Dataminr tracked Gaza-related protests
theintercept.com
theintercept.com
1. Every demographic commits petty crimes and code violations at about the same rate (things like parking violations and music piracy).
2. However, people who are being watched will be caught more often.
3. The end result is that people in the "wrong" crowd on average are punished more than people in the "right" one at an equal level of misbehavior.
I googled a bit and I found a hn comment that talked about an article which explains what you say
Basically, they estimate drug use in the population, and they draw a map, and black and white people more or less have the same habits in drugs use. They draw a map of the past arrests by the police for drug crimes and they're skewed towards the black neighborhood. There's a bit more about it since the article dealt with predictive policing and Ai but the gist is what you're saying, and this causes a self reinforcing feedback for the police (which in turn arrests more black people and the loop goes on)
https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-...
Do you have data backing this claim? For example, homicides (that are not a subject for reporting bias) don’t follow a uniform distribution, so I would expect other crimes to also be non-uniform.
Here is a survey of US youths that supports this premise: https://monitoringthefuture.org/data/panel/demographic-subgr...
It appears to show generally more frequent use in men than women, younger than older and until somewhat recently, white than black or hispanic.
The above linked data show self-reported cannabis use within +/- 10% over the relevant pre-legalization period (before 2012), if anything with a slight advantage to whites. Drug arrest and incarceration rates vary by much, much more (factors of 2-6 between whites and blacks). Against that, use rates of 15 vs 13ish vs 12.5ish are as good as uniform , esp. on a survey with all the inherent variability therein (even for one as competent and longstanding as the cited work).
So what's the quibble? That the shares aren't exactly equal? Or that there are other demographic cuts with larger differences (and, y'know, aligned carceral disparities)? Or that cannabis use isn't representative of 'petty crime'?
> Every demographic commits petty crimes and code violations at about the same rate
.. is not actually true, so better not to claim it as part of a strong argument.
I’m not the one who brought up the nitpick in the first place, so you can argue with them instead if you prefer people didn’t do so in the first place.
As I understand it, people went to prison mostly for selling or possessing amounts that are implying selling. Which might explain the difference. Would you go to prison for possessing a single joint back then?
Yes, Harvard Professor Timothy Leary was sentenced to 30 years in prison (!) for having a single partially-smoked joint in his car.
I think there's an ingrained sense of revulsion, in all of us that live in the cultural era that descended from Enlightenment ideals of equality for all, against the idea that there exist observable group-level differences on nearly any metric you could think of, but that doesn't make it any less true.
If you think people of certain ethnic, racial, political, or religious demographics are more likely to download a song without permissions, I'd like to know what demographics you think are the most likely and least likely to do it.
Because I don't know of a single person in my life who has a computer and hasn't done it.
That is not a crime.
Uploading/distributing/broadcasting a song without copyright permission to do so, might conditionally be a crime, if that usage does not fall within "Fair Use" such as for education, journalism or commentary.
Let's stop ceding more power and control to the copyright cartel, and be careful not to repeat their propaganda that misleads people into thinking sharing books or other media needs to always involve a payment to some publishing corporation.
Depends on your jurisdiction.
Because in my jurisdiction, you're wrong. :)
I read it as a scenario / "even if" for the presented thought experiment, not a load-bearing assertion about reality. As in the argument being made works equally well whether either way, and trying to challenge it misses the point.
Crime rates are likely different for different socioeconomic classes for many reasons, but also the socioeconomic class likely determines in part the types of crimes.
For example, poor people are more likely to do petty crime and physical crimes, while rich people tend to do complex frauds involving large sums.
So you cannot compare rates for one particular crime across socioeconomic groups because they will gravitate towards the opportunities that are present to their class.
"All zebras are red"
"Actually, if you look at studies, you can see that horses come in all types of colours. So I would expect zebras to be the same"
"Horses are not zebras, that should be all the proof you need to accept that all zebras are red."
There is very serious bias in which deaths are labelled homicides, and in who is held responsible for them. The idea that homicide stats are bias-free is weirdly pervasive, but absolutely without basis, on either the victimization or (even moreso, since the prior bias also impacts this on top of the direct bias applicable to it) perpetration side.
What? The rates of parking violations and music piracy vary dramatically with age and gender.
If parking violations are an old demographic problem, and music piracy are a young demographic problem for example (even though it is assumed that more things are in the set than just these two) then it could be that they roughly cancel each other out.
I guess one would really need to know what the full set petty crimes and code violations consists of to be sure.
Note that this is commission of offense as opposed to say police activity around offense, which is a different thing, as you note with your jaywalking example.
