US startup Geofeedia 'allowed police to track protesters'
bbc.com
bbc.com
I'm not trying to defend what is happening in a lot of areas with the police, I am just genuinely curious about the nature and potential for impact of these feeds.
> Why is it bad for a government to aggregate public data?
In the past, this has been problematic. There are several examples of government agencies using their authority to suppress political dissent. The Stasi in Germany, the KGB, Hoover's FBI. True, they had private data as well, but the problem wasn't the source of the data - it was that they used it for political suppression. It's clear that the agencies involved with Geofeedia would prefer the protesters just "go away" - they have no incentive to be supportive of their goals. Given the power imbalance and incentive misalignment, gathering information on them has an inherent smell to it, just from past experience.
But when the group protesting police malfeasance is then monitored by those same police in order to keep what those police consider to be the peace over them. And then they must rely on those same police not to target individual participants after the protest for retaliation, then that monitoring is obviously a very serious problem if the protesters be correct.
And yet: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/19/homan-square...
Hoover's FBI is infamous because its practices were exposed. As we begin to look more closely at police departments around the country, we begin to see that there are many that end up using terrible tactics, and the only significant difference is that they're limited to their city and county borders.
If you look at the events of the last three years in the United States, municipal police have been much more aggressive in punitive actions against innocent people they perceive as inconvenient:
https://theintercept.com/2016/09/30/lawmaker-who-pushed-bill...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/03/ramsey-orta-arreste...
https://theintercept.com/2016/10/06/in-the-chicago-police-de...
This includes things like voter suppression at the request of the Republican party:
https://theintercept.com/2016/10/04/police-raid-indianas-lar...
That feels wrong, so my "smell test" makes me also think that the other way around is wrong. Police should be acting on immediate actions of protestors, not potential actions based on some black box social graph algorithm that tells them who to arrest.
Yes, but only because the protesters aren't imbued with any special authority over the police (besides participating in a representative democracy) nor trained to use such a power responsibly. The impropriety has nothing to do with the corporation or the technology.
Would you then limit the impropriety to only those times when the agent is acting in official capacity upon that aggregating party, or do you think gathering social data about authorities should be blanket-banned until the aggregators take a class first?
In essence, I'm trying to figure out the implication of your use of the word "only". I suspect you intended it to qualify surveillance as a sanctionable, active operation, ignoring unordered or time-sensitive relationships and profiling.
No, that's not my argument. My argument is that the test would always fail; the technological aspect is irrelevant.
My personal sentiment is that the police are probably using this technology appropriately, but I fear the slippery slope this precedent could set for federal agencies. I think that slippery slope is more dangerous than these protesters.
That's why I stuck to your use of "improper only because of lack of good faith", to paraphrase. It seemed to me that you were willing to ignore not only the slippery slope argument, but also other forms of abuse such as harassing protesters at home, arresting bystanders, or identifying up exes' current companions.
In addition, a lot of the data is geotagged in ways that are non-obvious to non-technical users.
Geofeedia has since posted a response [2].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12688548
[2] http://blog.geofeedia.com/a-commitment-to-freedom-of-speech-...
I don't really buy that they have adequate safeguards against the police using this data inappropriately. Seems like a bold claim to me and requires further explanation. In the Ars story, they allege that as many as 500 different police departments across the country are using their data.
I would expect good cops to also want that same information as part of doing their jobs. Protesting isn't illegal, but if a large group of people are legally gathering someplace to vent anger about something (anything really, it doesn't even have to be a political flashpoint), I would expect police would want to know about that too, for non-sinister reasons (like general awareness WRT potentially disruptive events happening in their city that day). To police who are just doing their (non-evil) jobs, protests are important to know about for the same reasons that it's important for them to know about any other potential sources of civic chaos that day (concerts, etc.).
It feels like the article presents the facts with an unstated assumption of "bad cops using intel for nefarious purposes", but if that's true, there wasn't any supporting evidence presented in the article.
That forces protest movements to organize more and more potential protest sites, and have more and more logistical organization to gather people into same location.
It becomes an escalation of logistical requirements to even get people organized enough _to_ protest. When you add in the fact that police are also using social network monitoring (and I mean that not just in the online term of social network websites, but as in social network monitoring overall), and regularly use face recognition at protest events (I'm speaking mostly about nypd here), and what you're left with is the bitter truth that if the NYPD truly doesn't want you to have a protest, you're not going to be able to do it. The sites you try to go to will be locked down before people arrive. The people you send to help route people to impromptu backup collections will be arrested on first sight. etc, etc, etc.
Sure, is this all wildly illegal and unconstitutional behavior on the part of the police? Absolutely. But anyone who has ever worked for any politicized cause knows that its also par de course. New York, Chicago, and Oakland are famous for a break-the-law-now, pay the fines later type of police enforcement, but I've watched cops plow SUVs through 50 person hippie protest marches, light their own cars on fire, or attack protestors with knives and chainsaws (seriously, chainsaws) in more places than I care to admit, just so tomorrow's papers can say "Peaceful protest goes violent", and anyone who sells this sort of data to the police is aware that that's the reality on the ground.
