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Police surveilled protests with help from Twitter-affiliated startup Dataminr

theintercept.com

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Re: Police surveilled protests with help from Twitter-affiliated startup Dataminr

#81

Post by darawk »

taneq wrote: post #73
darawk wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am thinking about it. Think about what you are proposing. Do you really want to take the position that the government cannot monitor any group until it commits a crime?

I think that was the general idea, yes. Or at least, before they have strong indication that it’s likely to commit a crime.

How should they determine when a group is about to commit a crime though? Usually that's done via pre-emptive surveillance. If they are not allowed to surveil groups that they merely suspect might one day commit crimes, it will be very hard for them to know anything about their activities before the crimes actually get committed.

It's certainly possible that this is just the price of freedom. But I think its a rather heavy price.

Re: Police surveilled protests with help from Twitter-affiliated startup Dataminr

#82

Post by Natsu »

slg wrote: post #67
stefan_ wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first obvious point is that protesting is a constitutionally protected activity, as is any political speech on Twitter, and this is interpreted extremely widely - so why are public institutions in the business of surveilling this legal, ney protected activity? 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…

In my opinion, this goes because just surveilling a legal protest. These protests were specifically against the police's abuse of their power. This resulted in a police response that was much more adversarial than a traditional legal protest would face. Aiding the police in surveilling protesters allows police to further abuse their power and target protesters for retribution. Providing this monitoring isn't that dif…

At least 17 people were murdered during this time and a few more since this was posted:

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.

Re: Police surveilled protests with help from Twitter-affiliated startup Dataminr

#83

Post by darawk »

FilterSweep wrote: post #78
darawk wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not though. Not in any legal sense.

Is it or is it not? Per this tweet, I really don’t know: https://mobile.twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1267129644...

https://www.factcheck.org/2020/06/trump-cant-designate-antif...

Fortunately our legal system doesn't operate on the basis of Trump's tweets.

Re: Police surveilled protests with help from Twitter-affiliated startup Dataminr

#84

Post by gruez »

FilterSweep wrote: post #66
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I get the sense that most HN commenters are against having police surveil this kind of event in the U.S. Look to your left and right. The people building this dystopia are right here on this site.

it’s more of a "surveillance for thee, not for me" sort of deal on HN.

HNers only object to surveillance on themselves?

Re: Police surveilled protests with help from Twitter-affiliated startup Dataminr

#85

Post by monadic2 »

darawk wrote: post #58
rapind wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think deeply about what you're proposing.

I am thinking about it. Think about what you are proposing. Do you really want to take the position that the government cannot monitor any group until it commits a crime?

The FBI doesn’t appear to do a great job at preventing white supremacist domestic terrorism, so I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make.

Re: Police surveilled protests with help from Twitter-affiliated startup Dataminr

#86

Post by darawk »

elliekelly wrote: post #38
darawk wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The first obvious point is that protesting is a constitutionally protected activity, as is any political speech on Twitter, and this is interpreted extremely widely - so why are public institutions in the business of surveilling this legal, ney protected activity? 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…

I would agree, with the giant caveat that I would like those activities to be surveilled only upon a showing of probable cause and with judicial oversight. The government shouldn’t have carte blanche to “investigate” citizens who are not suspected of committing a crime.

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".

Re: Police surveilled protests with help from Twitter-affiliated startup Dataminr

#87

Post by throwawizzle »

> 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.

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.

Re: Police surveilled protests with help from Twitter-affiliated startup Dataminr

#88

Post by darawk »

aspenmayer wrote: post #68
darawk wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that they are both engaged in protected activities of free association and speech. If the standard is that the government should not surveil people engaged in those activities, then the KKK would have to be exempted too. Or, alternatively, you could formulate a more nuanced criteria for when the government should or should not surveil people.

The actions of the KKK are not legal if they prevent free exercise of civil rights.[1] The Supreme Court has weighed in on this issue and found the actions of the KKK to be in violation of the law if they impede protected activity, such as protesting or voter registration. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Enforcement_Act Edit: It should be noted that this statue only applies to actions of representatives of th…

That's true, interesting and important. But I don't think it addresses the intent of my point, which was that there are plenty of odious organizations that are abiding by the letter of the law in public, but may well have members or private discussions that are likely to tend into serious criminality or terrorism. The KKK is one example, as are right-wing militias, etc. I think it's important that the government be able to conduct some basic level of surveillance on their activities, even without any direct evidence of a crime, or intent to commit a crime.

Re: Police surveilled protests with help from Twitter-affiliated startup Dataminr

#89

Post by darawk »

monadic2 wrote: post #85
darawk wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am thinking about it. Think about what you are proposing. Do you really want to take the position that the government cannot monitor any group until it commits a crime?

The FBI doesn’t appear to do a great job at preventing white supremacist domestic terrorism, so I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make.

Relative to what? We have no idea how much terrorism there would be without the FBI.

Re: Police surveilled protests with help from Twitter-affiliated startup Dataminr

#90

Post by cortesoft »

DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #9

I get the sense that most HN commenters are against having police surveil this kind of event in the U.S. 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.

If you do a lot of surveillance, you are going to see a lot of things worth at least investigating. Most will be false positives, but you will still need to investigate... there will be a huge backlash if something happens and it becomes known you had intelligence that something might have been going on and you didn't investigate.

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.

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