> Honest statistical reports may even be written highlighting the frequency of lost-key-findings under streetlights.
The fact you note them as honest is so rhetorically powerful that I'm dead certain to reference this concept/phrasing again in the future.
Incoming Leo Sharp. He transported thousands of kilos of drugs in his car for the Sinaloa Cartel during his career. In the United States. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Sharp
Of course, He was white, he was old, he was a United States Veteran. This is just a funny single case.
> Here's an interesting thought about how preferential surveillance can lead to repression even when it's public and not itself acted on:
> 1. Every demographic commits petty crimes and code violations at about the same rate (things like parking violations and music piracy).
> 2. However, people who are being watched will be caught more often.
> 3. The end result is that people in the "wrong" crowd on average are punished more than people in the "right" one at an equal level of misbehavior.
Do this not just to be a descent human being—do this for the sake of your own survival. What will happen when Israel has made every nation hate it more than ever, and the US finally cuts the purse strings?
You are correct to be angry about the amount of people dying in this war. But you should direct your anger to those responsible for both starting the war and for directly endangering those people.
Nobody can force you to self reflect. Nobody can spare you the consequences if you refuse.
> “Look what you made me do” is what you’re saying, but Israel could stop attacking Gaza today and not suffer a single material attack from Gaza for a long time.
> Way, way more Palestinians have died since October than Jews.
Where you advocating for the Jews on October 8th, while the body count from the current conflict was still more Jews than Arabs?
> Israel has no need to keep on its current course. It has made its point and is now making a completely different point—that it is a cruel nation incapable of self restraint.
> Nobody can force you to self reflect. Nobody can spare you the consequences if you refuse.
Obviously, it was horrible for the hostages. I feel bad for them and I’m glad that many have been released.
But Israel’s response shows how insecure they are, how immature and dangerous they are.
Let’s be honest. All you have to do is admit Israel is committing genocide and is wrong to do so and start advocating for more peaceful measures, and by doing so you’ll discount the neonazis. I’m being really blunt here. Because right now your position is so extreme, so unwilling to truly change, that all your doing is making people who hate Jews look correct. Is that what you want?
In light of all that, please self reflect. I’m being your friend, I apologize for how painful this conversation is for you, but you have got to learn because you’re right, the stakes really are high, you are just playing by the wrong rules.
You just want him to concede your point so you feel better. You are not being his friend. Israel is under no definition committing genocide. Please self-reflect and admit this to yourself. Alas your position is too extreme and unwilling to change.
You have terribly disingenuous rhetoric.
Even if you don’t think Israel’s neighbors deserve life, you have to recognize that the entirety of western civilization and the Islamic world both see what Israel is doing as reprehensible.
Now I’m not asking you to say they’re right because they’re the vast majority (that would be subjective), what I’m asking you to agree with is that Israel needs to stop making everyone hate them, because it will be worse for Israel if everyone hates them.
That is an objective fact I hope we can agree on, regardless of the value you place on human life.
Protests should be protected, but i normally assume protestors get permits, and a reasonable police presence is around. Not to intimidate anyone, but just to make sure nobody gets too rowdy, keep protestors and counter-protestors away from each other (to prevent violence), provide aid if anyone gets hurt (big masses of people is always a trample risk). Otherwise just do normal crowd control sort of things.
If they were surveiling individuals who participated afterwards, maybe that would be something, but it seems like (according to the article) all they were doing was keeping track of when protests were happening.
Protests are not private events. They are literally the most non-private event possible. That is the entire point. I dont think there is any reasonable expectation of privacy in terms of time&date of demonstrations.
Another worrying element of protest surveillance is the documented practice of sending in provocateurs who commit violence or break stuff or cause problems to allow a pretense for crackdowns.
Good luck obtaining a permit for a Gaza protest from people in Israel's payroll.
But this does not guarantee that you will get a permit.
can't help but find this hilarious (also not american either)
Instead of revolution and all its upheavel & damage, you get a mini controlled revolution every 4 years.
Instead of unmitigated riots, you get demonstrations but with some crowd control & beurocracy to prevent injuries (and well chaos, riots and looting).
Democracy is kind of a deal - you get to have the popular discontent but without the extreme forms that end up damaging bystanders.
What you are describing here, are the requirements. The implementation, is usually, much, much different.
If you're out in public and using public websites to organize protests, it's a given that data will be mined about that.
The trick is to make it unattractive for those doing the enforcing to act upon their analysis of that data.
For what ever reason many people lack the ability to understand the casual connections between things that happen online and in the real world.
