
Police surveilled protests with help from Twitter-affiliated startup Dataminr - jbegley
https://theintercept.com/2020/07/09/twitter-dataminr-police-spy-surveillance-black-lives-matter-protests/
======
nullc
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 collected here:
name, address, duration of involvement. They'd end up in court immediately,
and it would likely be found that their actions had a chilling effect which
created a prior restraint on the public's constitutionally protected speech.

Yet online this kind of data collection amasses more data and is more chilling
due secretive nature since you never know when you're not being tracked.

~~~
due737y3
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 situation. This method also has the benefit
of removing the need to have riot-ready police pre-emptively deployed to zones
where everyone is keeping things calm.

Anecdotally, I was able to spectate active looting in my own city's downtown
when the protests first came to us via various livestreaming instagrammers and
while it was mostly a curiosity for me I imagine it would have been useful to
a dispatcher who had to decide where to send officers. I don't see why twitter
couldn't serve a similarly useful purpose.

~~~
jMyles
> I was able to spectate active looting in my own city's downtown when the
> protests first came to us via various livestreaming instagrammers and while
> it was mostly a curiosity for me I imagine it would have been useful to a
> dispatcher who had to decide where to send officers

We all watched the same thing in our cities. And we watched as the police
chose to launch projectiles into crowds of protestors instead of doing
anything about the smashing and looting.

On the first night of large protests (May 29), I found myself in my city of
Portland, OR, on SW 3rd and Yamhill. On one side of me (to the East), where a
small group of matching black-clad people had gone, were the unambiguous
sounds of windows being smashed and building alarms going off. In other
directions, especially South and West, there were huge groups of protestors,
simply occupying the area.

The police engaged, without a single exception that came to my awareness, in
the latter group, breaking them up into smaller and smaller contingents as the
night went on, while doing nothing about the much smaller group going around
smashing.

I described my experience in detail the following morning.[0]

The same story has emerged from streamed video throughout the USA.

So I don't think there's any evidence at this time that the police view
stopping rioting or "active looting" as a goal.

0:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Portland/comments/gtj1zm/what_i_saw...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Portland/comments/gtj1zm/what_i_saw_last_night/)

------
DoofusOfDeath
I 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.

~~~
stefan_
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 is similarly an infringement on those rights, and certainly take a
very dim look on any sort of surveillance of political activity.

~~~
darawk
> 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?

There are lots of things that are protected activities that I would like
surveiled. Militias. The KKK. Neo-nazis. I certainly hope the FBI and other
law enforcement agencies are keeping tabs on their activities.

~~~
elliekelly
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.

~~~
darawk
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".

~~~
d2v
It takes a lot of faith in law enforcement to believe they won't abuse that
power, especially given they are the target of criticism by these protests.
The argument that it is illegal for them to abuse / misuse this information
isn't very compelling either, given that they are the ones responsible for
enforcing the laws that they would be breaking. I might be okay with this info
just ending up in the hands of the FBI, but I definitely wouldn't want it
winding up in the hands of my local law enforcement agencies, who are known
for harassing and intimidating critics.

~~~
darawk
It's not that I think they won't abuse it. I know that they'll abuse it. The
question we have to ask is whether their abuses will be worse than the
consequences of total inaction on their part. And I think that balances in
favor of surveillance, when it comes to public social media data, but
certainly reasonable people can disagree.

------
throwawizzle
> 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 access to a content stream known as the “firehose” — a rare privilege
> among tech firms and one that lets Dataminr, recently valued at over $1.8
> billion, scan every public tweet as soon as its author hits send. Both
> companies denied that the protest monitoring meets the definition of
> surveillance.

Dataminr is not the only company with access to the firehose that has law
enforcement and military customers (or customers of customers, who would even
know?) doing whatever they please with it.

I believe that Twitter has cracked down on this recently, or is at least
beginning to ask Twitter data customers to restrict some of their customer's
usage (or remove access entirely). But all of this after the fact.

Also, if you deleted something off Twitter and you think it's gone from every
downstream data warehouses that captured it seconds after you tweeted, and
also the people with access to those warehouses that copied it to their own
storage... well, then I have a bridge to sell you.

~~~
falcolas
Last I heard, there were less than 10 companies with access to the full
firehouse (which has every tweet). Most only get a partial feed, if that.

Disclaimer: Used to work for Dataminr; was laid off.

~~~
ashtonkem
That’s true, but doesn’t mean quite what you’re implying.

