Police surveilled protests with help from Twitter-affiliated startup Dataminr
theintercept.com
theintercept.com
It is much more effective at making lists of people willing to lawfully and peacefully stand for the human rights or others, -- "potential subversives", as the parties monitoring might call them.
Imagine, instead, if law enforcement were to stand outside of a marijuana-legalization rally and collect the sort of data effectively collected here: name, address, duration of involvement. They'd end up in court immediately, and it would likely be found that their actions had a chilling effect which created a prior restraint on the public's constitutionally protected speech.
Yet online this kind of data collection amasses more data and is more chilling due secretive nature since you never know when you're not being tracked.
Anecdotally, I was able to spectate active looting in my own city's downtown when the protests first came to us via various livestreaming instagrammers and while it was mostly a curiosity for me I imagine it would have been useful to a dispatcher who had to decide where to send officers. I don't see why twitter couldn't serve a similarly useful purpose.
This duty has been used to justify arresting peaceful people and creating violent situations for decades. "He was gonna cause trouble".
We all watched the same thing in our cities. And we watched as the police chose to launch projectiles into crowds of protestors instead of doing anything about the smashing and looting.
On the first night of large protests (May 29), I found myself in my city of Portland, OR, on SW 3rd and Yamhill. On one side of me (to the East), where a small group of matching black-clad people had gone, were the unambiguous sounds of windows being smashed and building alarms going off. In other directions, especially South and West, there were huge groups of protestors, simply occupying the area.
The police engaged, without a single exception that came to my awareness, in the latter group, breaking them up into smaller and smaller contingents as the night went on, while doing nothing about the much smaller group going around smashing.
I described my experience in detail the following morning.[0]
The same story has emerged from streamed video throughout the USA.
So I don't think there's any evidence at this time that the police view stopping rioting or "active looting" as a goal.
0: https://www.reddit.com/r/Portland/comments/gtj1zm/what_i_saw...
In the US it is not legally correct to claim that the police have any duty to provide any specific police service. (Warren v. District of Columbia)
But pedantry aside, they could monitor twitter and whatnot for violence outbreak without collecting any identifyable information.
Let's take a moment to determine how likely it is that the cops will stop sending small battalions of riot police into situations where they are highly unnecessary. As protests have gotten smaller in many cities, police have started sending riot police that outnumber the protestors. They have shown no interest in measured responses.
It would be nice if the police used data to reduce their use of force, but that appears to be antithetical to their way of thinking.
I guarantee if Trump got legitimately reelected with 80% of the vote, you'd see every company quickly replacing those "We Stand with BLM" banners with some bright red MAGA flair.
They sort of do, by filming it and using facial recognition to identify people.
Could someone share the reasons for this strong opposition?
Personally, I can imagine valid reasons for and against conducting such surveillance. But given how many people feel otherwise, I wonder if I'm missing something.
Which presidential candidate voted for the Iraq war again? The Wall Street Bailouts? Who do that person represent?
The main "pro-surveillance" argument that comes to mind is that sometimes these protests devolve into illegal looting and destruction of private/public property. I think my ideal would be for police to have only the surveillance needed to prosecute those crimes, and nothing else.
Not arguing with your post, as you mention prosecution not prevention; I agree. Ultimately, we'll be trading more liberty for 'security' I imagine.
For example, imagine being undocumented and wanting to protest. You may second guess going to a protest (even if it benefits you to do so), because you learned law enforcement is tracking the communications and movements of protesters.
But there is more to it. Courts have long recognized that state activity that can be reasonably construed to chill exercise of ones constitutional freedoms is similarly an infringement on those rights, and certainly take a very dim look on any sort of surveillance of political activity.
The Government contends that the Harlan standard shows that no search occurred here, since Jones had no “reasonable expectation of privacy” in the area of the Jeep accessed by Government agents (its underbody) and in the locations of the Jeep on the public roads, which were visible to all. But we need not address the Government’s contentions, because Jones’s Fourth Amendment rights do not rise or fall with the Katz formulation. At bottom, we must “assur[e] preservation of that degree of privacy against government that existed when the Fourth Amendment was adopted.”
As a society we are only starting to become aware of the implications. "Fair game" is the biggest misnomer - it is anything but.