A man walks up and down the street either shouting about, or handing out flyers, that say "We should get together and blockade main street in protest of the illegitimate taxes Congress has passed on our whiskey." Is it legal for the cops to stop him? Probably not.
Is it legal for the cops to move their plans around to show up on main street that day? I can't see why it wouldn't be.
If we remove the tech from the dropping of the atomic bombs, what's the big deal?
You can't remove the tech; it is intrinsic to the issue.
If you remove the tech from dropping of atomic bombs, you still have firebombs, gas attacks, and myriad other weapons that may or may not be considered either war crimes or simply too destructive to allow. You can still extrapolate and / or build analogies from the older models to the new one.
Why can't we remove the tech in this context? Is the issue that the tech allows surveillance of public conversation to happen cheaply at scale, and that creates a fundamentally different scenario from someone saying things in public being overheard? Because I'd argue it does not; if one says things in public one should expect authorities to overhear the thing too because they're also in public.
People aren't taking umbrage with the cops knowing there is a protest, or attending one, you're right, that would be unreasonable.
All are post colonial-era technology.
By analogy to your argument, if we can only address surveillance as if colonial-era technology was used, then we can only address military actions that way. What if someone set off a colonial-era explosive? Not a big deal, right?
I think I see what you mean if we're talking morality. If we're talking law, this is exactly the rabbit-hole people end up going down trying to justify or un-justify the Second Amendment in an era where the weapon is a 60-to-1 force multiplier for body count, not a 1.5-to-1 (in that if two men approach you with a knife, and you have a colonial rifle, you can probably reliably shoot one of them and then you're on equal footing with the other).
The law has all kinds of pockets where they wrote it when people were on horseback... But it still applies.
That's not how it works. It can't be ignored, but even words change meaning over years (and are often imprecise to begin with). The Supreme Court changes intepretations - a lot, recently.
If anything, in olden times many of these types of things were considered normal. As hard as it might feel like it is to see it, we have come a very long way when it comes to morals of wars & state violence. If nothing else at least we mostly feel like its "wrong" now.
(Also, where and when specifically are you talking about? The 1950s US? State intelligence agencies didn't really exist, afaik, before maybe the (20th century?).)
As an example the surveilence practised by soviets or east germany was much more invasive despite not having phones.
I'm saying they are new, because the technology is different - like saying 'transportation isn't new' when comparing horses and airplanes. The technology is inseparable from the issue.
> One of the reasons the us had limited domestic intel services back in the day is that they were scared of this sort of thing.
Do you have evidence of that? Many people are scared of it now, and that does limit it to some degree, but not a lot.
> As an example the surveilence practised by soviets or east germany was much more invasive despite not having phones.
They were enabled by technology far more advanced than the colonial era. They did have phones and they tapped them, tapped rooms, etc., and used communication tech to centralize and disseminate the information, as well as using mass communication to implement propaganda.
There is a vast gap between what the cops can do in general and what holds up in court, but to a first approximation: the things they aren't allowed to do because it would taint the case are in general explicitly spelled out, and if it isn't spelled out it's legal to use as a stepping stone to conventional, more-understood-protections police tactics. Thus arresting someone for a general Twitter post is probably off-limits (the incitement-to-riot or sedition laws are narrowly tailored), but taking someone online who says "Hey let's all get together and do a riot" seriously, and allocating police resources to prepare for it as if they're telling the truth about their intentions, is almost certainly legal.
(This is the battleground that the ACLU fights on in this day and age).
you may be ok with that ("i don't have anything to hide", "i trust the police/government", "the free market will prevent abuses [by companies like Dataminr]" are some rebuttals i've heard recently), but it undermines our constitutional rights, setting a dangerous precedent and chilling free speech/association (per the ACLU). additionally, how else is this collected information being used by the police and Dataminr? what are their retention policies? what other kinds of analysis are being done (fta, there seems to be a not-insignificant number of false positives)?
I'm a long-time, hardcore civil libertarian so I share your concerns about potential law enforcement abuse. However, in the instance being cited here, I'm not seeing a clear violation of 4th amendment rights. Posting on openly shared social media is not only public speech, these days it's advertising and promotion. I assume you wouldn't have a problem with law enforcement subscribing to a press release monitoring service that would notify them if someone is sends out media press releases promoting their protest in that agency's jurisdiction. Arguably, not having any situational awareness of open-to-the-public mass gatherings planned in their area might be something they'd even be blamed for if overcrowding turned into a public safety situation at a book signing or something and they were oblivious.
