
How the cops watch your tweets in real-time - coloneltcb
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/09/how-the-cops-watch-your-tweets-in-real-time/
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jka
This is a copy-and-paste from a previous comment I made on the subject of
school student social media monitoring, but I think it's relevant here too:

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Social media monitoring is a huge industry at the moment, which I can say from
first-hand experience. Lots of businesses, individuals, and organizations want
to know what is being said about them or their field.

Even though no company providing these services can have perfect coverage (not
even a perfect coverage of public internet communications), or perfect
accuracy (generally it boils down to what you can express with search facets
and boolean expressions), they can very aggressively sell the capability to
people and organizations, because the 'idea' makes sense, and the fear/need is
genuine - maybe there are relevant good/bad things happening out there that we
need to know about.

I think this may be the real story here: there are private companies
incentivized to sell surveillance of public communications, regardless of end-
result quality for the customer, and education is just one of many places
where that is relevant.

I don't think this is going to change - we now take for granted that search
engines can see what is on the public web, and the same will become true of
public social media -- although these tools are (generally) not yet as well
known to the public as Google web search.

I'd personally really like to see distributed and private social
communications technology to take off, so that this kind of legitimized spying
becomes near-irrelevant, and I think there are big opportunities there - but
we're not there yet and there'll be some interesting ground to navigate in the
meantime.

\---

It's interesting that this group is using the full Twitter firehose - and when
you realize that this is just one of many other companies providing the same
type of services (either in public or behind closed doors), it becomes clear
that an entire industry now has incentives to encourage people to capture and
publish more of their life - with additional geolocation/contextual
information where possible as well.

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GabrielF00
A number of cities now have a technology called shotspotter. It's basically a
network of acoustic sensors on rooftops that are designed to detect gunfire
and alert the police. Many big city police departments have a major problem
where a shooting will take place and the cops won't find out about it until
someone stumbles into a hospital, at which point catching the bad guys becomes
much harder. Lots of people are unwilling to call 911 either because they fear
retaliation for snitching or they don't trust the cops or they're apathetic
and they don't think any good will come from reporting a crime. I imagine one
motivation for this twitter scanning technology is similar - if they're
monitoring tweets in real time they can get a precise location of a shooting
and also the twitter handle of a witness.

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cypherpunks01
"We’re intimately familiar with OSINT needs and deliverables, and we will
deliver the Deep Web Intelligence that finds the bad guys and lets you get
them behind bars."

Deep Web Intelligence? via Twitter? This sounds pretty delusional. Is the
average criminal _really_ twittering information about their crimes? Kids
these days..

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seiji
_Is the average criminal really twittering information about their crimes?_

I submit this into evidence of rampant human stupidity:
[https://twitter.com/NeedADebitCard](https://twitter.com/NeedADebitCard)

Never underestimate what people will do to try and feel special in their tiny
social spheres.

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D9u
Did anyone sign up for the free trial?

[http://bigdata.brightplanet.com/Portals/179268/docs/BlueJay_...](http://bigdata.brightplanet.com/Portals/179268/docs/BlueJay_UserGuide_20130725_FinalVersion.pdf)

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austenallred
It's neat that they got access to the firehouse (most likely licensing it from
gnip) but geolocation is still an issue. Only a small percentage of Twitter
users turn on geolocation. Last count I heard was under 10%.

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MisterNegative
My fatherland "The Netherlands" does also have these techniques in their
police systems. If people start/organize a riot/fight using twitter (mostly
after soccer games), they easily see this.

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njharman
Information wants to be free. Free to everyone. This would only be a problem
if people with authoriy denied access to information to others.

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mkr-hn
You could do something similar to this with Google Maps before Twitter stopped
selling data to Google.

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jrockway
If the fire department starts using this, it will be good news for Maurice
Moss.

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D9u
Not that I'm a criminal, but I don't use Twitter. I made a couple of accounts,
but never used them. (forgot credentials for the first account due to lack of
interest - the second has been idling for months)

So, the "cops" aren't really watching my "tweets in real-time."

~~~
rschmitty
The "cops" likely don't monitor all services you don't use...b/c you aren't
using them