As a tax payer, I would prefer my tax dollars are used as efficiently as possible - so if the alternative is to hire human police officers to manually search twitter and create reports then I would oppose that in favor of automated technology. I don't think the technology is the debate here, it simply enables us as humans to be more efficient. The decision to surveil is the debate here, and I can see it both ways. Do I think the police should be aware of a large gathering (regardless of purpose) in their cities? Yes, I think that's prudent for a variety of public safety reasons. Do I want this done in a way that does not interfere with protests or have a chilling effect? Yes, absolutely.
Many of the ugliest chapters in our history involve failing to uphold this standard.
> Many of the ugliest chapters in our history involve failing to uphold this standard.
I don’t have data to back this up, but I certainly would not be shocked to read a study which showed that police, rather than enforcing laws universally, are far more likely to be using their discretion attempting to steer society by selectively punishing segments of people who they view as “unamerican.” Whether it’s done to juggalo types from “the wrong side of the tracks”; strange religions; different races; or like in the past, pot smokers, guys with long hair, or punks with colors in their hair. etc... etc... etc...
I don’t know how we fix this problem, but I suspect the tendency to view “others” as problematic and applying pressure to other groups in a misguided attempt to steer them into compliance is part of the problem.
This is not to have a blanket claim that law enforcement should always have less data. The point is that innovation in law enforcement tech has to be balanced with accountability, experience and changes in the actual law. Especially in a climate in which rightful use of authority is in question, the last thing we would want is to empower further asymmetry.
However I'd say changing the law is the best option of them all. Restricting surveillance protects people out in suburbia from cops who are almost never there anyway, while poor schmucks downtown have to deal with the "broken window policies" getting tickets for a lot of nonsense.
From my perspective, protests appear to just be there to amplify loud minority opinions and distort the discussion at this point. For all we know, we're hearing the vocal minority of people, instead of the actual voices that need hearing.
If we really wanted to fix protesting, to take an example: Homosexual discrimination at the workplace. Have a platform or "offline vote" if you will where all homosexual individuals are asked to rate their work experience, whether they had been discriminated against and what action they think should be taken, with the assumption that if it's found, that action needs to be taken. They then "vote", and we see the results.
I bet that if the majority saw the results, they'd rightfully make their mind up pretty quickly. Instead, we forced homosexual individuals for years/decades to protest and complain about the things that were rightfully affecting them, and only once it reached some arbitrary critical mass, we as the rest of society decided to change. What were we "waiting" for exactly? For people to change their minds? People to cave in after being worn down even though they don't agree? Societal opinions to shift? A new generation grown up with the movement being taught to them by elementary school teachers? Cultural norms to adapt?
Also, if we did get there and such a vote isn't followed up by actual action, then maybe our system of government is broken and we should fix it. Perhaps for that we should go out and protest.
Why not both? If your way gets better results then I'm sure people will stop the exhausting and dangerous work of protesting and civil disobedience.
Yes, and they have the right to protest too if they feel like their own voices aren't being heard. That's the beauty of freedom.
You can't seriously be against people protesting simply because you don't want to do it too. It's like arguing against voting because some (or even most) people don't vote and those who do are usually more "vocal" or political. It's a very dangerous mentality
There are lots of things that are protected activities that I would like surveiled. Militias. The KKK. Neo-nazis. I certainly hope the FBI and other law enforcement agencies are keeping tabs on their activities.
How about people suspected of planning a crime?
It would be really hard for cops to prevent crimes if they had to wait until after it was committed in order to surveil.
Regardless, there are cops whose jobs are to identify people who may be planning a crime. So my question stands - any concerns with surveilling those people?
In Western jurisdictions, probable cause and judicial oversight are only relevant to searches of private property, arrests/etc. Police have always been empowered to surveil public behaviour, and in my opinion, rightly so.
It would be incredibly impractical to require judicial authorization for something as simple as browsing a public neo-nazi forum, or driving around looking at known drug-spots.
The question is whether the ubiquity of social media/phone cameras has changed our attitude. Arguably, we've created an inescapable, 24/7 surveillance apparatus . If you attend a protest, there's a real chance your photo may very well end up on Twitter/Facebook/etc, inadvertently or otherwise.
I do think it's time to discuss the role of phone cameras in modern society.
This part of your comment really, really rubs me the wrong way. Your personal inclinations absolutely cannot direct the apparatus of state on a whim. Either those groups are suspected of criminal activity or conspiracy to commit criminal activity, which is probable cause for surveillance, or they aren't.
It's certainly possible that this is just the price of freedom. But I think its a rather heavy price.