When the governor says jump, the police always do, regardless of legality, and this type of info just makes them that much more effective.
I don't know what offended me more, that Geofeedias work was so laughably amateur, or that they got paid so much for it. Good for the social media companies to shut them out, even if just to save face.
Many users don't know that something is on by default, and if the default is to geotag, people will nearly always forget to disable the geotagging.
You or I might know what it means when the 'place' icon is highlighted during a tweet. Non technical users might not understand the implication of thier actions.
the ACLU may well win a million court cases, but the data is out there.
i don't see an effective way to stop police, as individuals, or as small independently organized groups, from accessing this sort of data, whether legally or illegally. someone will find a way to get that information to the police if the police want it.
People are sold a phone to which they provide some details including social media logins and install some apps.
They then carry their phone around with them not realizing that the phone is automatically uploading it's location to various services.
If you were to poll people, "Does having Facebook installed imply your location will be broadcast to Facebook 24/7?", I think you might be surprised to find out that even despite that leading question that people in fact don't realize that.
To use an adroid phone requires a google account to which your location will be transmitted. You can ask google to stop this happening but then you're back to the issue that people need to be aware this is even happening.
In tech circles people are well educated about this particular issue. More widely this is less well known.
That means pictures and posts with GPS data attached (read: willfully created by the user), unless there's some kind of proof that this company had a level of API access that goes beyond the level any other developer can access.
People oversharing is a huge problem.
A hundred times over. Your social media posts are included in both your credit score and the criminal risk score algorithms used by police to prioritize covert civilian investigations.
The ACLU has spoken pretty powerfully on the use of police risk scoring algorithms and individualized data tracking, but it's the wave of the future with states and municipalities being pressured and incentivized by federal police to adopt the technologies and practices. IIRC it's close to a hundred US cities now that have official per-citizen social media and data surveillance feeds?
Although this data is all "public", it is still not convenient or in-line with their terms of service to access it en-masse, and in real time, for these types of purposes without an explicit agreement with them.
Personally, I would think that Facebook and Twitter only cancelled the contract with Geofeedia because the ACLU called them out so publicly.
On what basis could someone bring a class-action lawsuit about sales of data that was lawfully collected by a third-party?
Social networks are double edged swords by their nature.
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> It seems reasonable at time when "legislating" means shutting down infrastructure.
I'm curious why you complain about one and not the other? The latter is being used to take away people's access to things like voting, etc. by shutting down polling locations, changing times, etc. to reduce access to people who vote for the "wrong" party.
How does that justify potentially infringing upon the protected rights of the protestors?
So are armed mobs that murder political opponents. Might does not equal right.
People have a right to protest.
They don't have a right to destroy property that doesn't belong them.
They don't have the right to circumvent democracy and infringing upon the rights of everyone else by shutting down infrastructure that belongs to the all people.
Most protests happen because the government uses physical force, or the threat of physical force to infringe upon the rights of its constituents.
I don't agree that the police should be expected to confront protestors just because they shut down an interstate. You have no basic human right to not be inconvenienced at all by non-violent protestors. Non-violent protests that happen to shut down an interstate at some point should not be met with riot shields and swat teams.
You don't get an exception to law to harass hundreds, possibly thousands of innocent people just because you feel put upon.
Not to mention that almost every form of social progress came at the cost of inconveniencing all those poor, poor people who want nothing to do with the struggle for civil rights, universal suffrage, etc...
When you put convenience and order over basic human and constitutional rights, yes, you bloody well should be inconvenienced. The status quo 'inconveniences' these people every day - far worse then a blocked freeway. Perhaps you should channel your inconvenience at the oppressor, rather then the victim.
What if I disagree? What if you disagree? What if a whole lot of people disagree? You're not going to like the result, because you've already excluded the rule of law from this equation.
Historians do.
The rule of law made slavery legal. The rule of law made apartheid legal. The rule of law made sending black people to the back of the bus legal. The rule of law made killing millions of Jews legal. The rule of law sent 15 million people to the Gulags. The rule of law made the Divine Right of Kings part of the equation. The rule of law made human sacrifice in Central America part of society.
The rule of law is ephemeral, and has nothing whatsoever to do with justice. The rule of law is so often a fig leaf for barbarism.
160 years ago, an abolitionist stealing a slave away from a slaveowner was violating the rule of law. They were also damaging the property, finances, and livelyhood of an innocent person - all because their pet cause wasn't getting as much attention as they liked.
Read A Letter from a Birmingham Jail. [1] Martin Luther King puts this across far better than I can. (And he is only half of the story - the work of Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, and the NAACP, which could not be described as non-violent protest was a vital catalyst for civil rights.)