So, while I want to restrict police overreach as much as possible, the challenge is in how we might craft guidelines of what's allowable vs not allowable which are clear and consistent.
At the end of the day if you want privacy, don't broadcast your activities on open platforms that were DESIGNED to observer and record you.
But back to my original question, why are the police monitoring constitutionally protected activity?
Again, why are the police in this case monitoring constitutionally protected activity?
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Walkers and strollers and wanderers may be going to or coming from a burglary. Loafers or loiterers may be "casing" a place for a holdup. Letting one's wife support him is an intra-family matter, and normally of no concern to the police. Yet it may, of course, be the setting for numerous crimes. The difficulty is that these activities are historically part of the amenities of life as we have known them. They are not mentioned in the Constitution or in the Bill of Rights. These unwritten amenities have been, in part, responsible for giving our people the feeling of independence and self-confidence, the feeling of creativity. These amenities have dignified the right of dissent, and have honored the right to be nonconformists and the right to defy submissiveness. They have encouraged lives of high spirits, rather than hushed, suffocating silence.
But again, why are the police in this case monitoring a constitutionally protected activity?
If we step back and look at what's happening at "pro palestine" protests across the world, much of it is toxic and unwelcome by the wider community. Law enforcement sees the negative energy and responds using passive tracking tools and other measures. They're seeing escalating "decolonizing" associations too, as these groups try to merge with their socialist friends and agendas.
In my country Australia, they've taken the Aboriginal flag and Palestine flag and joined them together, parading them along the street screaming about colonisation. Many contain raised fist graphics and calls for resistance. And you wonder why cops are monitoring?
Barely qualifying as activity worth "protecting" in many cases. In particular, the terror-aligned rhetoric by masked mobs screaming about global intifadas, "resistance by any means necessary" and other stuff unrelated to peace or anything remotely "anti-war". No peace symbols in the crowd but plenty of Hamas flags, is the answer to your question.
Typically, in sane societies, it's preferable that the coercive part of state power is deployed for things more concrete and definable than 'negative energy'.
See how easily negative energy turns into trespass? Nothing wrong with cops planning ahead for the inevitable, based on historical data for that type of protest.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Walking around and talking to each other? Constitutionally protected.
That could very well be true, though there's also the possibility that there are people there who are subjects of investigations. The article doesn't really say; it just mentions that it's a possible threat to civil liberties. And to be fair, it very well can be, particularly in the hands of the current administration.
It's the whole "freedom to fail only applying to the layperson" thing that we're behind on.
EDIT:
Western nations/Common Law countries, I should specify.
https://kagi.com/search?q=dataminr+site%3Atheintercept.com&r...
When cops start using geolocation data that isn't enabled I'll be more worried.
Usually not, no. At least not until lawfully ordered to disburse.
Propaganda, communication and surveillance vary only inasmuch as the sender and/or receiver are coöperating. When done in public, communication necessarily empowers the other two.
Coercion has limits.
There is actual crime they could be investigating. Instead they are wasting resources on something that they shouldn't have anything to do with unless there is a threat of violence.
Importantly, CCOPS doesn't forbid surveillance; it simply requires new instantiations of it to be approved at an open board meeting. Things like Dataminr would almost certainly pass.
Not necessarily growing.
What is now registered with digital dragnets that can be queried at any time is what would require actual man-hours 50 years ago for just following one person.
You can't apply the "reasonable expectation of privacy" standard when you get into these new electronic forms of surveillance. It's become far too cheap and easy to surveil.
Not that I fully endorse their broaded view of privacy, I see it as much more of a fundamental right. That said, I was impressed that this court(who constantly misunderstands technology) understood this.
I think Jefferson proposed to let the constitution expire every 19 years. I think he had a point there. Instead of viewing the "Founding Fathers" as the ultimate source of wisdom we should accept that they made decisions that made sense during their time but times have changed so some decisions should change.
These ideas sound great when you imagine ideal politicians doing exactly what you want.
They're not so appealing when you remember that on a long enough timeline you'll get some political leaders who would abuse such a power to no end: Rewriting the constitution to give the president unchecked power or remove term limits would be more likely targets than anything you're imagining working in your favor.
>And the half of those of 21 years and upwards living at any one instant of time will be dead in 18 years 8 months, or say 19 years as the nearest integral number. Then 19 years is the term beyond which neither the representatives of a nation, nor even the whole nation itself assembled, can validly extend a debt.
>[...] On similar ground it may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation. [...] The constitution and the laws of their predecessors extinguished then in their natural course with those who gave them being. This could preserve that being till it ceased to be itself, and no longer. Every constitution then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right.
