[sliverstorm]

I guess my theory partly depends on the filter being too sophisticated for any one person to co-opt. We can design machine learning, but there can't be many people who are capable of wrapping their head around a running machine learning system, and be able to reach in right here and peek/poke some weight and bam your nephew is arrested in Texas. On the bright side, most of those people are probably not officers, whom you seem to be most afraid of.

As for the objectivity of feeding the filter data, I envision something completely automatic. No selective entry for this or that suspicious person- the filter is fed a database of all people, and perhaps monitors the internet's traffic on its own. Maybe ACH traffic too. Financial crime could be this system's biggest win- computers are way more suited to uncovering financial crime relative to humans.

Basically, when it's big enough and sophisticated enough and automated enough that no one person can fully understand it, it becomes significantly harder to pervert. And, as I mentioned before, it needn't be perfect- our current system is pervertable too (see: papers please, racial profiling, etc), so this one would just need to be less pervertable...