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U.S. Marshals Spied on Abortion Protesters Using Dataminr

theintercept.com

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

#251

Post by robomartin »

UncleMeat wrote: post #246
robomartin wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "The students will riot but I cannot point to meaningful numbers of examples but trust me it's totally a liberal conspiracy" is not a focus on factual discourse. I'm sorry, why do you think you can make up shit I did not say and then use it in support of your claim? > Conservatives speak at universities all the time. I am not a Republican (Conservative) or Democrat (Liberal). I try very hard to observe reality from…

> Saying that our universities are in the grips of leftist ideology isn't making shit up. It's verifiable reality. Frankly, all I can do is laugh. The data trying to argue that there is some threat to intellectual diversity at universities is laughable .

While you laugh, watch the interview with Nial Ferguson and you might learn a thing or two. I don't want to guess as to why reality escapes your conclusions. Are you going to say that places like Berkeley are balanced? Yes, that's an extreme example, of course. Academia, in this country, is decidedly on the left. The people they graduate are deeply influenced by this.

Here, let's use another metric to get a sense of the ideological leanings of our STEM graduates.

Source:

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/02/most-liberal-tech-companies-...

Summary of employee political donations:

             Democrat Republican
    Netflix:    98%       2%
    Nvidia:     93%       7%
    Adobe:      93%       7%
    IBM:        90%      10%
    Salesforce: 89%      11%
    Google:     88%      12%
    Microsoft:  85%      15%
    Apple:      84%      16%
    PayPal:     84%      16%
    Cisco:      80%      20%
    Amazon:     77%      23%
    Facebook:   77%      23%
    Intel:      68%      32%
    Broadcom:   68%      32%
    Oracle:     67%      33%
    TI:         60%      40%
    Qualcomm:   50%      50%

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

#252

Post by 1123581321 »

sangnoir wrote: post #248
1123581321 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, a protest is organized, but not violent and doesn’t disturb the peace.

In a group of 100 - if one person is violent, and the other 99 are peaceful would that be a protest or a riot? What is violence? Throwing an egg? Ice cream, rocks?

That would be a protest. There are crimes called assault and battery in the US that are for individuals acting violently, and they can be committed with a pretty wide variety of items.

There is also a crime called 'inciting a riot' that can get you in trouble for trying to turn a protest violent even if you didn't try to hurt anyone yourself.

What is violence is definitely an interesting question, but the decision-making process used by police keeping a protest peaceful, and the charges that can be applied afterwards when a protest goes wrong, have a lot of case law and precedent established.

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

#253

Post by sangnoir »

1123581321 wrote: post #252
sangnoir wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a group of 100 - if one person is violent, and the other 99 are peaceful would that be a protest or a riot? What is violence? Throwing an egg? Ice cream, rocks?

That would be a protest. There are crimes called assault and battery in the US that are for individuals acting violently, and they can be committed with a pretty wide variety of items. There is also a crime called 'inciting a riot' that can get you in trouble for trying to turn a protest violent even if you didn't try to hurt anyone yourself. What is violence is definitely an interesting question, but the decision-ma…

> That would be a protest. There are crimes called assault and battery in the US that are for individuals acting violently, and they can be committed with a pretty wide variety of items

So if a building is burnt down, it could be an arson at a site of protest, rather than automatically becoming a riot?

Is it criminal for police to try and incite violence at an otherwise peaceful protest? If they are successful in provoking violence, can they then legally disperse everyone?

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

#254

Post by 1123581321 »

sangnoir wrote: post #253
1123581321 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be a protest. There are crimes called assault and battery in the US that are for individuals acting violently, and they can be committed with a pretty wide variety of items. There is also a crime called 'inciting a riot' that can get you in trouble for trying to turn a protest violent even if you didn't try to hurt anyone yourself. What is violence is definitely an interesting question, but the decision-ma…

> That would be a protest. There are crimes called assault and battery in the US that are for individuals acting violently, and they can be committed with a pretty wide variety of items So if a building is burnt down, it could be an arson at a site of protest, rather than automatically becoming a riot? Is it criminal for police to try and incite violence at an otherwise peaceful protest? If they are successful in pro…

An individual act of arson not disrupting or a protest or turning it violent is possible, sure.

It's illegal for police to deliberately ruin a protest. The right to protest is ultimately defended by the US constitution's first amendment (free speech) and there are federal, state and local laws and policies that stem from that.

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

#255

Post by JellyBeanThief »

majormajor wrote: post #164
JellyBeanThief wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that the sides no longer agree that these things are important. They do. The problem is they don't believe they agree that they're important. They believe the other side has abandoned the constitution, and they know that puts their own side at a disadvantage if they stay with it. The two sides are so frightened of each other at this point that all assumptions of good faith are off the table. So, note for nex…

Money vs speech is a good example, I think, of people not agreeing that these things are important or not. And that the "Constitution" part is not the important part. How would you get a Constitution to separate money when there are so many well-funded pushes for exactly the opposite, resulting in the situation where the courts say money needs to be protected? Before you can do that you need to get everyone on board…

> How would you get a Constitution to separate money

Not that I put a lot of effort into this formulation, but how about something like

> A well-informed and reasonable public, being necessary to the security of a working democracy, the right of the people to free and quick access to public information must not be abridged, but protected.