This is a terrible idea, actually. The risks of opening the door to majorly modifying the Constitution are very, very high. There are a lot of core freedoms (speech, arms, press come to mind) that would likely come off worse, not better, were we to do so. Which get hit hardest would depend mostly on who's in office at the time, which is extra bad.
Similarly, the "expire every 19 years" must always be included and must never be removed.
Gotta keep this small though, because then what's the point...
How could one "make sure" of this, and with what authority?
>Similarly, the "expire every 19 years" must always be included and must never be removed.
Again, says who? The constitution has expired, and with it any legal basis for such a requirement.
So whoever does it today, or would do it either way in our hypothetical scenario.
You haven't abolished the Constitution, then, you've just forcing a recurring, streamlined amendment process. Given the song and dance SCOTUS nominations have turned into, I'm sceptical it would work out how you think it would.
On the filp side, it took him a while to come around to see the folly that was the then French Revolution whereas his political critics - notably Adams, Washington, and the frequently maligned Hamilton, were quick to keep their distance from it.
I like Jefferson but he sometimes seems to have an overly rosy and romantic view of revolutions. Tearing down is easy. Building up is very hard.
You want every state to come up with its own way of determining how to send delegates to a convention literally unbound by any law?
Didn't they pull back on enforcement of quality of life crimes when the previous DA stopped prosecuting criminals? You can't expect the police to arrest criminals knowing full well the DA is immediately going to drop or reduce charges and let them loose.
You can't expect the police to do their jobs?
Imagine you're a programmer, or a chef, or a carpenter, really anything. Now imagine you go to work every day, put in 8-10 hours a day working hard, and at the end of each day someone in a more powerful position than yourself throws out, ignores, or otherwise destroys all of your work for that day.
And this happens every day, day after day. No matter your work ethic or how much you care about your job, sooner or later after enough of your work is sabotaged, you're going to give up.
So no, I do not expect the police to "do their job" as you put it, when a chief prosecutor publicly and vocally undermines that work each and every day. If you can't understand that very fundamental human reaction, then I don't know what to tell you.
I understand how motivation works. Sometimes doing a job sucks. That's part of why you get paid to do it.
It sounds to me like those police officers don't want to do their jobs. I'd encourage them to quit instead of wasting tax dollars. Of course the real issue is they want the money without the work, and the respect without having to earn it.
This is like me saying I don't want to do my job because those other guys in the other department aren't going to do anything with it, so I'm just not going to bother. I think almost everyone can relate to lazy/incompetent coworkers - does that mean you should also be lazy/incompetent? The way to fight laziness is with hard work, and the way to fight incompetence is with competence. What you're advocating for just normalizes dysfunction.
If something you are doing is being thrown away, you should change focus (like pulling back on quality of life arrests, and focus on real crimes).
If your boss is destroying all your work, you're going to get fired for not producing anything. I'd recommend you figure out what your boss cares about.
... that could, actually, explain a little bit of the work ethic (though I'm pretty sure it's "scraping along the bottom of minimum wage" that explains most of it).
LAPD is a bastion of terrible police work. They have a rich history of killing, beating, racism, and organized crime. Maybe they're still doing bad police work, ever considered that? This budget is to protect them from civil rights lawsuits they're losing on the regular... which actually makes them the law breakers.
The voters of California certainly think he did: https://calmatters.org/justice/2024/11/george-gascon-pamela-...
LAPD and LASD aren't both part of any single entity called "Los Angeles" (the city and county of that name being separate entities).
> They're more concerned with being a paramilitary police force versus stopping or preventing neighborhood crime.
That's pretty much true (and foundationally so) of all American local general-jurisdictions police forces.
LASD and LAPD may have problems beyond those endemic to American police agencies, but that isn't one of them.
1. The wealthy, and by extension Silicon Valley founders, inevitably end up moving in lockstep with US government policy. Wealthy people inevitably become conservative to protect and grow their wealth. Any idealism is a temporary recruiting tool. Ultimately, all tech companies become defense contractors and end up aiding the surveillance state, repressing speech and supporting gencoide (eg Myanmar); and
2. Transhumanism [1]. I can remember hearing about this from tech people a decade ago. I really had no idea how popular this was (and has become). Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are all transhumanists. The central idea here is "what can I do now to ensure the best future for the gene pool?" And of course all these weirdos think their genes are superior because they're rich. It's why the likes of Elon can't stop having children.
It's not surprising Dataminr (who I'd honestly never heard of until now) is providing material support to repression. This is every tech company.