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U.S. Marshals Spied on Abortion Protesters Using Dataminr
- unvx-n-banned 3y ago[flagged]
- detaro 3y agoyou might want to read the article again
- boeingUH60 3y ago[flagged]
- pfffr 3y ago[flagged]
- derelicta 3y agoAnd what's the difference? Does that make it okay?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pfffr 3y agoObviously not, but it is important to distinguish who is actually being targeted. Like, obviously? Leftist activism has long been the target of government surveillance and infiltration. It would seem that the true threat is more from the right, so why is the left/post-left/anarchist groups/civil rights activism the subject of greater scrutiny? Semantics matter. I was just pointing out a fact for people just commenting who had not read the article and may have assumed the title was accurate, which it is not. I have been opposed to all government surveillance programs and technologies, and would guess that I have been researching them longer than you have been alive (i assume you are young since you are so quick to jump to conclusions)
- CoastalCoder 3y agoThis discussion might benefit from distinguishing several issues: (1) the propriety of protesting abortions at all (2) the propriety of protesting anything in a manner that seems to threaten violence (3) the government's use of Dataminr
- nsxwolf 3y ago(1) is made irrelevant in the most iron clad way by the First Amendment.
- trasz4 3y ago[flagged]
- rayiner 3y ago[flagged]
- trasz4 3y ago>Abortion is considered immoral Not praying as often as one should is considered immoral too. But "immorality" is not binary, and abortion tends to be quite low on the scale. Especially early abortion, which is specific to one particular branch of Christianity. >Abortion “rights” arises from a belief system The same one that got us other human rights, like freedom of speech. It's called humanism. It's different from religions by not being made up. Also, note the "life from conception" fringe is a relatively recent invention: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Christian_thought_on_abortion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Christian_thought_o.... Protestantism generally kept the old beliefs instead of adapting the new idea.
- nsxwolf 3y agoYou have an inalienable right to express any view on abortion in the US, regardless of merit.
- landemva 3y agoFrom the article, "the agency had cast such a broad surveillance net that large volumes of innocuous First Amendment-protected activity regularly got swept up as potential security threats." This is funded by unlimited federal deficit spending. Let's reduce their budgets.
- falcolas 3y agoThe cost of adding irrelevant data to relevant data is minuscule. Trying to use a "Rod from God" that is the deficit spending limit to set a finishing nail will only destroy the entire city.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bigbillheck 3y agoA lot of other more important things would get cut before the marshals felt the squeeze (c.f. other current events like what NYC does with the police and what they cut in order to have more cops)
- jonhohle 3y agoThen follow the law and penalize already illegal misuse or already illegal collection of data. Any administration that says it’s for civil rights cannot also be for mass surveillance.
- adventured 3y agoThat's correct. It's a longer term, monster cultural problem in the US. We're spending plenty of money to have the nice things our society should have (eg universal guaranteed healthcare; better public transportation), and we're spending it wrong (eg paying way too much for healthcare) and or in many of the wrong places (eg the decades-long war on drugs and its consequences). Nobody does inefficient government spending (and general spending, our consumers are fiscal idiots too) like the US. We spend more and get less for it than any affluent peer nation.
- falcolas 3y agoA point of context: Dataminr == Tweets, with ML and human filtering. They're one of the few remaining firehose consumers.
- beebmam 3y agoIf this is true, how can someone claim that collecting public information, like tweets, is "spying"?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- detaro 3y agoIt's not exactly unusual that people consider too-detailed and/or large scale attention paid to technically public things "spying" or similar to it. E.g. if the government were to have agents follow members of a group anywhere and watching their homes, without breaking into private spaces, that'd probably be labeled as such too. Even though they are just collecting publicly visible information and report "Mr Smith is getting close to the court house. Mrs Smith spoke to the lawyer again." Social media just makes automating that a lot easier.
- Dracophoenix 3y ago> Even though they are just collecting publicly visible information and report "Mr Smith is getting close to the court house. Mrs Smith spoke to the lawyer again. If this observation was made done from a public area or from a publicly visible vantage point, how would you're describing be any different from news coverage?
- hwillis 3y agoBasically every way? If the government was tracking everywhere you went via cameras, people would also call that spying. Are you arguing that when a spy follows someone in public and watches everything they do, that isn't spying?
- fencepost 3y ago[flagged]
- trasz4 3y ago[flagged]
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago[flagged]
- iudqnolq 3y agowhy should the rest of us accept your doublespeak? If you all get together on the sidewalk to chant and hold signs in opposition to something that's called protest. Just because you call it sidewalk counseling doesn't mean we can't all see the yelling and verbal abuse and sporadic physical assault.
- dopamean 3y agolol call it what you want. protest takes form in many ways whether it's a march in the street, a prayer in a park, or simply sitting at a diner counter. and i agree that there is a big difference between anti abortion protesters and and pro choice people. one of them has a history of murdering doctors. murders generally attract the attention of law enforcement.
