Twitter surveillance

[Stephanie]

Dataminr (nice name) apparently provides data to police departments on protests happening, while claiming it's not surveillance.

https://theintercept.com/2020/07/09/twi ... -protests/

According to internal materials reviewed by The Intercept, Dataminr meticulously tracked not only ongoing protests, but kept comprehensive records of upcoming anti-police violence rallies in cities across the country to help its staff organize their monitoring efforts, including events’ expected time and starting location within those cities. A protest schedule seen by The Intercept shows Dataminr was explicitly surveilling dozens of protests big and small, from Detroit and Brooklyn to York, Pennsylvania, and Hampton Roads, Virginia.

And Dataminr alert emails sent to the Minneapolis Police Department, obtained via a public records request, show the company collected, bundled, and captioned Twitter content relevant to the anti-police brutality protests and forwarded it directly to police as these events unfolded, including information on apparently nonviolent protests. The emails show Dataminr relaying the locations and images of Black Lives Matter protesters in the city where George Floyd lived and was killed, and where the nationwide wave of outrage against police abuse was launched, a fact difficult to square with the company’s claim that it doesn’t provide its governmental customers with “any form of surveillance.”

Wilcox’s defense of Dataminr was based mostly on a sort of linguistic distinction: that relaying data to the police isn’t a form of surveillance, but a form of ideologically neutral newsgathering. In an alternate euphemism, Wilcox described the surveillance alerts forwarded to police as “situational awareness through real time events, [in] many of which people’s lives are at stake, and they can respond more quickly and save lives.”

[Bird on a Fire]

That is creepy as f.ck (and they're seriously called Dataminr?!!), but protestors etc. do need to be smarter about these things? If you post something, assume law enforcement will know about it. If you're even near a device, assume law enforcement can know about it. This is just the stuff they were happy to release to the public, using civilian contractors.

[Millennie Al]

Dataminr (nice name) apparently provides data to police departments on protests happening, while claiming it's not surveillance.

https://theintercept.com/2020/07/09/twi ... -protests/

Wilcox’s defense of Dataminr was based mostly on a sort of linguistic distinction: that relaying data to the police isn’t a form of surveillance, but a form of ideologically neutral newsgathering.

Relaying data indeed is not surveillance. But chosing which data to relay certainly is. And "ideologically neutral newsgathering" can be surveillance as any famous celebrity pursued by paparazzi can testify.

[Bird on a Fire]

Dataminr (nice name) apparently provides data to police departments on protests happening, while claiming it's not surveillance.

https://theintercept.com/2020/07/09/twi ... -protests/

Wilcox’s defense of Dataminr was based mostly on a sort of linguistic distinction: that relaying data to the police isn’t a form of surveillance, but a form of ideologically neutral newsgathering.

Relaying data indeed is not surveillance. But chosing which data to relay certainly is. And "ideologically neutral newsgathering" can be surveillance as any famous celebrity pursued by paparazzi can testify.

I'm not sure about this. All a CCTV camera does is relay data, but it's still surveillance. If I follow someone around in real life and tell the cops what they're up to, that's still surveillance, etc. Indeed, wikipedia's definition of surveillance

Surveillance is the monitoring of behavior, activities, or information for the purpose of information gathering, influencing, managing or directing. This can include observation from a distance by means of electronic equipment, such as closed-circuit television (CCTV), or interception of electronically transmitted information, such as Internet traffic. It can also include simple technical methods, such as human intelligence gathering and postal interception.

is that it pretty much *is* relaying data, for a particular purpose.

It's basically the online equivalent of hanging around in public spaces eavesdropping and reporting those conversations to the police, which very obviously is a form of surveillance. It would be disingenuous in the extreme to try to paint that as "newsgathering", as the police aren't a news agency.