Tweeting from a protest subjects you to enrollment in a police database
November 22, 2015 6:57 AM   Subscribe

Your Social Media Posts Are Fueling the Future of Police Surveillance - Any posts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or any other location-tagged social media uploaded in [an] area will appear on a display at police headquarters. An uploaded Vine from one block away could show someone running away, and give the cops a starting point for their investigation. How long until that hypothetical situation is a reality? “We’re 100 percent there,” says Lee Guthman, head of business development at Geofeedia, a location-based social media monitoring site.
posted by nevercalm (46 comments total) 22 users marked this as a favorite
 
So, on my phone I can mock GPS coordinates, which is really helpful when testing/developing apps, since I can fool the phone into thinking I'm anywhere I want without getting up from my desk. Does Geofeedia try and counteract this? Also, will I be tweeting from "inside" the police station next time there's a BLM protest? Maybe not me, but everyone else should be. Sounds like a good topic for an activist skillshare.
posted by dis_integration at 7:06 AM on November 22, 2015 [4 favorites]


so if I wanna murder somebody, I just gotta set my phone to tweet a series of pre-timed tweets (most Twitter apps will do this now) and then leave it at home?

the future brings us bold new alibis
posted by mightygodking at 7:14 AM on November 22, 2015 [24 favorites]


This is my surprised face.
posted by entropicamericana at 7:21 AM on November 22, 2015 [8 favorites]


I mean if people are going to metaphorically shout about their crimes from the rooftops then of course the police should be looking at it and using it. Shit you put online with your name on it and your location has no reasonable expectation to privacy.
posted by Talez at 7:28 AM on November 22, 2015 [5 favorites]


Protesting is a crime?
posted by entropicamericana at 7:31 AM on November 22, 2015 [40 favorites]


Whereas if you're prudent enough to avoid publicly posting to Twitter/Facebook/Instagram from the protest, you'll only appear with a higher person-of-interest score in the security services' database of locations aggregated from phone locations and facial-recognition cameras. Which officially doesn't exist, so there's nothing for you to actually have a right of reply to.
posted by acb at 7:33 AM on November 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


Yeah, no; as someone who has had first hand experience of the (UK) police deciding that bystanders ought to be treated as criminals & dealt with via violence (and then denying that they did so), I'm not going to be part of the 'if you have nothing to hide/nothing's private on the internet anywayz' crowd. it's creepy, it's dangerous.
posted by AFII at 7:34 AM on November 22, 2015 [49 favorites]


Oh hey, extrajudicial tools justified by terrorism seem to end up used against routine crimes instead. Nobody could have predicted.
posted by T.D. Strange at 7:37 AM on November 22, 2015 [29 favorites]


(On the other hand, don't think that having a public Facebook feed with visible activities will keep the police from plastering your face all over the media, raise the terror threat level to the highest it's ever been, and launch a national man hunt, just because they'd heard some rumour and would like to talk to you, but cannot figure out where you are.)
posted by effbot at 7:40 AM on November 22, 2015 [4 favorites]


a general rule of thumb is that anything you do is being monitored. Mail a package overseas? Sure. Fill out custom form. And then watch clerk type in your name and address and recipient aside from taking care of package. Return addresses I am told are scanned by PO...the rest is obvious, since even advertisers with less high tech equipment are all over your electronics.
posted by Postroad at 7:56 AM on November 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


I've been assuming that this was basically the case since I started seeing Twitter used at protests, because why wouldn't the state do this? Power does because it can. But it's nothing to cheer about - I've had friends put through years of hell because, although they didn't commit any crimes, they organized large protests or were believed to have organized large protests, or were friends and allies of people who had organized protests.

I should remember this more often - we usually say that protest is useless and changes nothing, but the fact is that the state is so frightened of protest that it will use as many anti-democratic measures as it needs to shut it down. Protest is obviously doing something - unfortunately, I think what it's doing is merely preventing things from getting worse rather than actively making gains. If the state hates your little "why not let in some Salvadoran refugees" demo so much that they'll start surveilling you and making up charges, don't you think that what they really want is total and absolute acceptance of any abuse of citizens with no protest at all?
posted by Frowner at 7:59 AM on November 22, 2015 [38 favorites]


Oh hey, extrajudicial tools justified by terrorism seem to end up used against routine crimes instead. Nobody could have predicted.

