acquisition of new integrative ethical/technological aspects. Depending on how the legal system is organized ( I noticed you utilized circuits) there may be higher level appellate courts, each observing more of a bird's eye view than the last. It is also important to have a check/balance system on judges/juries and the fact finding and decision making process.

3) I partially eluded to this in a different post, but I believe to take the human element out of finding the elements in an offense in law is a grievous error. I'm sure that just like any legal system, there will be various severities of offenses which are classified appropriately. That being said, it is entirely possible, that offenses which are not criminal in nature, i.e. resulting only in a fine or appropriate measure , may one day be automated. But I also noticed that rehabilitation/punishment is a hot subject here, in which case automation would make a poor substitute. Ultimately, the people, or their elected representatives for society, should make the call on how violators are dealt with, and not a machine which cannot consider matters prior to a sentence or judgment.

Thanks for the questions!

Jan 14, 17 / Aqu 14, 01 00:29 UTC

  1. Yes. I do believe asgardians should trust the law, law enforcement officials and the whole judicial system to make sure that law will be protected and "enforced" Also at the same time protect human rights.
  2. I also believe that the appellate courts are mandatory Appellate courts oversee the protection of the state and citizenry equally, ensuring that the rights of the individual. So this must be put in place and maintained over the years . Citizens should fully trust the courts and respect any decisions that they make. As long as it is lawful and abiding to our constitution.
  3. Yes punishment should be given and justice should be served, I agree with someone in this forum for the most part. Question is. How can we punish? We do not have any jail cells or anything at this moment in time unless we have our own private prisons and work on rehabilitation process for those violators. Are we thinking more along the lines of when and if we have a suitable colony on orbit with the appropriate technology, will we house inmates in space? I would hope not. A dangerous scenario would unfold if so. Putting rest of inhabitants at risk. So in the far future. I'd suggest inmates should be on earth and we should have our own island. Which has been mentioned quite a few times To bring asgardians together. And thus make things a lot easier. This space nation concept will take some time to get use too. But I'm sure over time.all of us will reach our goals to secure our place in space and the international community

Jan 18, 17 / Aqu 18, 01 20:35 UTC

In response to Niko, Yes what ever the final rules and laws, 100% transparency in their enforcement must be maintained. After all, 'Sunlight is the best disinfectant'.

Jan 18, 17 / Aqu 18, 01 22:34 UTC

On the point about Appellate courts, I believe that they would be necessary, especially if we use AI in the court.

If we begin to use AI in the court system, they may not be able to understand the whole scenario which could cause them to make judgments that aren't entirely fair. We still have a long way to go before we get true AI, and until then it would be best if they had human revision. Even after we develop true AI, it would still give us a safety net for if there's a failure in the system.

Jan 22, 17 / Aqu 22, 01 22:47 UTC

1) If it's an inquisitorial system, then it makes sense for the courts to be a direct part of law enforcement. Otherwise, the police and judiciary should be independent of each other. Distribution of power limits the possibilities for abuse.

2) Is there some reason there shouldn't be an appellate system? Mistakes are inevitable.

3) There is no existing AI system that can replace judges, juries, or lawyers. Even if there were, a weak AI system is limited to what humans direct it to learn and do. There is extreme potential for abuse by the people who would design it, maintain it, and feed it relevant input.

Jan 23, 17 / Aqu 23, 01 00:14 UTC

I would like to see a number of things in law enforcement, considering we are discussing a long term idea that involves us sending people to live in space. 1. Laws must apply equally to everyone. Money and social status must not be allowed to interfere with justice. 2. Innocence must be maintained until proven guilty. 3. Legal defense must be provided unequivocally to all parties. 4. Whichever court system is used, justice must be blind. Facts and not emotions must be the indicator of guilt. Seeing as a great deal of any locations where people are living would be closely monitored, I believe this could be easier t achieve. 5. An DNA evidence in a trial must be submitted and analyzed swiftly and not back logged for years.

