21 ms·
Police surveilled protests with help from Twitter-affiliated startup Dataminr
- aspenmayer 6y agoI 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.
- kohtatsu 6y agoWho needs a panopticon when the prisoners post evidence themselves?
- prophesi 6y agoSocial media flips the classic panopticon on its head; instead of instilling fear of perpetual surveillance to keep others disciplined, it instills a fear that others can't see you until you self-discipline according to the algorithm's desire.
- poooooooop 6y agoThe irony of this being downvoted...
- radicalidiot 6y agoso the leftists sold out the leftists? classic.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoA lot of people, frankly, don't have any principled understanding of what it means to oppose surveillance. Dataminr says it's not doing "surveillance" but "newsgathering", based on some ad-hoc distinction they have no idea how to flesh out. And the article author doesn't seem to know either; he says Dataminr's defense was a "linguistic distinction" and a "euphemism", but none of his sources really explain what the correct distinction is between surveillance and newsgathering. Personally, I think any principled opposition to surveillance is going to end up including some practices which have traditionally been considered news. The reason that Dataminr's activity is surveillance is that "look at these random tweets!" news articles are also surveillance.
- colordrops 6y agoWhy is this comment downvoted?
- aspenmayer 6y agoI’ll admit I was a bit too emotional with my take. I don’t mean to imply that those who violate the Constitution deserve to suffer from their conscience or from any health or psychological issues as a result of such constitutional violation. I simply don’t know how those employees avoid the cognitive dissonance. I suppose there is ample scientific evidence showing that the more money you make, the less ethical you may act[1], but this is really raising the bar, or lowering it, depending on your perspective. [1] https://www.pnas.org/content/109/11/4086 https://www.pnas.org/content/109/11/4086
- dx87 6y agoProbably because they're just posting something that is already in the article, and adding nothing to the discussion.
- ciarannolan 6y agoMaybe 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 6y agoDoes “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 6y agoTwitter 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.
- 6y ago
- DoofusOfDeath 6y agoI 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.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago>I get the sense that most HN commenters are against having police surveil this kind of event in the U.S. Look to your left and right. The people building this dystopia are right here on this site.
- FilterSweep 6y agoit’s more of a "surveillance for thee, not for me" sort of deal on HN.
- gruez 6y agoHNers only object to surveillance on themselves?
- jniedrauer 6y agoI think it's more that human nature lets you justify a lot in the act of self-preservation. When it advances your career, it's so easy to say "if I wasn't writing this code, then it would just be the next programmer in line behind me."
- arminiusreturns 6y ago"Notably, Epstein, who was known for his interest in obtaining blackmail through the sexual abuse of the underaged girls he exploited, also claimed to have “damaging information” on prominent figures in Silicon Valley. In a conversation last year with New York Times reporter James Stewart, Epstein claimed to have “potentially damaging or embarrassing” information on Silicon Valley’s elite and told Stewart that these top figures in the American tech industry “were hedonistic and regular users of recreational drugs.” Epstein also told Stewart that he had “witnessed prominent tech figures taking drugs and arranging for sex” and claimed to know “details about their supposed sexual proclivities.” https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/business/jeffrey-epstein-interview.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/business/jeffrey-epstein-...
- dgarrett 6y agoDataminr Access and Deletion Requests: https://www.dataminr.com/access-and-deletion-requests https://www.dataminr.com/access-and-deletion-requests
- jb775 6y ago> 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 6y agoFor 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.
- ehsankia 6y agoI had no idea who or what Dataminr was before this, but I recently started a simple Twitter bot [0], and noticed they were crawling every single link I posted multiple times, even though I explicitly disallow in my robots.txt. Their User-Agent just says to contact them, and there didn't seem to be a way to get them to stop, so I just banned their user agent from my servers. It is scary how little information there is about these random companies like Clearview AI or this that just gobble up everything online with no care. https://twitter.com/CatalogScanner https://twitter.com/CatalogScanner
- throwawizzle 6y ago> 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 6y agoLast 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.
- throwawizzle 6y agoThere is partial firehose access, that's true. That's probably much more common than full access. I bet you could get some surveillance done with only partial access, though. And there is also such a thing as imports, which I think lets you pull historical data based on terms you want to find. I don't know if that gets a sample, or everything that matches.
- ashtonkem 6y agoThat’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.
- nullc 6y agoThis 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.
- TeeMassive 6y agoThe problem right now is that there are a lot of people who want to (and did) commit violent acts and use black block tactics. They openly encourage lawful protesters to dress homogeneously all clad in black under the pretense of protecting protesters against police but in fact they do so to commit acts of violence and then meld away in the crowd, effectively taking hostage the lawful protesters. The argument can be made that to protect peaceful assemblies, tools need to be engineered so those rioters can be differentiated from the lawful protesters and bring them to justice.
- heavyset_go 6y ago> The argument can be made that to protect peaceful assemblies, tools need to be engineered so those rioters can be differentiated from the lawful protesters and bring them to justice. This is the same reasoning behind the argument for putting backdoors into crypto algorithms, and it's a bad argument for the same reasons.
- joshribakoff 6y agoAs a law abiding protestor I don’t buy this because it was done to me without my knowledge. They can use tools to watch criminals without compiling data on peaceful protestors without their knowledge
- 6y ago
- EverydayBalloon 6y agoThe police didn't need much help, tbh. The rioters were extremely naive to not realize that each & every one of them were going to be tracked & recorded by multiple systems. If the government wants to nail one of them, either now or later, they've now got the goods. Social Darwinism at its finest.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- thinkingemote 6y agoAnswering 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 6y ago"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 6y agoMaybe 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 6y agoTo 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.
- some_random 6y agoI don't know if I'd cite England and Australia as safe societies
- rsynnott 6y ago> 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 6y agoI guess my first question is, where's the line between "policing" and "investigating your own citizens"?