And then back that up with a multi-layer prescriptive dictionary to minimize judicial reinterpretation. The terms "right of the people", "free and quick access", "public information" would defined in layer N, while the terms "right", "people", "free", "quick", "access", "public", and "information" would be defined in some layers N - M.

We've had some centuries now to get better at technical writing, language engineering, and lexicography, to say nothing of IT. We should use them.

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

#256

Post by zamnos »

beebmam wrote: post #68
falcolas wrote: post #11

A point of context: Dataminr == Tweets, with ML and human filtering. They're one of the few remaining firehose consumers.

If this is true, how can someone claim that collecting public information, like tweets, is "spying"?

Are you suggesting that theintercept.com has a headline that uses a word inaccurately to generate outrage?

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

#257

Post by wolverine876 »

robomartin wrote: post #243
UncleMeat wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am not making shit up. You are. "The students will riot but I cannot point to meaningful numbers of examples but trust me it's totally a liberal conspiracy" is not a focus on factual discourse. Conservatives speak at universities all the time.

> "The students will riot but I cannot point to meaningful numbers of examples but trust me it's totally a liberal conspiracy" is not a focus on factual discourse. I'm sorry, why do you think you can make up shit I did not say and then use it in support of your claim? > Conservatives speak at universities all the time. I am not a Republican (Conservative) or Democrat (Liberal). I try very hard to observe reality from…

> I am not a Republican (Conservative)

It's a matter of definition, but you are taking a conservative position, repeating conservative talking points, in a modern conservative style (aggression, lack of evidence, etc.).

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

#258

Post by Dracophoenix »

hwillis wrote: post #226
Dracophoenix wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While they don't track other people everywhere at once, the media does record what people say or do and you as an individual have little control concerning what's published about you and how and to what degree other will react. But this form of recording isn't generally called spying, even if the circumstances are disadvantageous or even dangerous to the subject being recorded. When it comes to the media, the general…

Context and scale matter. Drawing a picture of a dollar bill is not illegal, but forgery is. It's not illegal to call someone, or to ask them a question, or to follow someone. It IS illegal to stalk someone.

> Context and scale matter.

Who determines context in this case? On what basis?

I disagree that scale matters. A right doesn't disappear simply because multiple people exercise it in a way others find unpleasant. Either a liberty exists on its own merits to it doesn't.

> Drawing a picture of a dollar bill is not illegal, but forgery is

Forgery requires a mens rea; in particular there must be an intent to deceive or profit from deceit.

> It's not illegal to call someone, or to ask them a question, or to follow someone. It IS illegal to stalk someone.

In a number of cases, stalking statues have and do implicate rights. There isn't a consistent corpus of case law or statute to make a clear distinction between merely undesirable contact and stalking as such.

https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2023-04-19/supreme-co...

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

#259

Post by hwillis »

Dracophoenix wrote: post #258
hwillis wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Context and scale matter. Drawing a picture of a dollar bill is not illegal, but forgery is. It's not illegal to call someone, or to ask them a question, or to follow someone. It IS illegal to stalk someone.

> Context and scale matter. Who determines context in this case? On what basis? I disagree that scale matters. A right doesn't disappear simply because multiple people exercise it in a way others find unpleasant. Either a liberty exists on its own merits to it doesn't. > Drawing a picture of a dollar bill is not illegal, but forgery is Forgery requires a mens rea ; in particular there must be an intent to deceive or…

> Who determines context in this case? On what basis?

In general, you'll be sorely disappointed if you expect law to justify itself rigorously. That's not the point. The reason we use phrases like "beyond a reasonable doubt" is because that phrase should be interpreted personally by each juror. It is intentionally divorced from an objective standard.

The technical standard in US law in this case would be (afaik) rational basis review: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_basis_review

> There isn't a consistent corpus of case law or statute to make a clear distinction between merely undesirable contact and stalking as such.

That's really not relevant to what I'm saying. Whether it's legal or not isn't really even relevant since I'm just trying to show you something that you think should obviously be illegal.

There are many other examples where scale changes the nature of the action. Sending a GET request is fine. DDOS is not. Sharing someone's address is fine. Putting their personal information everywhere is not. Doing something once may have much less or much more than 1% of the harm of doing it 100 times.

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

#260

Post by sangnoir »

josephcsible wrote: post #190
sangnoir wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Monitoring an active riot seems pretty much what I’d expect the FBI to do. What - if any - is the difference between a riot and a protest?

> What - if any - is the difference between a riot and a protest? Whether people are being intentionally injured and property is being intentionally damaged/stolen.

> Whether people are being intentionally injured and property is being intentionally damaged/stolen.

If this sufficient to revoke 1A rights, does it also apply to 2A?

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