Even if they were able to catch every crime before it started, ala minority report, they, based on past behavior, would most likely seriously abuse that power hence the strong opposition here to having them even come close to posessing that power.
Here's a long list of terrorist incidents, some of which were pre-emptively disrupted by the FBI:
https://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/terrorism-20...
> Even if they were able to catch every crime before it started, ala minority report, they, based on past behavior, would most likely seriously abuse that power hence the strong opposition here to having them even come close to posessing that power.
I don't really understand your point. I'm not arguing that they won't abuse their power. They will. They always do. The question is whether or not the abuses that might occur as the result of analyzing publicly available information are worse than the harms that might come from not doing so. I come down pretty squarely on the harms from not doing so being greater, but reasonable people can disagree, I suppose.
And this feeling you have may stem from another political narrative being created and amplified: the fear of 'the other'. The fear that justifies all of this to so many people.
Sowing the FUD that e.g. most people from Mexico are "criminials, rapists, carrying disease", or that Moslims are terrorists. That terrorist sleeper cells may be everywhere. A gliding scale of xenophobia created for political purposes.
How many criminals announce their plans on Twitter in a way that law enforcement can use to prevent a crime? From my perspective, it seems like the potential for crime prevention is small compared to the potential for abuse.
Says the FBI, with a conflict of interest large enought to drive a big truck full of fertilizer though in publishing these things. They also have a varified history of lying through their teeth.
Bring out FBI press-releases and the like and I'll just have to point you at the many FBI statements from the past that are now obviously blatent fabricated lies.
You mean like the entire practice of forensic fiber analysis, which they were forced to cop to after the fact: https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-testimo...
The thread of discussion here is that the FBI needs to have broad survaillance capabilities to catch crime before it occurs. The list you gave has verly little support for that in that almost all of the acts in the list were not stopped due to any survaillance, but rather invesigations after the fact. You could assert that they might have been stopped, but that is conjecture.
Inevitably, the microscopic amount of good that could be done would be vastly outweighed by the chilling effect on every group that was trying to create positive change at the expense of the oligarchy. Aka: true patriots.
The government shouldn't put someone under (specific|personal) surveillance without strong evidence of course. But I don't see what prevents them from reading twitter, going into public chat rooms, etc.
I'd rather still have Matin Luther King around than to have whatever the FBI claims to have disrupted.
We know they tried to do so at least once while maintaining deniability.
It must be very difficult to catch (unless you want a surveillance society where everyone is suspect).
Even in cases where it's planned and announced it's difficult to stop (Al Qaeda did announce they would assassinate Charb, editor in chief of Charlie Hebdo, and despite police protection they managed to do so).
There is an ocean of options in between “do nothing” and “surveil and database every citizen who potentially maybe, might, could exercise their constitutional protections and protest.” A vast amount of options.
Reading public messages seems like a super reasonable thing for the police to be doing, to keep tabs on groups that have recently engaged in disruption and violence. Whether those groups are right wing or left wing.
I don't see how you can prevent the police from reading stuff that's being broadcast for everyone else to see.
And threats of violence, or evidence of organizing to cause violence, should be investigated.
The police aggregate vast sums of data and uses it in ways that the public does not understand, intend, or expect. It's not unlike the way people 'sign' away their privacy on the internet without being aware that their data will then be sold and resold and used against them.
It is a common belief that information is a weapon, and it certainly can be used as one. So does it makes sense, at least from one perspective, that our information should not be legal to catalogue? After all, it is illegal in the U.S. for the government to create a registry of firearms owners because such a registry could be used against the people and its very existence would be an infringement on the rights of those people.
If a police officer sits down at the dinner table next to me and listens in on my conversation with friends and family, I'd be quite uncomfortable. I'd feel equally uncomfortable if they sat across the restaurant and pointed a microphone at the table to record everything. However, suddenly we treat them like normal people if they download the entire contents of our digital lives and process every word we've ever written online.
It's one thing for Twitter to be accessible to natural persons publicly. It's another for a government to treat everyone as though they are under investigation at all times, without a warrant.
For clarity, in my opinion, a police officer who just happens to follow me on twitter because he likes video games is a natural person. However, he stops being a natural person once he starts representing the organization he works for.
Innocent people should not be surveilled ruthlessly on the off chance that every now and again we catch one evil person. In my mind, it's like the TSA invading everyone's privacy without ever catching a single terrorist. It's a waste of resources, on top of being a disgusting behavior.