Well, those are, uh, narcoterrorism cases. Yeah.
posted by thelonius at 8:06 AM on November 22, 2015 [2 favorites]


The last time I looked at legal documentation on "right to privacy" it seemed to me that the term was invented by lawyers for rich people who didn't want their activities gossiped about in the daily newspapers back in the nineteen teens.

Us peasants never had, do not have, and will never have rights. That middle school civics stuff was a load of crap.
posted by bukvich at 8:06 AM on November 22, 2015 [7 favorites]


I am old enough to watch the paradigm shifting from "off the grid" to "the anonymity of the herd."

The spotlight shows everybody. That's why man police forces push back against phone cameras. This technology is the new fact, being processed by everyone. The numbers are in our favor. We are the vast majority. We can only be hurt by this if we just give in.

Civil disobedience and non-violent protest are our tools, not our rights. Rights do not actually exist, except in legal fictions--these have to be filtered, from the time of your arrest, to the court that makes a ruling. You can lose at any level, depending on whether you are in a court of and by people or one run by kangaroos.

Keep your cameras on and make them work for you. I acknowledge my bias: sunlight kills germs.
posted by mule98J at 8:17 AM on November 22, 2015 [8 favorites]


The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing people that they own their social media profile.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 8:39 AM on November 22, 2015 [7 favorites]


Twitter is a PUBLIC medium. It's micro-publishing. So... don't tweet stuff you don't want people, including the authorities, to know about.

There's an upside. For the moment, most protest is legal, and in this case, Twitter could be a potent record - of the size of the protest, of police overreaction when it occurs. Hard to deny facts about a protest when many tweets tell the same story. If the majority of attendees tweet from a protest, that's one hell of a haystack...

Small digression - does anyone "aggregate" the tweets after an event like a protest to count the tweets or participants, and pull out the significant facts or occurrences?

I'm not surprised, or that worried about the authorities monitoring tweets. It would be more alarming if they were able to selectively suppress or delete tweets coming from a protest...which I guess they could do to a certain extent by cellphone-jamming in a protest area.

As we already know, the police put undercover provocateurs into protests- to spy, and to commit or incite lawbreaking in the crowd when they need the excuse to shut it down. The importance of finding, recording and outing these infiltrators can't be overstated.
posted by Artful Codger at 8:59 AM on November 22, 2015 [2 favorites]


The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing people that they own their social media profile.

An especially great trick considering that this is all happening after they've already signed their souls away in the ToS.

"CIA's 'Facebook' Program Dramatically Cuts Agency's Costs"
posted by XMLicious at 9:18 AM on November 22, 2015 [3 favorites]


As we already know, the police put undercover provocateurs into protests- to spy, and to commit or incite lawbreaking in the crowd

...to introduce libel into Greenpeace pamphlets, to betray lovers and become deadbeat fathers...
posted by XMLicious at 9:28 AM on November 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


Where I work they've got something. We're not supposed to bring phones with cameras onto the property unless you've permanently removed it and filled the space with epoxy so it can't be ever reinstalled. It's actually easier than it sounds, and there are thousands of people running around playing Facebook and whatnot with their iPhones legally. You can't tell the difference without close inspection of the phone.

Security has an uncanny ability to walk into an office and go straight to the person who hasn't removed the camera. "Can I see your phone?" I'm not sure how they do that.
posted by ctmf at 10:29 AM on November 22, 2015 [2 favorites]


We're not supposed to bring phones with cameras onto the property unless you've permanently removed it and filled the space with epoxy so it can't be ever reinstalled.

RIM (now BlackBerry) used to sell SKUs of their phones that didn't have physical cameras. For some-what less security conscious organizations there was an IT policy that would turn cameras off (that users couldn't easily undo, at least not while still talking to the corporate network).
posted by el io at 10:38 AM on November 22, 2015


Small digression - does anyone "aggregate" the tweets after an event like a protest to count the tweets or participants, and pull out the significant facts or occurrences?

Yes. Ed Summers, a librarian, and others have actively archived tweets from various events such as the Ferguson protests using tools such as twarc.
posted by metaquarry at 10:53 AM on November 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


Us peasants never had, do not have, and will never have rights.

Now you are showing an unwarranted disdain for feudalism. Peasants did indeed have rights (especially in Western Europe), which they understood, litigated, defended with great perseverance. Pretty much all of the major peasant rebellions in the Medieval period were not driven by a desire for a more egalitarian society but by a determination to maintain the rights they had been guaranteed.

