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Dataminr tracked Gaza-related protests
- ryandrake 2y agoHeadline is kind of clickbaity. They could have just as easily used "LAPD Surveilled Gaza Protests Using A Tool Called Dataminr". Bonus: The tool name is in the URL itself!
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- xmprt 2y agoI'd change it to "A Social Media Tool called Dataminr". On its own, the name of the tool is meaningless.
- rqtwteye 2y agoUnless there is a massive rethink of a lot of laws we are running into a surveillance state worse than Orwell could have come up with. "No expectation of privacy in a public space" made sense when there were no databases that could record and analyze everything that's going on and people didn't live half of their lives on the internet. And tech is only going to accelerate the ease of total surveillance. I think Jefferson proposed to let the constitution expire every 19 years. I think he had a point there. Instead of viewing the "Founding Fathers" as the ultimate source of wisdom we should accept that they made decisions that made sense during their time but times have changed so some decisions should change.
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- Aurornis 2y ago> I think Jefferson proposed to let the constitution expire every 19 years. I think he had a point there. Instead of viewing the "Founding Fathers" as the ultimate source of wisdom we should accept that they made decisions that made sense during their time but times have changed so some decisions should change. These ideas sound great when you imagine ideal politicians doing exactly what you want. They're not so appealing when you remember that on a long enough timeline you'll get some political leaders who would abuse such a power to no end: Rewriting the constitution to give the president unchecked power or remove term limits would be more likely targets than anything you're imagining working in your favor.
- krapp 2y ago...and simply not including the 19 year expiration in the new version because why would you?
- geodel 2y agoWhy wait for 19 years? Lets change constitution along administration change in DC.
- baggy_trough 2y agoYou can! Just have to get the votes.
- gs17 2y agoJefferson wanted 19 years to make it something each generation gets the chance to do, based on life expectancy at the time. >And the half of those of 21 years and upwards living at any one instant of time will be dead in 18 years 8 months, or say 19 years as the nearest integral number. Then 19 years is the term beyond which neither the representatives of a nation, nor even the whole nation itself assembled, can validly extend a debt. >[...] On similar ground it may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation. [...] The constitution and the laws of their predecessors extinguished then in their natural course with those who gave them being. This could preserve that being till it ceased to be itself, and no longer. Every constitution then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right.
- _bin_ 2y ago> Jefferson proposed to let the constitution expire every 19 years. This is a terrible idea, actually. The risks of opening the door to majorly modifying the Constitution are very, very high. There are a lot of core freedoms (speech, arms, press come to mind) that would likely come off worse, not better, were we to do so. Which get hit hardest would depend mostly on who's in office at the time, which is extra bad.
- johnisgood 2y agoYou could always make sure it could only increase and not decrease privacy or what have you. Similarly, the "expire every 19 years" must always be included and must never be removed. Gotta keep this small though, because then what's the point...
- krapp 2y ago>You could always make sure it could only increase and not decrease privacy or what have you. How could one "make sure" of this, and with what authority? >Similarly, the "expire every 19 years" must always be included and must never be removed. Again, says who? The constitution has expired, and with it any legal basis for such a requirement.
- johnisgood 2y agoEnforcement is always an issue either way though. So whoever does it today, or would do it either way in our hypothetical scenario.
- gs17 2y agoI don't agree with the idea (and technically by Jefferson's logic it should now be a much longer period, which shows it would need to be more flexible), but whatever process approves the new Constitution (probably involving a Supreme Court-type entity) would have to require these changes. Future Constitutions would both have "this document expires in 19 years" and "the successor of this document must include this clause, and the clause 'this document expires in 19 years'", and another for privacy (which would be up to whatever court allows the new Constitution). Enforcement is still "difficult", but that's kind of inherent in the process.
- eej71 2y agoWhile Jefferson is an understandably venerated figure in the foundation of America, he was not active in the creation of the constitution. He of course wrote The Declaration of Independence and while having misgivings about the strength of the executive branch, he went on to become a hugely influential president. On the filp side, it took him a while to come around to see the folly that was the then French Revolution whereas his political critics - notably Adams, Washington, and the frequently maligned Hamilton, were quick to keep their distance from it. I like Jefferson but he sometimes seems to have an overly rosy and romantic view of revolutions. Tearing down is easy. Building up is very hard.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> Jefferson proposed to let the constitution expire every 19 years. I think he had a point there You want every state to come up with its own way of determining how to send delegates to a convention literally unbound by any law?
- sitkack 2y agoWe are about to watch that show!
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- lenerdenator 2y agoIs this really surprising to anyone? If you're out in public and using public websites to organize protests, it's a given that data will be mined about that. The trick is to make it unattractive for those doing the enforcing to act upon their analysis of that data.
- Teever 2y agoIt is unfortunately surprising to a lot of people. For what ever reason many people lack the ability to understand the casual connections between things that happen online and in the real world.
- tdb7893 2y agoI think that while not surprising it's still interesting and useful to know exactly how they are doing it and what tools they are using. In the US protests are a constitutionally protected right and visibility into how they are monitoring and reacting to them is important.
