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.
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...
For what ever reason many people lack the ability to understand the casual connections between things that happen online and in the real world.