Feb 21, 17 / Pis 24, 01 15:33 UTC

Law Enforcement should be more under the judiciary than under the executive branch, as it is done in the United States. Judges, Corrections, and Law Enforcement are the three legs of the stool of Justice; they each look at it from a different perspective.

-Judges are in charge of adjudicating the law and making decisions about the law. They should not make laws, nor should they have the power to enforce the law. Their whole purpose is to make difficult decisions based on all the evidence made available to them. It would be nice if the laws could be decided upon by judges with AI assistance, but the judgments shouldn't be purely by AI or human alone: humans are prone to bias, while AI would lack compassion. Appeals should be allowed, although a limit of one per year might be appropriate in all but the most egregious circumstances. The primary executive (President, whatever) would still have the power to pardon in those cases where the law is limited or where justice may have been limited by the letter of the law.

-Law Enforcement is in charge of protecting the citizens from those who violate the law. They do not make decisions, only observe when laws are broken and collect evidence to give to the judges so that the judges can make the best determination of whether or not the laws were violated. Everything in society should be recorded but not necessarily monitored by someone, allowing evidence to be collected in the event of a crime, but not be used as a method of investigation prior to a crime. Law Enforcement can only observe the private recordings of citizens with an order from a Judge IF that judge is given sufficient evidence to believe that a crime is likely to be committed. Law enforcement should ALWAYS be monitored and recorded while on the job, and obvious to anyone who meet them. Covert investigations should remain under the purview of the executive branch, specifically intelligence operations.

-Corrections is in charge of making certain that those who are found guilty of crimes are educated about the laws (especially those they violated), and protecting the citizens by making certain that they will be no longer a threat to society when released. Those who have violated the law should be seen as misguided, perhaps damaged, individuals to be made whole and informed. If they cannot be taught, or repaired, then they must remain as charges to live out the rest of their days in further education until they either learn, heal, or depart this life. Corrections should NOT be considered punishment under any circumstances, but be in charge of the CORRECTION of aberrant social behavior.

Above all, as you might guess, I believe the entire role of the judicial branch should not be seen as an actor of punishment, but one of protection and education for its citizens. You should never dread going before a judge (slight pun intended), but instead should only see them as a 'village elder' who will make as impartial a decision as it is humanly possible to do so, while making sure that all parties involved return to a place of equilibrium (in the case of civil law) so they can return to a place where they can grow and thrive.

Feb 22, 17 / Pis 25, 01 01:20 UTC

There is no existing AI system that can replace judges, juries, or lawyers.

Clearly you've been inobservant with the likes of IBM's Dr. Watson. Granted, that particular system isn't perfectly suited for purpose, but it's already 2/3 feature complete and could train itself appropriately. It'd more likely serve as a suitable template to build from. Yes clearly bias can be added in the training, but the same is true for the human counterpart - in both cases you're attempting to make them come up with the "expected" answer from a given set of input stimulous.

My suggestion of AI was intented for "human supervisation" largely due to the initial mistrust of such that is likley to be prevalent until it is proven itself consistently. And especially within it's early deployments for the case of failure. This is ofc not "true AI" and therefore quite likely to not understand, discard or lend insufficient weight to a possibly important variable when deciding, at least until it can understand a wider range of situations than those provided by the training data. The cases where this gets it "wrong" are assured to be of the most interest as this will allow for some rapid tuning. In less than ten generations of development(less than ten active cases where feedback results in manual changes to codebase) then it's likely to be a pretty reliable system.