- shadowgovt 2y agoIf we remove the tech from the story and consider the old "colonial village test": A man walks up and down the street either shouting about, or handing out flyers, that say "We should get together and blockade main street in protest of the illegitimate taxes Congress has passed on our whiskey." Is it legal for the cops to stop him? Probably not. Is it legal for the cops to move their plans around to show up on main street that day? I can't see why it wouldn't be.
- tptacek 2y agoIt's more than legal for the cops to do that; it's a longstanding norm. In fact, at many protests, it's something you actively want to see, because counterprotests can get rowdy and dangerous.
- mmooss 2y ago> If we remove the tech from the story If we remove the tech from the dropping of the atomic bombs, what's the big deal? You can't remove the tech; it is intrinsic to the issue.
- jeffbee 2y agoIt is not "surveillance" when the cops see your tweets.
- giraffe_lady 2y agoJudging by the cops I see around chicago their main responsibility is reading tweets actually.
- bavent 2y agoOr eating Portillos. Or napping in their cars.
- unethical_ban 2y agoDoes surveillance need to be covert? Historically, if the police are observing you or your event specifically, that's surveillance.
- nickff 2y agoI mostly agree with you, but there’s a difference between using a non-covert method of communication like telephone or SMS, and a social media post, which is designed to be relayed and amplified.
- Tostino 2y agoWhat legitimate reason would the police have for monitoring everything on social media that is protected by the Constitution?
- nickff 2y agoThat really depends on which police you're talking about, and one's views on the Constitution. State and local police have fairly broad powers, and I don't know much about California's laws, so I'm not in a position to judge this.
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- bgschulman31 2y agoThis seems like mostly a nothingburger. If you want to communicate privately there are plenty of pieces of software that allow for that.
- mmooss 2y agoHow do you communicate with the public and attract to a protest people you don't already know?
- delichon 2y agoImagine the reverse: A police department vows not to use social media to help predict where to deploy their forces to protect public safety. That sounds like malpractice. A commitment to civil rights doesn't restrict them from gathering real time public intelligence, a.k.a. situational awareness, to do their job.
- typon 2y agoImagine the actual reverse: police surveil American jews for attending pro Israel/pro genocide protests. The police chief would be fired within a day.
- bigolkevin 2y agoRespecting people's civil rights and the spirit of the Constitution? Oh, the horror!
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- parsd 2y ago[flagged]
- text0404 2y agodo you have citations for any of this ("most protestors", "calling for destruction", "extermination", "misinformation", etc)? you may also be surprised to find that much of the world doesn't consider the opinions of the USG to be reliable, including the claim that Israel is not committing genocide - other organizations such as the UN and human rights groups like Amnesty and HRW disagree.
- YZF 2y ago[flagged]
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- bastardoperator 2y agoLAPD and LASD are going to bankrupt Los Angeles. They're more concerned with being a paramilitary police force versus stopping or preventing neighborhood crime.
- tharne 2y ago> They're more concerned with being a paramilitary police force versus stopping or preventing neighborhood crime. Didn't they pull back on enforcement of quality of life crimes when the previous DA stopped prosecuting criminals? You can't expect the police to arrest criminals knowing full well the DA is immediately going to drop or reduce charges and let them loose.
- MegaButts 2y ago> You can't expect the police to arrest criminals knowing full well the DA is immediately going to drop or reduce charges and let them loose. You can't expect the police to do their jobs?
- tharne 2y ago> You can't expect the police to do their jobs? Imagine you're a programmer, or a chef, or a carpenter, really anything. Now imagine you go to work every day, put in 8-10 hours a day working hard, and at the end of each day someone in a more powerful position than yourself throws out, ignores, or otherwise destroys all of your work for that day. And this happens every day, day after day. No matter your work ethic or how much you care about your job, sooner or later after enough of your work is sabotaged, you're going to give up. So no, I do not expect the police to "do their job" as you put it, when a chief prosecutor publicly and vocally undermines that work each and every day. If you can't understand that very fundamental human reaction, then I don't know what to tell you.
- MegaButts 2y agoWhenever you feel like not doing your job, just tell your boss "I don't want to" and see how that goes for you. I understand how motivation works. Sometimes doing a job sucks. That's part of why you get paid to do it. It sounds to me like those police officers don't want to do their jobs. I'd encourage them to quit instead of wasting tax dollars. Of course the real issue is they want the money without the work, and the respect without having to earn it.
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- whatshisface 2y agoHere's an interesting thought about how preferential surveillance can lead to repression even when it's public and not itself acted on: 1. Every demographic commits petty crimes and code violations at about the same rate (things like parking violations and music piracy). 2. However, people who are being watched will be caught more often. 3. The end result is that people in the "wrong" crowd on average are punished more than people in the "right" one at an equal level of misbehavior.
- amarcheschi 2y agoJust today I was preparing some slides for a course that makes the student participate and show some topics we're interested in regarding social and ethical issues in compsci I googled a bit and I found a hn comment that talked about an article which explains what you say Basically, they estimate drug use in the population, and they draw a map, and black and white people more or less have the same habits in drugs use. They draw a map of the past arrests by the police for drug crimes and they're skewed towards the black neighborhood. There's a bit more about it since the article dealt with predictive policing and Ai but the gist is what you're saying, and this causes a self reinforcing feedback for the police (which in turn arrests more black people and the loop goes on) https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2016.00960.x https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-...