On the other hand, there are tons of cameras in public spaces too. So, even though people have had a built-in expectation of ephemerality, that's already been violated for quite a while now.
That said, in my view, surveillance against the average person has got to go.
Yes. That's better than the alternative. So many things can be construed as criminal that I don't think it's an impediment to the investigation of actual criminal in practice. If anything stops police from wasting our money surviving groups that are not actually threats to anything but the government wants under surveillance for political/ideological reasons.
In the 2006 bulletin, the FBI detailed the threat of white nationalists and skinheads infiltrating police in order to disrupt investigations against fellow members and recruit other supremacists.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/fbi-white-supremacists-i...
Also, let's not forget the KKK's history of organized crime. They've earned any surveillance they're under. It's far from a straight comparison between them and ad hoc protesters when you're talking about "protected activities".
https://www.thepostemail.com/2020/06/03/twitter-user-compile...
The posts are public and the police cannot go after anyone for simply engaging in protected speech, but they can and have identified looters and murderers who have tried to discredit the fact that black lives matter with their actions.
So I'm not clear why so many people are against the police catching the violent criminals who undermine the message of the many peaceful protesters.
[1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-ferguson-acti...
What did you expect the police to do? Stop the mobs while the looting happens? With anti police sentiment so high here, it would be a thousand times higher on the street. I'm not sure stopping the looting there and then would be a good idea.
Isn't that their job?
...dozens of police looked on, in some cases chatting and sharing pizza with the group. They included Officer Joseph Goodwin Jr., whose brother Richie shoved one protester and was photographed punching another. [0]
Maybe it's the same thing with the looters.
0 - https://www.inquirer.com/news/fishtown-philadelphia-communit...
"police SHOULD NOT go after anyone for simply engaging in protected speech".
FTFY
They can do lots of things they should not. They should not run cars into protesters. They should not push over old men who are not causing trouble. They should not shoot unarmed people in the back who are running away. They should not kill a black man by choking him to death with their knee over a false counterfeit bill complaint.
And yet all these things happen. The police should not go after innocent protesters, but there's no way in hell I will believe that they will not, or are not doing so.
They shouldn’t kill even for legitimate counterfeit bill complaints. Police should use the absolute minimum force required to both apprehend suspects (as limited by relevant law) and is required by public safety; not one ounce more.
If someone is accused of committing a crime, it’s up to the courts and the jury to determine if they’re guilty and what the punishment shall me, the police don’t get to play judge, jury, and executioner.
Why Some Cops Think They're The Punisher https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LM7z7pDmEC4
>Sharon Rondeau has operated The Post & Email since April 2010, focusing on the Obama birth certificate investigation...
Linking to a website like that is going to destroy whatever point you were trying to make for a large portion of your audience.
If the only important pieces of that article are the links to primary sources, you could have linked to them yourself. That has potential to make you sound like a conspiracy theorist tying photos on your wall together with red yarn. However that is still better than linking to a conspiracy theorist website that seemingly proves the same point.
Even to the point of missing that it's an honest compilation and includes those killed by police during the protests. But he's the biased one here, right?
Besides, that's a silly shibboleth all told. I voted for Obama and I wouldn't have cared even if he was born in Kenya (he wasn't). McCain was born in Panama and I didn't care about that, either.
Mostly they were done by looters, a few by police. That's all shown in the linked articles, which give names and dates and locations.
> How do these number of deaths compare to other protests?
You remember that Charleston protest? One death. Number of unarmed black people killed by police in 2019? Ten. That's eleven too many, of course, but you wanted context and those are the most recent and closely related stats. Most protests are smaller scale and have few or no deaths, though, e.g. other big protests like the Women's March, March for Life, etc. don't normally involve looting or fatalities. Nobody died protesting Trump's inauguration, either, that I'm aware of.
> Questions like that need to be answered for the facts to have value.
They are answered, by the links to mostly local news stories where you can read all about David Dorn, a black cop murdered by looters. You can watch the video from the sister of the girl murdered outside of a Davenport, IA Wal-Mart. There's tons of context in the sources, that's just a convenient set of names and links.
> That is why people attack the source. Because the story here is the context of the facts and not the facts themselves.
The context is available to anyone capable of clicking two links. There are also names given which can be looked up to find sources you prefer. But maybe you're right that I should compile a giant list. I just feel that it's hard to justify it as worthwhile when people engage on a non-factual level. I can't take the beliefs of lazy thinkers seriously.
