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I agree in spirit here, but in practice in order to get probable cause of criminality or criminal intent, you need to do a little bit of surveillance/monitoring first. And it seems to me that a good compromise is "monitor publicly available media, like twitter to look for evidence of criminal intent, and then use more invasive tactics if you find it".

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It takes a lot of faith in law enforcement to believe they won't abuse that power, especially given they are the target of criticism by these protests. The argument that it is illegal for them to abuse / misuse this information isn't very compelling either, given that they are the ones responsible for enforcing the laws that they would be breaking. I might be okay with this info just ending up in the hands of the FBI, but I definitely wouldn't want it winding up in the hands of my local law enforcement agencies, who are known for harassing and intimidating critics.

It's not that I think they won't abuse it. I know that they'll abuse it. The question we have to ask is whether their abuses will be worse than the consequences of total inaction on their part. And I think that balances in favor of surveillance, when it comes to public social media data, but certainly reasonable people can disagree.

The compromise you're suggesting is what Dataminr is doing. Monitoring publicly available media like Twitter to look for evidence of criminal intent (albeit in an automated fashion).

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