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U.S. Marshals Spied on Abortion Protesters Using Dataminr

theintercept.com

81–90 of 268 posts

Re: U.S. Marshals Spied on Abortion Protesters Using Dataminr

#81
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As someone on the hook for $116k in deficit, I’d be much happier to direct my tax dollars to eliminating debt and interest payments Our tax returns have a field at the bottom where you can offer to do just that with your tax refund. I suspect it costs them more in ink than the value of any takers. Always seemed like a “nonono, I didn’t mean to pay down the debt with my money!” kinda thing. “Ontario opportunities fu…

The government is already wasting half my paycheck, I'm not going to donate more money and hope its spent wisely. The issue is an inability to budget. If we doubled tax revenue, we would double spending and increase the deficit further.

are you in Ontario?

Re: U.S. Marshals Spied on Abortion Protesters Using Dataminr

#82
post #59

Can someone explain the legal theory that diffentiates using something like Dataminr to monitor tweets vs simply having an army of agents manually searching for them? I agree that it feels like the scale of the former makes it different, but is there a principled reason why that is the case?

The legal choices and mechanisms we have are based on built in assumptions about how easy and expensive something is, and this is especially true for monitoring of public spaces. The decision to say that stuff you say/do in public can be monitored without oversight was made when that would be fairly rare accidentally or require a lot of resources to deliberately use. If we suddenly find ourselves in a world where every single public moment can be recorded and surveilled, the risk to rights is much large for the same state interest. So with the balance shifted, the legal decision could shift.

The law (thankfully) is not some hard coded machine that follows cold logic ignoring all context. (Good) judges are able to look at changes in context and recognize that the underlying factors have shifted and so change rulings.

Re: U.S. Marshals Spied on Abortion Protesters Using Dataminr

#84
post #59

Can someone explain the legal theory that diffentiates using something like Dataminr to monitor tweets vs simply having an army of agents manually searching for them? I agree that it feels like the scale of the former makes it different, but is there a principled reason why that is the case?

The legal choices and mechanisms we have are based on built in assumptions about how easy and expensive something is, and this is especially true for monitoring of public spaces. The decision to say that stuff you say/do in public can be monitored without oversight was made when that would be fairly rare accidentally or require a lot of resources to deliberately use. If we suddenly find ourselves in a world where eve…

Sufficient quantitative change in capability causes a qualitative difference to outcomes.

Re: U.S. Marshals Spied on Abortion Protesters Using Dataminr

#85
post #72

I'm struggling to understand the outrage here. It's quite possible I'm missing the point and am open to being educated, but what's being described here is essentially running data analysis tools on the public postings people are making on Twitter right? Everything described in the anecdotes, unless I missed it, was basically someone going on Twitter, a global media platform designed to convey your postings to a mass…

People don't communicate well. They use the word "spying", when "surveillance" would be more appropriate. How would you feel if you found the past three weeks, there was someone parked outside your home, who followed you to work, and logged when and where you left? I mean, it's all public information, right? How would you feel if they did this, specifically because of your political beliefs?

I get the concept. But there's a pretty obvious difference between just sitting in my home and going to work and posting on a global media platform that is literally intended to reach every other living human as its core reason for existing.

The argument seems bizarre to me. A much better pre-technology analogy would be if I wrote lots of letters to the editor of a newspaper and people read them.

Maybe it would even be a little creepy if the government had an FBI agent in every small town that read letters to the editor and sent them to be filed by topic in Washington or something.

But it wouldn't be spying right?

Re: U.S. Marshals Spied on Abortion Protesters Using Dataminr

#86
post #45

So many people are okay with unconstitutional things as long as it supports their side and beliefs. It is genuinely unsettling. Personally, I don’t care about the underlying thing the protests are about, the important aspect is that if you allow unconstitutional government action like this, eventually it will be used against you. A decade from now we have no idea what the political climate will be. If the precedent i…

Additionally, I find it a bit concerning that people are ok with violating one principle or right on the basis that it’s fighting against another violation. If we identify A, B, C, and D as potential rights, and you and I agree on rights A and B, but we disagree on the principles of C and D, then it’s ok that my side violates your rights A and B because if we can’t agree on all of them, then you deserve none. It’s th…

[dead]

Re: U.S. Marshals Spied on Abortion Protesters Using Dataminr

#87
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, but Congress passed legislation to prevent the digitization of gun records. So they have massive paper files and a small set of agents to match guns to crimes. You would think with AI we could track all guns and bullets to crimes eventually.

> You would think with AI we could track all guns and bullets to crimes eventually. Not sure how that would be achieved since you can make your own guns and bullets in the majority of states.

[dead]

Re: U.S. Marshals Spied on Abortion Protesters Using Dataminr

#88
post #25
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

Opinions on abortion among many christian groups have been pretty fluid in the past century[1].

> The rhetoric about abortion being the catalyst for the rise of the Religious Right, however, collapses under scrutiny. Evangelicals considered abortion a “Catholic issue” until the late 1970s. In 1968, the flagship evangelical magazine Christianity Today convened a conference with another evangelical organization, Christian Medical Society, to discuss the ethics of abortion. After several days of deliberations, twenty-six evangelical theologians issued a statement acknowledging that they could not agree on any one position, that the ambiguities of the issue allowed for many different approaches. “Whether the performance of an induced abortion is sinful we are not agreed,” the statement read, “but about the necessity of it and permissibility for it under certain circumstances we are in accord.” The statement cited “individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility” as possible justifications for abortion and allowed for instances when fetal life “may have to be abandoned to maintain full and secure family life.”

And this is a real eye-opener:

> Baptists, in particular, applauded the Roe decision as an appropriate articulation of the line of division between church and state, between personal morality and state regulation of individual behavior. “Religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision,” W. Barry Garrett of Baptist Press wrote.

[1] https://religiondispatches.org/the-evangelical-abortion-myth...

Re: U.S. Marshals Spied on Abortion Protesters Using Dataminr

#89
post #72

I'm struggling to understand the outrage here. It's quite possible I'm missing the point and am open to being educated, but what's being described here is essentially running data analysis tools on the public postings people are making on Twitter right? Everything described in the anecdotes, unless I missed it, was basically someone going on Twitter, a global media platform designed to convey your postings to a mass…

People don't communicate well. They use the word "spying", when "surveillance" would be more appropriate. How would you feel if you found the past three weeks, there was someone parked outside your home, who followed you to work, and logged when and where you left? I mean, it's all public information, right? How would you feel if they did this, specifically because of your political beliefs?

That's what Google does, pretty much. People seem OK with ubiquitous surveillance these days. "Hey wiretap, got any good recipes for risotto?"

Re: U.S. Marshals Spied on Abortion Protesters Using Dataminr

#90
post #45

So many people are okay with unconstitutional things as long as it supports their side and beliefs. It is genuinely unsettling. Personally, I don’t care about the underlying thing the protests are about, the important aspect is that if you allow unconstitutional government action like this, eventually it will be used against you. A decade from now we have no idea what the political climate will be. If the precedent i…

It is because my side is made up only of good virtuous people who really want to do what's best and only want the power to do good things, and the other side is full of evil horrible people that want to bring about oppression and sadness my favorite media outlet proved it.
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