The full firehose was originally given to a small number of companies,
including Gnip (eventually purchased by Twitter). What Gnip did was provide
filtering for the firehose as well as some historical searches; this in theory
would allow companies to receive in soft real time every tweet that was
relevant to their search query.

The result is that there are tons of people who don’t have access to the full
firehose, but effectively have the ability to receive every single tweet
that’s relevant to their search query. It wouldn’t be very hard to find every
tweet relevant to a protest, as this is superficially quite similar to finding
tweets relevant to a brand or marketed event.

That being said, this isn’t a product that you can just sign up for and use.
You had (my contacts no longer work at twitter) to negotiate a contract with
Twitter directly to get access to this, pay large sums of money, and go
through a fairly high touch sales and support process.

------
dgarrett
Dataminr Access and Deletion Requests: [https://www.dataminr.com/access-and-
deletion-requests](https://www.dataminr.com/access-and-deletion-requests)

~~~
jb775
> _We will use the information you provide to process and to maintain a record
> of your request._

What a paradox...In order to delete your records, they create records on you

~~~
tzs
For data on people in the EU, that's essentially required to comply with GDPR.

That's because of backups. GDPR doesn't really say if handling a deletion
request just requires deleting from your live databases or if you also have to
through your backups and delete from them too.

I didn't save the link, but at least one country's privacy regulator has
clarified that deletion requests do not apply to backups, but if the backup is
ever restored you have to delete any restored records that had been subject to
a deletion request.

Hence, the need to maintain a record of deletion requests in sufficient detail
to re-delete those records if they ever come back.

------
aspenmayer
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 access to a content stream known as the “firehose” — a rare privilege
> among tech firms and one that lets Dataminr, recently valued at over $1.8
> billion, scan every public tweet as soon as its author hits send. Both
> companies denied that the protest monitoring meets the definition of
> surveillance.

~~~
colordrops
Why is this comment downvoted?

~~~
ciarannolan
Maybe because HN is full of people that work for similar privacy-destroying
tech companies. I find that people on this board get a bit touchy when you
talk about FAANG companies doing immoral things. (I know this isn't a FAANG
company but its affect is in the same vein).

~~~
jakear
Does “FAANG companies” really mean literally those 5 companies? That’s not
very usefully of a term. I think it’s more the concept, which I’d say Twitter
is included in.

~~~
unreal37
Twitter is not even trading at the stock price it was 2 years ago. It's not a
FAANG. It's not a growth stock. It just barely escaped being a Yahoo.

------
thinkingemote
Answering these questions are difficult because the protests were against the
police, and any admission of nuance lessens the passion against injustice.
With less emotional investment comes less participation.

Questions:

Were these protests legal or during coronavirus effectively temporarily
illegal?

Another question is, given a police precinct building was evacuated and set on
fire during a protest, should those attending the protest expect to no
surveillance. Or only if violence happens?

In the UK there are stronger hate speech laws. Most people in the UK would
want the police to be surveiling the far right during their arguably less
violent counter protests. Should they not be wanting this?

~~~
unreal37
"In the UK there are stronger hate speech laws."

The UK is an odd place, legally. Stronger laws against free speech yet looser
laws around freedom of the press to do normally illegal things. It's a
surveillance state with cameras on every street corner, yet a big advocate for
protecting private data online.

A nation of paradoxes.

~~~
0xdeadb00f
Maybe it's on purpose.

This is a stretch but recall in 1984 where the ministry's slogans were all the
direct opposite to what they really did, and how details about the past were
always chopped and changed so no one could keep track.

------
sacks2k
To have a safe society, you need to either have lots of surveillance, so
people know they are being watched and will think twice about committing
crimes (countries with very string gun laws like England and Australia have
very strong surveillance systems in place) or the ability for anyone to defend
themselves legally against said criminal.

When you try yo get rid of both guns and surveillance, it only increases the
crime rate and hurts innocent people.

Very large cities like New York and Chicago are seeing this in action right
now. Police are either quitting, not working, and are being defunded as we
speak. New york and Chicago had record crime rate increases, including murder.

~~~
rsynnott
> To have a safe society, you need to either have lots of surveillance, so
> people know they are being watched and will think twice about committing
> crimes (countries with very string gun laws like England and Australia have
> very strong surveillance systems in place) or the ability for anyone to
> defend themselves legally against said criminal

So, the issue here is that you've picked two countries out of the vast number
of countries who ban or severely restrict guns. There are plenty of countries
with few or no guns which don't have significant public surveillance systems.

------
pmarreck
I guess my first question is, where's the line between "policing" and
"investigating your own citizens"?