>I just feel that it's hard to justify it as worthwhile when people engage on a non-factual level.
Which brings me back to the first reply to you. You are asking people to click through at least 3 level of links before we get to a non-biased source that can provide facts. People aren't going to think that effort is worthwhile if the first page they land on is a site founded on spreading conspiracy theories.
Also I quickly googled Dorn and you are fudging the facts a little. He is a 77 year old retired police officer. His death had nothing to do with him being a police officer. He was working as a security guard when he was killed. Coincidentally police have also recently killed an on-duty security guard[1]. Mentioning one and not the other can be an indication of bias.
[1] - https://www.ajc.com/news/police-shoot-kill-year-old-hispanic...
Insofar as you want to compare crime stats, CHAZ/CHOP is part of a huge % increase in crime. Even CHAZ "security" managed to shoot people.
I only said that Dorn was a cop, not that he was murdered for being a cop--you're putting words in my mouth. I believe I did mention that some of even the 17 had been shot by cops and there were more deaths after that.
I take making false claims about what I've said to be a red flag.
Once again more context you are expecting your reader to look up rather than have explained by an unbiased news source.
The question isn't whether looting happened. Of course it did. However there are also hundreds of thousands of robberies and millions of larcenies. Those don't just go away during times of civil unrest. How do you decide what is considered looting connected to the protests versus traditional robbery or larceny?
>I only said that Dorn was a cop,
Here is what you actually said:
>>David Dorn, a black cop murdered by looters
There was no past tense on being a cop there.
There's a video of the people looting the store and several arrests were made. But you know that because you reviewed all that context, right?
> There was no past tense on being a cop there.
You do realize that I mentioned that he's dead, right?
But let's humor this for a moment... the fact that he was an old retired cop trying to keep his friend from losing his income and ending up in the proverbial poorhouse somehow makes his murder less awful to you?
Of course, that would only last until you found out about Sgt. Damon Gutzwiller or Dave Patrick Underwood, one assumes. Or will I hear more complaints if I neglect to mention that neither is black and the second is more of a security guard than a cop?
Because someone can be against physical violence and simultaneously think surveilling everyone is wrong.
It's because human beings are tribal by nature and tend to take social queues from those around them. SV and most major metro areas are overwhelming liberal, and right now it's trendy in those circles to issue blanket condemnations of all police activity with little regard for nuance.
In a lot of ways it's very similar to George W. Bush and co.'s "You with us or against us" mentally shortly after 9/11. Then, like now, any nuance or pointing out of grey areas were seen as a form of disloyalty and siding with the enemy, despite the matter itself being very complex, and yes, nuanced.
The Bill of Rights protects you from the government. Twitter is not the government.
Not that that will limit the creation of ethically dubious firms like ClearviewAI or Palantir.
There is no law restricting the governments right to collect public data.
In the 21st century, our "papers and effects" are digital, online, and stored by third parties, and the law hasn't kept up with that.
Not sure why exactly you think "aha, so you admit it is legal!" is a particularly insightful thing to say, obviously all authoritarian governments have decided that they have the legal right to intrude on their citizens' privacy and thus have self-determined their actions to be legal. That has nothing to do with whether it's the morally right thing, or is in keeping with the spirit of the constitution.
To wit: China has determined that they have the legal right to disperse assemblies in Taiwan. That is legal there too. Do you think that is the right thing?
Kohlberg addresses this with his stages of moral development - some people think "because it is law, therefore it is moral", and that's really as much thought as they need to put into it to justify it to themselves. They don't bother addressing whether it should be legal, and that seems to be the thrust of your argument.
These arguments have already been decided. Wanting something to be true doesn’t make it true. If you want to further restrict the government you’ll need to petition for new laws.
The first amendment is limited to protections against government interference.
As someone who don't live in the US but which country has a bunch of laws protecting protesting under specific conditions, I wonder a bit about that statement.
Looking around for an answer, while the US governments may not deny a person's constitutional right to peacefully protest, they may regulate the time, place, and manner in which the protest is conducted. They can also deny permits as long as they have a compelling, objective reason to do so.
So its a mixed bag when it comes to the US courts, and the question that seems to have most significance is what is or isn't an compelling objective reason. In order to sue the court you would need to both demonstrate the infringement of the right, and that the government does not have objective reasons (such as keeping order). I suspect the result of such court case would not be obvious, but rather uncertain with a lot of variation based the judges in question.