- the_optimist 3y agoThis conversation is not around murder, or data on murder, or pre-crime. It’s a very poor point. I struggle with how to incorporate partisanship into the dialogue. On one hand, it’s potentially useful for achieving reform. On the other, I expect that you’d be content to establish unfair policies that resulted in actual harm based on mere disagreement. The sense of justice is perverted. But sure, come on in and oppose surveillance and promote a broad definition of protest.
- formerly_proven 3y ago> it's not a protest it's a rally Are you actually being serious?
- adfgionionio 3y ago>we don't really consider it "protesting" at all when we organize activities. Everyone else does.
- luma 3y ago
- webdoodle 3y ago1984 and A Brave New World were written as warnings, not how-to manuals, but that's what the governments of the world are clearly doing.
- umvi 3y agoAuthoritarianism is the path of least resistance, no how-to manual required. Democracy requires constant care and course correction or it slowly trends towards authoritarianism. Unfortunately "constant care and course correction" equates to people getting out, voting, participating in their state and local governments, etc. Most people don't like to think about that stuff so they just leave it to others. I'm sure there's some underlying universal principle related to entropy. You see the same with code bases. Unless you are diligent about caring for and correcting things, every large code base will eventually become a steaming pile of tech debt after a few decades.
- tintedfireglass 3y agofarenheit 451 is not too far away
- pfffr 3y agoAlready happened
- the_optimist 3y agoBulk, high-resolution activity tracing by the government should be illegal. There is no justification for employing warfare-grade surveillance as standard operational protocol for non-combatant citizens. There is no basis for collecting and examining such data in search of criminality. Results are highly subject to political whimsy. The government is inadvertently creating a platform for turn-key intimidation and extortion. The individuals broadly identified and targeted are those who are least likely to be engaged in crime. This is the wrong approach. It is time to force our leadership back to the drawing board to identify and develop more sound approaches.
- maerF0x0 3y agoThey keep going back to the drawing board and coming up with 2 cases: 1. Bulk surveillance for pattern recognition 2. Breaking cryptography so they can go directly to the source/plaintext Perhaps we need to figure out some other ways to make the population resistant to crime. For example reducing poverty and increasing opportunity often leads to reduced crime, why not spend billions on pursuing lasting changes on that front?
- Dig1t 3y agoSo many people are okay with unconstitutional things as long as it supports their side and beliefs. It is genuinely unsettling. Personally, I don’t care about the underlying thing the protests are about, the important aspect is that if you allow unconstitutional government action like this, eventually it will be used against you. A decade from now we have no idea what the political climate will be. If the precedent is allowed to be set, there’s a good chance the power will be used against your cause in the future.
- vkou 3y agoI don't think my political enemies need any kind of precedent to piss on my rights. If one doesn't exist before they take power, they'll happily establish it.
- joseph_grobbles 3y ago[dead]
- kiawe_fire 3y agoAdditionally, I find it a bit concerning that people are ok with violating one principle or right on the basis that it’s fighting against another violation. If we identify A, B, C, and D as potential rights, and you and I agree on rights A and B, but we disagree on the principles of C and D, then it’s ok that my side violates your rights A and B because if we can’t agree on all of them, then you deserve none. It’s the kind of thing that ensures that compromise, understanding, and legislation won’t happen by way of conversation or respectful debate, but instead by name calling and force.
- paulgrant999 3y ago[dead]
- drewcoo 3y ago> people are ok with violating one principle or right on the basis that it’s fighting against another violation It's as if they never heard of or disagree with the sentiment of the ninth amendment . . . https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-9/ https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-9/
- kornhole 3y agoDataminr and others have been selling this service to corporate and government customers for years. Activists should all be well aware of this and use protocols not easy for Dataminr to buy, scrape, or identify persons of interest.
- bink 3y agoUsing another protocol is the easy part. Getting everyone else to use it is a problem. If they're organizing rallies they want to have the greatest reach possible.
- tqi 3y agoCan someone explain the legal theory that diffentiates using something like Dataminr to monitor tweets vs simply having an army of agents manually searching for them? I agree that it feels like the scale of the former makes it different, but is there a principled reason why that is the case?
- theGnuMe 3y agoI don't know, but Congress passed legislation to prevent the digitization of gun records. So they have massive paper files and a small set of agents to match guns to crimes. You would think with AI we could track all guns and bullets to crimes eventually.
- hiatus 3y ago> You would think with AI we could track all guns and bullets to crimes eventually. Not sure how that would be achieved since you can make your own guns and bullets in the majority of states.
- one_level_deep 3y ago[dead]
- giantg2 3y ago"Congress passed legislation to prevent the digitization of gun records." Funny thing about that which could also apply to data/AI/etc, is that I understand the ATF is ignoring that law anyways.
- snarf21 3y agoI think the contrast is supposed to be the difference between always monitoring people who post about protesting FOR X and/or protesting AGAINST X versus searching for posts of people who were near some incident related to some protesting or some crime. It is similar to the geo-fence search warrants that were recently discussed here. tl;dr: I see it as the difference between using search tools to monitor for potential suspects vs search tools to implicate already identified suspects.
