Police Use of Social Media Surveillance Software is Escalating
aclu.org
aclu.org
I'm sure they feel the same way about us, but the honest truth is that going tit-for-tat against them re: surveillance works far better for the public as a whole.
A good read on the topic from Dr David Brin, http://www.davidbrin.com/transparentsociety.html
People need to realize is that social sites are voluntary surveillance platforms to begin with.
In the best of cases they surveil you to learn what advertisements to show you, but of course once the infrastructure is built, it can be put to other uses.
Social media gives the government and spy agencies undreamed of power. They don't have to create a file on each citizen, the citizen will create and update it for them!
Which is exactly why accessing this kind of public and innocuous info needs to require a warrant when the police do it. Unreasonable surveillance/stalking of an individual is not acceptable.
We also need to clarify what "public" social media postings really mean. The intent is for a limited audience of peers to recieve postings, not the entire world, and not the police. Conflating a desire to communicate with friends with a desire to be surveilled is a mis-step that the police and state are happy to abuse.
Otherwise you end up with bizarre conclusions such as police twitter accounts requiring a court order to follow someone.
A certain amount of what police properly do is "surveillance" - of a particular area or situation. What does become a problem is the use of directed police attention as harassment, for political purposes, or in a racial or otherwise discriminatory way.
You can make statements to the police that will cause you to be arrested, convicted, and imprisoned - it does not matter one bit what your "intent" was. Social media posts are no different.
If you make a public Facebook post admitting to a murder, the police should not need to get a warrant based on other evidence to get that post then arrest you.
That might be your intent, but whoo boy, do I have news for you: that's not the way it works, it's not how it was designed to work, and it's not how "they" tell you it works. Your "intent" has nothing to do with it.
If you wish to keep your audience small, Facebook and Twitter aren't the way to do it. But long before "social media" showed up, we had means to keep things to a limited audience, things which do require a warrant to access.
And my experience says they'll flip that off on a whim. It's been several years now, but one day FB decided that all formerly private photos would now be public. Not a bug, a design decision. I deleted my account the next day, so I can't say I've kept up on the latest in FB's privacy features.
FB has obviously since gone back on that decision, but there's nothing stopping them from doing it again, or from introducing a bug.
That said, the way I perceive Facebook over the last few years, is that they're constantly baiting people into increasing their privacy. They switch defaults towards "more private", and even for some time they had this annoying popup when you tried to post publicly that said something like "Did you know you're posting publicly? Click here to change it."
I wish I could find a link for you, but I'm having no luck. And middle-age has rendered me unable to get within even a few years of when it occurred. I do distinctly remember the event, though, because I thought to myself, "nah, that can't be right". So I went poking around in the albums of friends that I recalled having private albums. Sure enough, everything was now accessible. People that aren't friends? No problem, could see those, too. There was an Internet kerfluffle, then FB put it back the way it was. Sorry for no better details.
Use those aliases.
How is this controversial? If you want privacy, surely you should understand that sharing on the web isn't the way to go?
In a lot of these cases where protests turn into violent riots a police response is necessary, if at a minimum to keep the peaceful protestors safe. Using publicly available information to facilitate that makes perfect sense.
I don't know that either of your assertions is true. I suspect very very few demonstrations turn violent (a negligible number) and I suspect that a small but significant number (maybe as high as 1/3) of those that do, turn violent due to police involvement.
But I have seen no numbers; they could be the opposite for all I know. The episodic nature of how news reporting is done (where most events are treated sui generis or are arbitrarily linked due to the structure of reporting) makes it impossible to tell unless someone actually does a study.
There is nothing in principle wrong with various entities monitoring public statements. In terms of policing there are several structural problems in how it is performed, in California, the US, and in the world at large. I doubt anyone would disagree.
If anything it gives law enforcement a heads up of where thier presence might be needed.
edit - changed often to sometimes, since 'often' really isn't accurate. Lazy writing on my part.
Crowsds are so easily manipulated, its a time old tactic.
That sounds very conspiratorial. Is there any evidence for that claim?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
COINTELPRO (a portmanteau derived from COunter
INTELligence PROgram) was a series of covert, and at
times illegal, projects conducted by the United
States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at
surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting and disrupting
domestic political organizations.
Cops in the US are people with guns who have been trained that force is their only tool. The idea that cops will ever decrease violence is deeply misguided.
Surely there are documented cases of abuse of police power, but it is not all of the time. In fact, those cases are a very small minority when compared to all citizen-police interactions.