> You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city's white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.
[1] https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham....
So, let's try this again.
What are your thoughts on those gentlemen in Oregon who took over an empty building on federal land?
What about the 2011 riots in Vancouver when their hockey team lost?
What about the Trump rally in California this year?
What about Ferguson a couple years back?
Your absolutist position would place all of these events under equal justification.
Hockey riots aren't drunken looting - they aren't politically motivated, and they aren't for a political cause.
Not familiar with the Trump rally.
Ferguson is a pretty classic civil rights protest. A cause with large public support, but one that the government does not care to address - and judiciously uses violence to suppress.
The thing about Ferguson is that the "protest" was based on completely false pretenses. The guy the protestors chose to build their narrative on robbed a store, assaulted the clerk, then assaulted the cop who was there to investigate the robbery. The actual evidence was on the side of the state in that particular case, which is probably why the cop who shot him was never charged.
The thing about Ferguson is that the protest was based on over a century of racist policing across America, and particularly in Ferguson (And I'm not just speaking of police killings - consider the DOJ report on Ferguson.) Michael Brown, and the treatment of his body was the last straw, not the first one.
I suggest you educate yourself on the question of race relations. Between the World And Me [1] is a good start, if you want to understand why so many encounters between African Americans and police end as poorly as they do.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=between+the+world+and+me+pdf...
The fact that you can differentiate Oregon from Ferguson tells me that you have a mental model, I just want you to elaborate on it. Kind of like I asked you, point blank, three posts ago.
2. There is no conclusive evidence that anyone's "basic human and constitutional rights" are infringed upon.
> When you put convenience and order over basic human and constitutional rights, yes, you bloody well should be inconvenienced. The status quo 'inconveniences' these people every day - far worse then a blocked freeway. Perhaps you should channel your inconvenience at the oppressor, rather then the victim.
You're begging the question. There's no direct evidence for systemic racial bias in policing, there are only disparities, some of which haven't been accounted for because the U.S. does a shitty job of collecting this data (and sometimes left-leaning politicians even censor certain data that don't support their narrative, like offender race statistics in the NCVS or various city-specific data sets). Insufficient data isn't proof or even strong evidence of anything. That said, there are actual victims--those who have had their property stolen or destroyed or who have been harassed, assaulted, murdered by BLM activists.
I absolutely have a right not to be held hostage. I also have a right to use public infrastructure, especially when that infrastructure is used by emergency vehicles. Such protests should be met with the minimal necessary force to quickly restore order. Most importantly, these protests are often turn violent, so I'm thankful the police take (non-infringing) precautions to protect themselves and the safety and property of law-abiding citizens.
What does this have to do with anything? Is this supposed to justify the tactics?
> How does that justify potentially infringing upon the protected rights of the protestors?
Why do you think police need justification to enforce the law without infringing on the rights of protesters?
Original commenter specifically mentioned "at time..." which I took as an implication that there was something special about today's society.
>Why do you think police need justification to enforce the law without infringing on the rights of protesters?
Because you don't lose your rights when you protest, even if you break the law? The police don't have ultimate power to enforce the law. There are purposeful limits to the power of the police. That's the point of having certain rights enshrined into the legal system. Do you disagree?
"Shut up, go home, you live in a democracy, so complain at the ballot box" isn't a civilized response to a protest issue. When it's used to justify tyranny of the majority, it is borderline fascism.
Is this really the hill you want to die on?
People turn to protest, violent, or otherwise, when other forms of petition have failed.
> Further, would your tune change if the protesters were right-wing?
Absolutely. Conservatives, reactionaries, and fascists have exactly the same rights that I do.
> Would you support their right to block critical infrastructure (not to mention the violence that characterizes so many of these "protests") in defense of what they perceive as their rights?
Critical infrastructure almost always has redundancies, and in case there isn't one (e.g. a protest in front of a hospital), the police should just clear a route with minimum force and no legal actions afterwards. Violence is another issue entirely--if people are being violent in a protest, then stop and arrest them for being violent, not for merely protesting, and leave the other protesters alone.
No on is disputing this, the key part being "obeying the law."
>Critical infrastructure almost always has redundancies, and in case there isn't one (e.g. a protest in front of a hospital), the police should just clear a route with minimum force and no legal actions afterwards.
And here is the bait the switch. Now the protesters are no longer law abiding.
>Absolutely. Conservatives, reactionaries, and fascists have exactly the same rights that I do.
So you supported the Oregon protesters that occupied Federal land in protest?
You mean bait & switch. It isn't--in many cases marches and protests are lawful even if they block roads. If they aren't, use muscle, batons, and shields so that the law is no longer being violated. Don't go after them afterwards.
> So you supported the Oregon protesters that occupied Federal land in protest?
Absolutely, up to the point where guns became involved.