Yup, the modern capitalist state: worse than feudalism.
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:58 AM on November 22, 2015 [16 favorites]


you get monitored even if you talk to yourself.
posted by Postroad at 10:59 AM on November 22, 2015


RIM (now BlackBerry) used to sell SKUs of their phones that didn't have physical cameras.

Yeah, higher-level managers get government-issue blackberries with no camera. The latest thing is iPhones that have a government-provided app installed that lets you decrypt/encrypt/sign email, sign on to the secure VPN, and also as a side effect disables the camera so it doesn't have to get physically removed. On topic, I wouldn't doubt there's some tracking involved with that app.
posted by ctmf at 11:02 AM on November 22, 2015


Peasants did indeed have rights (especially in Western Europe), which they understood, litigated, defended with great perseverance. Pretty much all of the major peasant rebellions in the Medieval period were not driven by a desire for a more egalitarian society but by a determination to maintain the rights they had been guaranteed.

In mediaeval Europe, “peasant” could encompass anyone from a serf (i.e., essentially slave labour, and the property of their lord) to those who owned grand houses and had other peasants working for them; the power of (parts of) the peasantry waxed and waned at various points in history.
posted by acb at 11:12 AM on November 22, 2015


the state is so frightened of protest that it will use as many anti-democratic measures as it needs to shut it down.

Unless of course, you're protesting your right to open carry a bazooka or something, in which case, by all means, please exercise your constitutional rights.
posted by triggerfinger at 11:31 AM on November 22, 2015 [2 favorites]


Now you are showing an unwarranted disdain for feudalism. Peasants did indeed have rights (especially in Western Europe), which they understood, litigated, defended with great perseverance. Pretty much all of the major peasant rebellions in the Medieval period were not driven by a desire for a more egalitarian society but by a determination to maintain the rights they had been guaranteed.

Yup, the modern capitalist state: worse than feudalism.
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:58 AM on November 22
[4 favorites −] Favorite added! [Flagged]

THIS!
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 11:48 AM on November 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


I mean if people are going to metaphorically shout about their crimes from the rooftops then of course the police should be looking at it and using it. Shit you put online with your name on it and your location has no reasonable expectation to privacy.

posted by Talez at 9:28 AM on November 22




This. If you put it out on a nominally public medium, you are foolish to expect that it isn't being monitored by people you might find unfriendly.
posted by hwestiii at 12:35 PM on November 22, 2015


But why are my employees using my money to monitor things which should be welcome in our society?*

I know that as a non-member of the 1% the above sentence would be more accurately stated by me as "their employees" and "their society" though it's still, conveniently enough for them, "my" money they're using.
posted by maxwelton at 12:48 PM on November 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


> IT policy that would turn cameras off (that users couldn't easily undo, at least not while still talking to the corporate network).

configuration profile with Device Restrictions. It's a long list[PDF, page 50]

but is it trustworthy? Seems like wire cutters & epoxy are safer.
posted by morganw at 2:29 PM on November 22, 2015


Anytime medieval times are mentioned on MetaFilter, the probability of an actual time traveller posting to correct someone approaches 1 as the thread length increases.
posted by benzenedream at 3:10 PM on November 22, 2015 [4 favorites]


I see no evidence in the article this has happened anywhere.
posted by Ironmouth at 4:10 PM on November 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


Yeah, there's no good solution, cause we were dumb enough to not listen to the crazy conspiracy theorists back when they were telling us we shouldn't voluntarily carry around tracking devices all the time.

Best practice, as far as I can tell, is to use burner phones at protests and to have a social media presence that's basically just a giant cloud of lies. but even that's not reliable.

What's especially scary is that even if your Facebook is on friends-only lockdown, it's not safe to speak candidly there — I personally know at least one case where police informants got onto a prominent activist's Facebook friends list and entered what people thought were private conversations into evidence. personally, I stopped using Facebook altogether about... three months ago? It's not a trustworthy site.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 4:23 PM on November 22, 2015 [3 favorites]


It's obvious that there is only one solution: more kitty pictures.
posted by y2karl at 5:00 PM on November 22, 2015


...and to use steganography.
posted by MikeKD at 5:26 PM on November 22, 2015


What's especially scary is that even if your Facebook is on friends-only lockdown, it's not safe to speak candidly there — I personally know at least one case where police informants got onto a prominent activist's Facebook friends list and entered what people thought were private conversations into evidence.

Privacy is a bit of an active right. It's like the right to remain silent. It's not a protection for "oopsie" situations where you get to call timeout and the police can't use it. You actually do have to keep your mouth shut at some point if you're doing less than savory things that authorities want to pin on you.

