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…
Police surveilled protests with help from Twitter-affiliated startup Dataminr
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Re: Police surveilled protests with help from Twitter-affiliated startup Dataminr
#222Earlier 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?
>Do you really want to take the position that the government cannot monitor any group until it commits a crime? Yes. That's better than the alternative. So many things can be construed as criminal that I don't think it's an impediment to the investigation of actual criminal in practice. If anything stops police from wasting our money surviving groups that are not actually threats to anything but the government wants…
That's a nice ideal, but ultimately very naive. Your idea would work great until a neo nazi group or a terrorist organization executed an attack killing a large number of people. Then everyone would be screaming at the government demanding to know why they weren't monitoring more so they could prevent just such an occurrence.
Re: Police surveilled protests with help from Twitter-affiliated startup Dataminr
#223Earlier 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…
You might want to look into “automated speed enforcement.” AFAICT, it’s primarily used in construction or school zones right now.
Re: Police surveilled protests with help from Twitter-affiliated startup Dataminr
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hadn't heard of that website, but this is how the author of that article describes herself: >Sharon Rondeau has operated The Post & Email since April 2010, focusing on the Obama birth certificate investigation... Linking to a website like that is going to destroy whatever point you were trying to make for a large portion of your audience.
It links to primary sources on everything, so this seems to me more a distraction than a meaningful critique. The fact that this is all easily verifiable, yet hard to find compilations of, is a critique in the other direction.
I wasn't debating the facts of your argument. I was simply telling you that the debate is already lost as soon as you link to a site that still claims Obama wasn't born in the US. In many people's minds, it isn't worth the energy to dispute your point because you are already displaying symptoms of someone who lacks the critical thinking skills necessary to assess and process basic facts.
If the only important pieces of that article are the links to primary sources, you could have linked to them yourself. That has potential to make you sound like a conspiracy theorist tying photos on your wall together with red yarn. However that is still better than linking to a conspiracy theorist website that seemingly proves the same point.
Re: Police surveilled protests with help from Twitter-affiliated startup Dataminr
#225I 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.
It is a very, very bad sign when the police start making lists of people who are trying to reform abusive police departments.
Re: Police surveilled protests with help from Twitter-affiliated startup Dataminr
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Notably, Epstein, who was known for his interest in obtaining blackmail through the sexual abuse of the underaged girls he exploited, also claimed to have “damaging information” on prominent figures in Silicon Valley. In a conversation last year with New York Times reporter James Stewart, Epstein claimed to have “potentially damaging or embarrassing” information on Silicon Valley’s elite and told Stewart that these…
I hope we’ve reached a point where aside from pedophilia or coercive sex practices, sexual proclivities and drug use would not be enough to blackmail anyone today. The religious right and their “moral majority” have been hamstrung both through the courts and through culture moving on. Prior to the first tech boom wider society also believed not wearing a suit was a reliable indicator that a person was stupid. We’ve p…
I would agree, but it's rather interesting to see how the evolution of social acceptance has changed the blackmail game.
So in intelligence circles, just being gay int he mid-20th century was enough to blackmail a person, but because most people, even conservatives, have adjusted to it, it no longer serves as enough of a blackmail. This is why in the blackmail world it moves progressively towards more repulsive actions.
Honestly an analysis of Epstein shows he was more trying to get his foot in the door in SV (as his backing of a few tech ventures confirms) but it lends me to believe he didn't have "the real dirt" on SV.
When you look at which intelligence agencies were running Epstein though, it becomes more clear that they certainly already have a huge presence in SV, and they are certain to have deployed the blackmail networks for quite some time.
So yes, aside from those things you mention, we should be relatively ok with whatever... but the problem is the blackmail system will move towards those things if they know that, and they do so.
I've tried to explain this progression to others, and it applies across the board to politicians, businessmen, etc. Bribery comes first. Then comes blackmail. It starts with the after-after party, and the target is in the back room doing drugs. Got it on video. Next it's a prostitute. Next it's an underage prostitute. Next is abuse... and it progresses into places most people on HN wouldn't want to know. If you do want to know more, lookup the Dutroux scandal, aka the Belgian X-files.
I would venture most of SV doesn't have to progress past the bribery stage, and that includes manipulations of national identity (national security).
Re: Police surveilled protests with help from Twitter-affiliated startup Dataminr
#227Earlier 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. 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,…
"were pre-emptively disrupted" Says the FBI, with a conflict of interest large enought to drive a big truck full of fertilizer though in publishing these things. They also have a varified history of lying through their teeth.
So, you're simply unwilling to accept any evidence on the subject? Do you have any evidence at all to support your perspective?
Re: Police surveilled protests with help from Twitter-affiliated startup Dataminr
#228Earlier 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. 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.
I think things are often planned on Twitter to some degree. A lot of the quasi-planned looting and rioting was mapped out on Twitter, for instance. It's a very rich source for information on these sorts of things.
Re: Police surveilled protests with help from Twitter-affiliated startup Dataminr
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's hard to disagree with this point, really. I don't see how you can prevent the police from reading stuff that's being broadcast for everyone else to see. And threats of violence, or evidence of organizing to cause violence, should be investigated.
I think it's rather easy actually. The police aggregate vast sums of data and uses it in ways that the public does not understand, intend, or expect. It's not unlike the way people 'sign' away their privacy on the internet without being aware that their data will then be sold and resold and used against them. It is a common belief that information is a weapon, and it certainly can be used as one. So does it makes sen…
But this information is already being cataloged. It's being published on a platform that explicitly catalogs it, for the public. Anyone tweeting on Twitter is doing so with the full knowledge that anything they say might get signal-boosted by someone with a high follower count and become a major public incident. It happens with extreme regularity. The idea that there is some kind of expectation of privacy here seems far-fetched to me.
Re: Police surveilled protests with help from Twitter-affiliated startup Dataminr
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure. But a lack of concrete, precise information doesn't mean we can throw up our hands and just call them equivalent, either. The FBI disrupts quite a bit of terror activity, and quite a bit more never materializes because the FBI exists. They've certainly engaged in their fair share of abuses over the years, but I don't think you can seriously argue we'd be better off without them.
Um. Yes I can. It's in the same vein as letting a few guilty people go free to ensure that less innocent people get sent to prison. I'd rather still have Matin Luther King around than to have whatever the FBI claims to have disrupted.
The FBI didn't kill MLK, though. If you eliminated the FBI, you woulnd't get MLK back. But you would have a few hundred more serious terror attacks in the US history, probably a decent number of them against minorities.