You are woefully misinformed if you think that police in the US are taught that violence is the only tool in their repertoire. And even more so that you would say that police presence is the cause of violence.
"There have been too many lives lost to police killings. Too many phone calls telling families that their loved ones, particularly young black men, won’t be coming home. But in most cases, it isn’t because individual police officers are consciously racist or think black lives don’t matter. It is because officers perform the way they are trained to perform."[1]
"Officers are trained to shoot until the threat is no longer present."[2]
Paul Waldman: Did you think what the officers did [in Powell's shooting] was appropriate? It seems pretty clear that that's standard operating procedure.
Maria Haberfeld: Yes it is, absolutely. [3]
> And even more so that you would say that police presence is the cause of violence.
Could you explain to me how a person with a gun could ever decrease violence?
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/12/police-g...
[2] http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/08/19/ferguso...
[3] http://prospect.org/article/expert-us-police-training-use-de...
The way every standing army out there does it by just being there and having guns?
As for the quotes, the biggest issue I see with the police brutality topic is lack of hard numbers. "There have been too many lives lost to police killings" is meaningless in this context. How many? 5 this year? 50? 50 000?
Eyeballing numbers from [0], the US - a 300 million country - has about one million police officers with arrest powers. 5, or even 50 deaths over one million officers is, frankly, an irrelevant statistical blip, not a major and important issue.
Now I'm not saying there is no issue in the US. I haven't seen the numbers, because they tend to not show up in the discussion. It seems to me however, that this is another media-driven issue - i.e. something that does not exist until media start talking about it, and worst case may actually become a self-fulfilling prophecy afterwards.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_enforcement_in_the_United_...
Now contrast with all the posts going around social media from military veterans explaining the training they got on rules of engagement, including use of deadly force as an absolute last resort when all other options fail after explicit attempts, and look at how often the narrative with police is simply shoot first, then shoot more, then keep shooting. And that's without getting into increasingly-recorded incidents where we see things like officers retroactively planting guns on corpses to back up a claim that "I had to shoot him, he was going for a gun!"
Also:
5, or even 50 deaths
Try 2.8 per day[1] that we know of, which is over one thousand per year.
And how is that, exactly?
The cold war, where much greater threats than the threat of standing armies were at play, exhibited itself in violence all over the world.
It shouldn't require explanation that the threat of violence doesn't prevent violence.
I'm not sure which country you're talking about so I can't tell.
That said, I agree with OP, if you're posting in a public forum, don't turn around and then say you expect privacy. The internet is a broadcast medium, in this sense, you can't push the genie back in the bottle once you let it out.
So, if you're going to say provocative things which don't broadcast them and then expect only your followers to pay attention.
Furthermore, more monitoring of activists provides more chances for incitement/provocation by the police as needed.
Exactly. Police are willfully misinterpreting participation in a conversation intended to raise awareness about police misconduct in an attempt to intimidate activists into remaining silent.
Using social media as a surveillance apparatus to manage their public image through intimidation is essentially cyber bullying.
When an actor representing the state does this, I think it is appropriate to call it oppression. Sure, it isn't the Stazi, interrogate you in a small room for days kind, but it isn't exactly friendly or well meaning either.
As Thomas Drake says, the Stasi would have killed for the surveillance engine regular lea's have at their disposal today.
OTOH, "X would have killed for Y" doesn't say a lot about Y when X is not actually known to be even slightly reluctant when it comes to killing.
OWS was the big one really. It saw law enforcement cooperation not just across NA, but globally, to put down the protests, to share tactics, and also to threaten the activist leaders at the time into hiding. Many had been branded by the electronic system and profiled.
The use of surveillance is highly questionable for citizens exercising basic rights. Military grade equipment and a heavy handed approach suggests a level of paranoia that does not seem at ease with basic democratic principles.
Protests, large crowds and activism are essential aspects of a vibrant society, they also have potential for volatility and disruption. If you can't accept this and put law and order above all else to the extent that you need to monitor and confront citizens how far away are you really from a police state?
> "identify so-called “threats to public safety” by monitoring hashtags such as #BlackLivesMatter, #DontShoot, #ImUnarmed, #PoliceBrutality, and #ItsTimeforChange."
None of these things even have to happen to get people scared enough to vote yes.
Also, the social media stuff directly concerns the police image, and stature in society. Funding observations of criminals and miscreants is just their regular job. They don't get as much status for just doing their job as they might lose from institutionalized accountability.
Them commies are everywhere.