As for informants infiltrating an activist, fifty years ago there was Hoffa v. United States:
Neither this Court nor any member of it has ever expressed the view that the Fourth Amendment protects a wrongdoer's misplaced belief that a person to whom he voluntarily confides his wrongdoing will not reveal it.
There is also Katz v. United States:
What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home…,is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection.
The courts are entirely comfortable with the government assuming the role of a confidant without a warrant. Hell, it's the entire lynchpin of undercover operations. They're comfortable saying "if you're stupid enough to invite anyone in expect that someone might be a police officer". The fourth amendment gives you protection against your things being searched without a warrant without asking. It has no protection against you giving them up voluntarily even via accidents or poor judgement.

Always assume your social media posts are talking to the police.
posted by Talez at 5:55 PM on November 22, 2015 [2 favorites]


ctmf: "
Security has an uncanny ability to walk into an office and go straight to the person who hasn't removed the camera. "Can I see your phone?" I'm not sure how they do that.
"

Simplest thing would be looking for people using wifi to upload pictures to some cloud service.
posted by Mitheral at 9:09 PM on November 22, 2015


Even NOT having a social media presence will not help; I have had bureaucratic problems from NOT having a FB account and not being believed that I was not withholding passwords to an account I didn't have. (Well, an account I could access - FB has a "me" shadow account, as FB does of most device-using folks, based on my RL FB participating social networks and browser use) At the same time law-enforcement was contacting me due to other's social media content. Kind of what Frowner mentioned.
posted by Dreidl at 10:49 PM on November 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


Protesting is a crime?

There is, at some level, something funny about this. If you're tweeting at a protest, you're trying to advertise your presence. You're making it clear that you're there, and it's still major event. And yet, there's outrage that certain groups might want to keep track of publically advertised activity.

If we can fundamentally change the social paradigm where protests are right to have the potential to burst into mob violence, great. That seems very important. But as long as this particular conception and potentiality remains, all such data collection will continue.
posted by Going To Maine at 6:37 AM on November 23, 2015


It's really hard to buy into the "omg scared Big Brother is Watching" brouhaha when 100% of the folks I know who've had to go to the police over online harassment have gotten the answer, "How does a Twitter Tweet" or something equally ridiculous. Either the cops are tech-savvy privacy killing monsters or they are idiots who can't understand the basic notions of what Internet is in order to keep people from getting swatted. Which is it?
posted by SassHat at 12:45 PM on November 23, 2015


Or, alternatively, they are tech-savvy privacy-killing monsters when it suits them, and oblivious how-you-Tweet-ers when that suits them, ie, when women are being harassed and threatened. The police are, in general, right wing. They have every interest in quashing dissent and little interest in preventing feminist writers from getting death threats.

Or, as is more likely, different police departments and bureaus have different levels of expertise, different levels of funding and different degrees of access to consultants. A lot of their funding is tied - you can't spend the "fight th' terrorist forners" money from the state on "prevent sexual assault"; you have to spend it on bullshit terrorism initiatives.
posted by Frowner at 1:52 PM on November 23, 2015 [1 favorite]


Yeah, the people who know something about the subject aren't in roles where they would help you. They're there to help the machine.
posted by phearlez at 9:20 AM on November 24, 2015


It's really hard to buy into the "omg scared Big Brother is Watching" brouhaha when 100% of the folks I know who've had to go to the police over online harassment have gotten the answer, "How does a Twitter Tweet" or something equally ridiculous. Either the cops are tech-savvy privacy killing monsters or they are idiots who can't understand the basic notions of what Internet is in order to keep people from getting swatted. Which is it?

Both. When they're getting a birds eye view of tweets from the community some company is providing the service. They don't know what geolocation is, what Twitter is or even what the Internet does. All Joe Officer knows is he can click a button and see what people are saying in the immediate area. It's like magic!

Come to them with harassment? Where's the button to push? There isn't one. They don't have the foggiest on how this works.
posted by Talez at 6:27 AM on November 25, 2015


Yeah, the people who know something about the subject aren't in roles where they would help you. They're there to help the machine.

....or maybe they're living in Russian hotels.
posted by mule98J at 10:12 AM on November 26, 2015


Article from 2014 : How the NYPD is using social media to put Harlem teens behind bars
posted by jeffburdges at 8:22 PM on December 14, 2015


Thread spawned by that article from earlier this year.
posted by Mitheral at 8:33 PM on December 14, 2015 [1 favorite]


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