Police surveilled protests with help from Twitter-affiliated startup Dataminr • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by raxxorrax » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 6:44 AM UTC

nullc wrote: post #107

This kind of surveillance is not very effective for preventing or solving crimes. 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 collecte…

Twitter-affiliated is interesting too since the pretend to care so much about the issue. Well, they seem to care on a very personal level.

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

#172

Post by drak0n1c » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 6:58 AM UTC

colordrops wrote: post #7

aspenmayer wrote: post #2

I don’t know how these folks sleep at night, lying to the public, their users, and their customers in the same breath. > 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 acc…

Why is this comment downvoted?

HN typically expects more from comments than just a castigatory sentence and a quote.

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

#173

Post by rapnie » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 7:12 AM UTC

darawk wrote: post #162

rapnie wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I come down pretty squarely on the harms from not doing so being greater 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 everyw…

What a strange non-sequitur. You know that I am the one in this thread suggesting that the FBI should monitor right-wing white supremacist groups, right?

You are right. If I could still edit I'd replace 'you have' with 'in general' because that was what I was referring to. Didn't refer to you in particular.

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

#174

Post by drak0n1c » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 7:12 AM UTC

darawk wrote: post #86

elliekelly wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

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).

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

#175

Post by bionoid » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 7:24 AM UTC

darawk wrote: post #113

minerjoe wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Usually". Evidence? I doubt that the police pre-emptively stop many crimes at all. They catch criminals _after_ they have committed crimes. 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.

> "Usually". Evidence? I doubt that the police pre-emptively stop many crimes at all. They catch criminals _after_ they have committed crimes. 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,…

> 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.

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.

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

#176

Post by 0xy » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 7:27 AM UTC

raxxorrax wrote: post #171

nullc wrote: post #107

This kind of surveillance is not very effective for preventing or solving crimes. 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 collecte…

Twitter-affiliated is interesting too since the pretend to care so much about the issue. Well, they seem to care on a very personal level.

They care the minimum amount required to shut up their vocal employees on this issue.

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

#177

Post by unishark » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 8:03 AM UTC

thekid314 wrote: post #105

Natsu wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peo…

In Boston I was standing beside the police as the let looting occur. There were only about 5 shops broken into and only 1 that I saw looted, but the police were standing 10 feet away from one and didn't do anything about it.

In other big cities, cops are kept on a very tight leash during protests and need permission from leadership to intervene.

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

#178

Post by aspaceman » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 8:17 AM UTC

due737y3 wrote: post #129

nullc wrote: post #107

This kind of surveillance is not very effective for preventing or solving crimes. 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 collecte…

I'm not sure the crime solving utility is wholly relevant here, police have other duties like maintaining public safety. The obvious utility seems to be monitoring different protest zones for signs that violence is beginning to break out. If x people are suddenly tweeting about a fire or gun shots near an active protest then you know it would probably be wise to at least send a scout over there to evaluate the situat…

> The obvious utility seems to be monitoring different protest zones for signs that violence is beginning to break out.

There's an easier way of knowing when violence is happening. Just have the cops report when they decide to start beating and shooting innocent civilians. I'm sure they'll be thrilled to let folks know when their partner decided to kill someone innocent or beat some faces in. After all, their duty is to "maintain public safety".

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

#179

Post by unishark » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 8:20 AM UTC

acituan wrote: post #138

jerrybee wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren’t the tweets ingested by Dataminr public? I agree this would be problematic if they were using private data, but using data available to anyone on the platform feels like fair game.

Speed of any car currently travelling on US public roads is public information , it is publicly observable, people have no expectation of privacy on this. Now imagine some technology made it possible to observe and mine this data en masse, and to issue speeding tickets all at once based on it, as often as speeding occurs. This would be so massively disruptive that the speed limits and/or the law itself would have to…

We don't even need to change the law. An even simpler fix is to simply veto the idiot who thought it was a good idea to mass issue those tickets without leniency. Personally I think this human factor already exists in our government. Police can give warnings even when they have you dead to rights. And they are subject to pressure both to write more tickets or to write fewer, depending on the climate.

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.

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

#180

Post by aspaceman » Fri, Jul 10, 2020, 8:23 AM UTC

TeeMassive wrote: post #119

nullc wrote: post #107

This kind of surveillance is not very effective for preventing or solving crimes. 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 collecte…

The problem right now is that there are a lot of people who want to (and did) commit violent acts and use black block tactics. They openly encourage lawful protesters to dress homogeneously all clad in black under the pretense of protecting protesters against police but in fact they do so to commit acts of violence and then meld away in the crowd, effectively taking hostage the lawful protesters. The argument can be…

> tools need to be engineered so those rioters can be differentiated from the lawful protesters and bring them to justice.

Tools need to be engineered to bring murderers, killers, rapists, and jackbooted jarheads to justice.

Murderers are being let free. Society should revolt at such injustice. I wish folks talked with such conviction about the folks raping, murdering, and killing with impunity. Beating protestors without care, etc. Instead they reserve "bring them to justice" for broken windows and stolen Nikes. What a country.