I would like to see any type of station/colony/base have 24/7 CC surveillance on everything. Nothing monitored by people but everything kept on record for a amount of time

Not everything. "Private homes" are certainly off-limits if adhering to the likes of the UDHR. Bathrooms, changing rooms etc are probably going to generate a lot of contraversy too. To realistically operate sizeable infrastructure in space there will require to be a high density sensor network, with a wide array of sensing abilities. CCTV is likely to be used for multiple purposes, and you can avoid the need to monitor the tens of thousands of just cameras by deploying AI to do it for you. You're going to need a lot more capacity than CCTV too and AI will be needed to monitor and react to that many sensors. Humans will be too inattentive and far far too slow in reaction times to be of any particular use. As this sensory data could stand potential to be used in an abusive capacity also then human removed of the equasion and AI unconcerned with anything not "serious" or directly related to it's precise function should cover privacy concerns nicely.

Generally sensor data is incredibly small, so archiving the last three years air pressure values taken at five second(data sampled for storage every five, to reduce network transmissions across the sensor network they can be staggered to tx in the five second "blank" of surrounding sensors. The data it uses to operate would be sampled a lot more frequently but should be used more locally to reduce transmission) intervals can be easily stored indefinitely and easily for a single sensor, but the scale of sensors deployed will make even storing the tiny data an inconvenience. Video footage tends to consume massive amounts of data in transmission and storages, The precise number and positions would depend heavily on final designs, but I would not find it unreasonable to be expecting a few thousand per deck - looking at a scale of 170k citizens. Just streaming this much raw data to collection site will require a couple of hundred terrabit networking capacities using crappy webcams available today - which are unlikely to be actually "useful". We deploy an 8k network and if the refresh rate is fast enough it should be able to tell you things as detailed as someone's heartbeat by watching the pressure change cause regular fluxuations in outlines or clearly identifyable circulatory features - and give "zoom in" abilities similar to those depicted in films. But that will be a massive amount of data, hundreds of terrabytes, to store a fifteen min buffer of, let alone indefinitely in case of future usefulness. With curently available media the "best" data per cubic meter rates would be via the likes of SSD's and it would take about 15 cubic meters of just SSD - not any hardware to make that run - to store about a single days worth of footages from a single deck. If there's 200 floors in this facility, it'll need three of them for data storage of sensor data. Alternate storage technologies may be developed to make this more practical but storing that much data will be a headache within itself. It's likely storage will be minimised to that which the AI picks out as "abnormal".

  Updated  on Feb 22, 17 / Pis 25, 01 01:21 UTC, Total number of edits: 1 time
Reason: typo

Feb 22, 17 / Pis 25, 01 01:20 UTC

I'd like to focus on the first question: The judicial branch of Asgardia should be part of law enforcement.

Here's the question - Would decisions made by the judiciary be binding? If so, how could their rulings be enforced? For the time being and for the foreseeable future, it seems as though all Asgardians would be under the jurisdiction of another state. This means that our courts have no capacity to take punitive measures aside from revocation of citizenship, which I am pretty sure is against international law. I mean, we could raise a fine against someone, but what if they don't want to pay? We can't really put them in jail for contempt.

I would like, therefore, to reframe this issue in the context of the realities that we face. Maybe Asgardian courts should have less of a focus on retributive justice and more of a focus on restorative justice. If two Asgardians have a dispute, they could approach an Asgardian judge (perhaps also the local ambassador or consul) to serve as a mediator. The goal of the judge would be to find a resolution which is acceptable to both parties, not to assign guilt. If they are unable to resolve the dispute, then it is handed over to the local criminal or civil justice system.

What do you think?

Feb 22, 17 / Pis 25, 01 01:27 UTC

I was under the impression the benefits of the seperation of these was universally - or at least by the majority - understood.

Certainly for the next few decades as a minimal there is going to be no "enforcement" capacity that is logical. Restorative justice is a worthy goal, and a suitable way to expend effort but it will only work, IMHO, where both parties are lacking belligerence. I personally don't see much place for Asgardia's legal system, until Asgardia actually has a place in which to practise law(And really, we shouldn't be practising anything where people's lives are concerned, we should know what we're doing). That's not to say it is unworthy effort to plan the structure and formations of a legal system, just that it's not likely to be actively functional for quite some time.