“I don’t want the gov’t to know I was at a protest, but I’m more than happy to give them all my medical data and work for a nationalized company.”
I don't see how those two can jive.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean by anti gov't though, I just mean having laws and mechanisms that protect privacy
The reason you do not surveil protestors is because it encourages the government to intervene and acts as an engine for parallel construction. some US cities actually profit from incarceration, and the opportunity to fill a jail cell is all too enticing. It also makes it almost impossible to defend against the argument that the state is acting to punish political dissent, or that police arent reacting as a defensive organism instead of a public safety agency. Police and governments are meant to build trust with their citizens, so when surveillance tactics make themselves public (and they always do, its just great PR for dataminr) citizens rightly feel targeted, vulnerable, and bullied. surveillance erodes trust, which leads to more fervent protests.
Surveillance does little to keep people safe during a protest. Its mainly a tool to write negative narratives about protestors, or used as a tool to help infiltrate protests and break them up from inside.
B-34. Strict limits are placed on collecting information related to a civil disturbance in order to protect the civil rights of people and organizations not affiliated with the DOD. Civil disturbance plans and materials must not include lists of groups or people not affiliated with the DOD. Information on civilians and civilian organizations can be collected only with specific authorization from the Secretary or the Under Secretary of the Army. ...
wait until AI is used in hiring.
Look to your left and right. The people building this dystopia are right here on this site.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/business/jeffrey-epstein-...
Prior to the first tech boom wider society also believed not wearing a suit was a reliable indicator that a person was stupid. We’ve progressed past these ridiculous ideas. I know plenty of exceptional performing individuals who both like sex and occasionally use drugs. If we’re backsliding into the right’s moral majority tyranny again, someone let me know as my filter bubbles may have me blinded.
Either way, none of the high profile Silicon Valley people I know would care that someone knows they have sexual desires.
So in intelligence circles, just being gay int he mid-20th century was enough to blackmail a person, but because most people, even conservatives, have adjusted to it, it no longer serves as enough of a blackmail. This is why in the blackmail world it moves progressively towards more repulsive actions.
Honestly an analysis of Epstein shows he was more trying to get his foot in the door in SV (as his backing of a few tech ventures confirms) but it lends me to believe he didn't have "the real dirt" on SV.
When you look at which intelligence agencies were running Epstein though, it becomes more clear that they certainly already have a huge presence in SV, and they are certain to have deployed the blackmail networks for quite some time.
So yes, aside from those things you mention, we should be relatively ok with whatever... but the problem is the blackmail system will move towards those things if they know that, and they do so.
I've tried to explain this progression to others, and it applies across the board to politicians, businessmen, etc. Bribery comes first. Then comes blackmail. It starts with the after-after party, and the target is in the back room doing drugs. Got it on video. Next it's a prostitute. Next it's an underage prostitute. Next is abuse... and it progresses into places most people on HN wouldn't want to know. If you do want to know more, lookup the Dutroux scandal, aka the Belgian X-files.
I would venture most of SV doesn't have to progress past the bribery stage, and that includes manipulations of national identity (national security).
So you investigate a lot of people. If you are good at your job, you will exonerate all the innocent people. So no harm, no foul, right?
Except being investigated really sucks, even if you are found innocent. You might have to answer questions, and knowing a wrong answer could land you in real trouble is stressful and scary, even when totally innocent. Sometimes it is hard to explain context of things when investigators only see parts of it.
The more surveillance you do, the more likely innocent people are going to suffer this stress of investigation.
This will lead to people being less likely to want to participate in social movements because of the added risk of having to be investigated.
As someone that has used Dataminr first hand, I can confidently tell you it is being used to monitor for threats. And as such and based on observed law enforcement response, I can confidently say anti-mask/lockdown protests where protrstors brandished weapons in public were not monitored this way. Plenty of care was taken to protect those people's rights.
The fact that the protests are against specifically police and the fact that police used cleat and absooutley unwarranted violence against both protestors and even journalists and also how white people had to form a human shield to protect black protestors should tell any observer clearly that the police see the blm protestors as a threat, simply for protesting and for airing their grievances against government in public.
Dataminr, palantir's excellent tools and many other products of the tech center were abused in racially motivated retribution against blm protestors.
In other words, while normally the police are a just arm of the executive branch that enforces laws(and they mostly are in few places in the US), most US police departments are technically a rogue insider threat against americans constitutional rights, they are enemies of the people taking sides in a culture war designed to tear apart the west.
