Disclaimer: I agree that AI exaggerates human rights problems in the US and Israel instead of focussing on countries where human rights violations really cause grievance for many many people. If I had to chose I'd much rather be held in Guantanamo than in an ordinary russian prison where I'd have to share a cell with 20 others and get infected with tuberculosis within the first week.
That aside: Did anybody actually read that cited "study"? Seems pretty obscure to me. Somewhere in fineprint I'm told that it was written by some Moldovan student that was a summer intern at their "Institute" last year. He probably didn't have scientific writing 101 before that. The first 4 pages are a plain anti-AI-pamphlet that tell how A.I. is just another "transnational leftist" organisation that is against the "free world", supports evil feminists and so forth. I think when criticizing a non-profit organisation for being biased and having a political agenda its not very clever to do so in such an overtly biased way, merely hiding one's own political agenda.
Then there is the "scientific" part where they calculate these scrutinity scores. For that they take the number of AI reports from that country, per capita, and then divide it by some sort of freedom index for that country from another institute. Seems pretty arbitrary to me. If you just take the mere number of reports per (million) capita, the U.S. has 0.6, UK 0.7, Iran 1.4,Greece 1.6, Zimbabwe 2.0, Syria 4.2, Israel 5.1. China and NK are both < 0.1.
Now these are some mixed values that don't correspond too well with the actual situation in those countries, however the US score is pretty low. I think these results are most accurately interpreted as the product of a) the activists in a country that are actively looking for human rights violations and b) the amount of violations that actually occur. Also I would imagine what's a human rights violation for some female college freshman in the U.S. might be considered normal elsewhere. So...... uh well I can't come up with a catchy conclusion... (it's late)... I agree they're evil but thats one poorly written paper..... and on page 3 they even ask to include them in one's will and estate planning :roll: .... pretty shabby considering that poor moldovan probably won't see a cent of the money.