Fox News guest Aaron Cohen, an American-Canadian actor and former Israel Defense Forces (IDF) operative, sparked outrage after he shared his pitch with the network for an "AI threat detection platform" to aid law enforcement in identifying "potential school shooters."
Cohen spoke after a gunman opened fire through the windows of a church on Wednesday morning, killing two children and wounding 17 others during the first week of classes at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis.
The FBI identified the shooter as a 23-year-old who was a 2017 graduate of the school. The shooter died at the scene. The shooting has angered Democrats who are once again making the case for gun reform to curb the epidemic of mass shootings nationwide.
Speaking to Fox and Friends co-host Trey Gowdy, Cohen said:
"I’m about to launch Gideon, America’s first-ever AI threat detection platform built specifically for law enforcement. It scrapes the internet 24/7 using Israeli-grade ontology to pull specific threat language and then routes it to local law enforcement."
"It's a 24/7 detective. It never sleeps and it’s going to get us in front of these attacks.”
When Gowdy asked Cohen if this software would have prevented the Minneapolis shooting, Cohen replied:
"100 percent. I wish my program would already be up. We're not launching until next week. I've got a dozen agencies on board, Trey. I just onboarded a major Northeast agency with over 2,700 sworn. This is America's early-warning system."
You can hear what he said in the video below.
Cohen's announcement angered many who said it was less a solution and more akin to something out of George Orwell's 1984, in which the secret police of the totalitarian state of Oceania discover and punish "thoughtcrime."
Cohen has previously made overtures to the Trump administration in the hopes the federal government can make use of his threat-detection platform.
He previously said the system he's developed “scans the open web and social media for pre-attack signals,” including “radicalization, target casing, manifesto writing, tactical planning, and group coordination,” and then “pushes real-time alerts to law enforcement or school threat units so they can act before an attack happens.”
Cohen has also highlighted members of his "elite engineering team," a group that includes billionaire Peter Thiel's company Palantir, which has been tapped to compile a "master list" of Americans' personal info that would constitute an unprecedented expansion of state surveillance power.
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