If you ask me, this isn't a domestic law enforcement issue. I remmber in ecuador or somewhere in south america soldiers were protecting protestors against police violence (very similar to blm protests). The US military should show they take their oaths seriously and interfere, maybe this has been considered and they simply need judical or congressional authorization. Although given the nature of the protests and america's ironic disunity, soldiers may take cops' side. A very unpleasant situation.
You are not being paranoid if you are afraid if a civil war breaking out. Suddenly all the tech in the world becomes scary when used in a war against our neighbors.
Dataminr is not the only company with access to the firehose that has law enforcement and military customers (or customers of customers, who would even know?) doing whatever they please with it.
I believe that Twitter has cracked down on this recently, or is at least beginning to ask Twitter data customers to restrict some of their customer's usage (or remove access entirely). But all of this after the fact.
Also, if you deleted something off Twitter and you think it's gone from every downstream data warehouses that captured it seconds after you tweeted, and also the people with access to those warehouses that copied it to their own storage... well, then I have a bridge to sell you.
Disclaimer: Used to work for Dataminr; was laid off.
And there is also such a thing as imports, which I think lets you pull historical data based on terms you want to find. I don't know if that gets a sample, or everything that matches.
The full firehose was originally given to a small number of companies, including Gnip (eventually purchased by Twitter). What Gnip did was provide filtering for the firehose as well as some historical searches; this in theory would allow companies to receive in soft real time every tweet that was relevant to their search query.
The result is that there are tons of people who don’t have access to the full firehose, but effectively have the ability to receive every single tweet that’s relevant to their search query. It wouldn’t be very hard to find every tweet relevant to a protest, as this is superficially quite similar to finding tweets relevant to a brand or marketed event.
That being said, this isn’t a product that you can just sign up for and use. You had (my contacts no longer work at twitter) to negotiate a contract with Twitter directly to get access to this, pay large sums of money, and go through a fairly high touch sales and support process.
Was Twitter an investor in those other companies though? I believe this is the differentiator that the author of the article is trying to bring up.
What a paradox...In order to delete your records, they create records on you
That's because of backups. GDPR doesn't really say if handling a deletion request just requires deleting from your live databases or if you also have to through your backups and delete from them too.
I didn't save the link, but at least one country's privacy regulator has clarified that deletion requests do not apply to backups, but if the backup is ever restored you have to delete any restored records that had been subject to a deletion request.
Hence, the need to maintain a record of deletion requests in sufficient detail to re-delete those records if they ever come back.
> The monitoring seems at odds with claims from both Twitter and Dataminr that neither company would engage in or facilitate domestic surveillance following a string of 2016 controversies. Twitter, up until recently a longtime investor in Dataminr alongside the CIA, provides the company with full access to a content stream known as the “firehose” — a rare privilege among tech firms and one that lets Dataminr, recently valued at over $1.8 billion, scan every public tweet as soon as its author hits send. Both companies denied that the protest monitoring meets the definition of surveillance.
Personally, I think any principled opposition to surveillance is going to end up including some practices which have traditionally been considered news. The reason that Dataminr's activity is surveillance is that "look at these random tweets!" news articles are also surveillance.
Questions:
Were these protests legal or during coronavirus effectively temporarily illegal?
Another question is, given a police precinct building was evacuated and set on fire during a protest, should those attending the protest expect to no surveillance. Or only if violence happens?
In the UK there are stronger hate speech laws. Most people in the UK would want the police to be surveiling the far right during their arguably less violent counter protests. Should they not be wanting this?
The UK is an odd place, legally. Stronger laws against free speech yet looser laws around freedom of the press to do normally illegal things. It's a surveillance state with cameras on every street corner, yet a big advocate for protecting private data online.
A nation of paradoxes.
This is a stretch but recall in 1984 where the ministry's slogans were all the direct opposite to what they really did, and how details about the past were always chopped and changed so no one could keep track.
When you try yo get rid of both guns and surveillance, it only increases the crime rate and hurts innocent people.
Very large cities like New York and Chicago are seeing this in action right now. Police are either quitting, not working, and are being defunded as we speak. New york and Chicago had record crime rate increases, including murder.
So, the issue here is that you've picked two countries out of the vast number of countries who ban or severely restrict guns. There are plenty of countries with few or no guns which don't have significant public surveillance systems.