- CPLX 3y agoI'm struggling to understand the outrage here. It's quite possible I'm missing the point and am open to being educated, but what's being described here is essentially running data analysis tools on the public postings people are making on Twitter right? Everything described in the anecdotes, unless I missed it, was basically someone going on Twitter, a global media platform designed to convey your postings to a mass audience, and then reading the things people wrote. Right? I can think of a variety of things that could have been done after that which would be bad, oppressive things. But are they alleging that? The headline here is "U.S. Marshals spied..." Did they? Like if I post something WITH THE VISIBILITY SET TO PUBLIC VISIBLE BY EVERYONE WITH AN INTERNET CONNECTION EVEN NON-LOGGED IN PEOPLE and then someone reads it, then I can claim someone is spying on me?
- bjt2n3904 3y agoPeople don't communicate well. They use the word "spying", when "surveillance" would be more appropriate. How would you feel if you found the past three weeks, there was someone parked outside your home, who followed you to work, and logged when and where you left? I mean, it's all public information, right? How would you feel if they did this, specifically because of your political beliefs?
- CPLX 3y agoI get the concept. But there's a pretty obvious difference between just sitting in my home and going to work and posting on a global media platform that is literally intended to reach every other living human as its core reason for existing. The argument seems bizarre to me. A much better pre-technology analogy would be if I wrote lots of letters to the editor of a newspaper and people read them. Maybe it would even be a little creepy if the government had an FBI agent in every small town that read letters to the editor and sent them to be filed by topic in Washington or something. But it wouldn't be spying right?
- bjt2n3904 3y agoWho cares whether it's "spying" or "surveillance"? Here's the real issue, which this semantics argument is derailing. Several times, a shooting spree has occurred, and all the government agencies say, "Oh, yeah... We knew about them! Anyways, the mass shooter's community is very much under attack..." Pretty hard to swallow when the federal agencies are spending time and resources holding a magnifying glass over political opponents (with a long, LONG track record of nonviolence).
- asynchronous 3y agoRepeal the patriot act.
- theptip 3y agoI wonder how far you'd get issuing a CCPA deletion request against Dataminr? If your twitter account is linked to your public identity (and you live in CA), presumably you can require them to delete all your tweets from their system?
- tetrep 3y agoWhile I agree with some others here that the idea of the government watching public tweets is generally fine, I think the concern here is that there's various legal restrictions on how the government can conduct surveillance, and by using a willing private company to do the surveillance instead, they can avoid oversight and bypass some (most? all?) of those restrictions. Another concern is the perverse incentives setup by private surveillance tech like this, where you very easily get into ShotSpotter situations where the ability to deliver perceived value to the government is more important that not fabricating evidence to ruin people's lives: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/its-time-police-stop-using-shotspotter https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/its-time-police-stop-u... I know Palantir will work with your data, but do they also offer any sources of data themselves? If so, this sounds more or less the same as that (or at least that part of their offerings). I'm very ignorant of the legal context for this sort of thing, so I really don't know if it'd be trivial (legally) for the government to try to get this information themselves. As an analogy, I think this is (ethically) similar to parallel construction. But rather than hide the illegal activity outright, you tunnel it through a private company. That way you get the same derived value as you would if you had broken the law to do it for yourself, but without the law breaking. I guess something like Room 641A is the best of both worlds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
- cronix 3y agoI don't find scraping publicly accessible data nearly as bad as when they circle planes over protests and track people. Not just the marshals service, but FBI[1] and even the US Air Force[2], etc. A prime example of this was during the riots in Kenosha, WI in 2020, and the subsequent trial of Kyle Rittenhouse. A good deal of the footage they used in the trial was from the FBI surveillance plane[3], and they supplied low resolution footage, but had all persons involved clearly marked and tracked. What they actually have is much clearer than what they provided to the lawyers under subpoena. Combine that with cell phone data, and trackers they manually place on "suspects" and their cars[4]. [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3zvwj/military-fbi-flying-surveillance-planes-george-floyd-protesters https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3zvwj/military-fbi-flying-s... [2] https://theintercept.com/2020/07/23/air-force-surveillance-plane-portland-protests/ https://theintercept.com/2020/07/23/air-force-surveillance-p... [3] https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/03/us/kyle-rittenhouse-trial/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/03/us/kyle-rittenhouse-trial/ind... [4] https://www.kgw.com/article/news/investigations/mysterious-plane-linked-to-federal-agents-flew-over-protesters-in-portland-st-louis/283-ffc54628-980a-432c-a2c7-f9d7f161ff4d https://www.kgw.com/article/news/investigations/mysterious-p...
- nostromo 3y agoMonitoring an active riot seems pretty much what I’d expect the FBI to do. It doesn’t seem that there was any intimidation of peaceful protesters, which obviously would be concerning.
- sangnoir 3y ago> Monitoring an active riot seems pretty much what I’d expect the FBI to do. What - if any - is the difference between a riot and a protest?
- bombcar 3y agoWhich side you’re on. If they’re for what you support, they’re freedom lovers protesting the evils of the totalitarian government. If they’re against what you support, they’re evil thugs rioting to overthrow the rightful government.