- jimbob45 2y agoSounds like that estimate is doing all of the heavy lifting and cannot, by definition, ever be verified.
- amarcheschi 2y agoYeah, that's quite a strong assumption. Basically, they're assuming that the local drug use is similar to the national one. While not perfect, they provide some other cases in which these data were deemed more trustworthy than police reports. at least to me it is quite crystalline that a system relying on past police data to predict future crime will be inherently biased by the fact that the police data itself is biased towards certain demographics
- VoodooJuJu 2y ago[dead]
- blorkusmelorkus 2y agoTwitter started as TXT2MOB for organizing protests, and now it and social media have become surveillance tools. The irony.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> Twitter started as TXT2MOB for organizing protests, and now it and social media have become surveillance tools Propaganda, communication and surveillance vary only inasmuch as the sender and/or receiver are coöperating. When done in public, communication necessarily empowers the other two.
- Centigonal 2y agoThis is a really great piece of wisdom. Thank you!
- blorkusmelorkus 2y agoWhat are “the other” two here?
- JumpCrisscross 2y agoPropaganda and surveillance. If you’re communicating in the open, it’s trivial for a non-coöperating receiver to tap in. And it’s only a touch more trivial for a non-coöperating sender to join in on the rabble. You cannot have a private and public communication protocol.
- blorkusmelorkus 2y agoOh right. Thanks for explaining. There’s more packed into your comment than I expected.
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- ngruhn 2y agoDon’t you have to register protests in the US? So if there registered the police already knows about them, right? And if not they are illegal, no?
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> And if not they are illegal, no Usually not, no. At least not until lawfully ordered to disburse.
- sureglymop 2y agoThis isn't a statement about these specific protests (that I'm not informed enough about) but don't you find "registering" a protest at least a little bit laughable?
- 7402 2y agoIt depends where you are and the circumstances. You certainly need a Parade Permit if you will be marching down a city street blocking traffic, e.g, for New York City: https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/services/law-enforcement/permits-licenses-permits.page https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/services/law-enforcement/permi...
- zdragnar 2y agoEven then, it isn't often enforced. A few times a year people walk out into freeways in groups to shut down traffic and get at most a slap on the hand for it.
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- swores 2y agoStrongly disagree, both with the claim that the protestors don't care about peace elsewhere, and with the claim that Israel's actions are "defensive".
- YZF 2y ago[flagged]
- beepbooptheory 2y agoJust some small corrections here because the news has changed since like last year where you still seem to be. As of today, Israel and Hamas have agreed to a ceasefire (after tons of delays, like a negotiator being assassinated [1], but that was a moment ago), but one side is not actually respecting it [2], and the other side is literally in the process of dying en masse from hunger [3,4]. Really hard to even know what you are talking about here! 1. https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2024/0801/hamas-assassination-gaza-cease-fire-negotiations https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2024/0801/hamas-... 2. https://archive.is/rzLYF https://archive.is/rzLYF 3. https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2025/3/17/palestinians-in-gaza-suffer-extreme-hunger-under-israeli-blockade https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2025/3/17/palesti... 4. https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/03/1147312 https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/03/1147312
- jmyeet 2y agoFor a long time tech people lived in a bubble believing the idealistic BS spun by Silicon Valley. What we've seen over the last few years is how the mask has come off. There are two factors at play here: 1. The wealthy, and by extension Silicon Valley founders, inevitably end up moving in lockstep with US government policy. Wealthy people inevitably become conservative to protect and grow their wealth. Any idealism is a temporary recruiting tool. Ultimately, all tech companies become defense contractors and end up aiding the surveillance state, repressing speech and supporting gencoide (eg Myanmar); and 2. Transhumanism [1]. I can remember hearing about this from tech people a decade ago. I really had no idea how popular this was (and has become). Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are all transhumanists. The central idea here is "what can I do now to ensure the best future for the gene pool?" And of course all these weirdos think their genes are superior because they're rich. It's why the likes of Elon can't stop having children. It's not surprising Dataminr (who I'd honestly never heard of until now) is providing material support to repression. This is every tech company. [1]: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT2goBEvS/ https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT2goBEvS/
- neonate 2y agohttps://archive.md/ofFDk https://archive.md/ofFDk
- nemo44x 2y agoThis whole thing is “why won’t you let us undermine you?! The law says we can subvert and overthrow you!” Coercion has limits.
- gunian 2y ago[dead]
- bawolff 2y agoAm i weird in that this feels kind of normal (im not american)? Protests should be protected, but i normally assume protestors get permits, and a reasonable police presence is around. Not to intimidate anyone, but just to make sure nobody gets too rowdy, keep protestors and counter-protestors away from each other (to prevent violence), provide aid if anyone gets hurt (big masses of people is always a trample risk). Otherwise just do normal crowd control sort of things. If they were surveiling individuals who participated afterwards, maybe that would be something, but it seems like (according to the article) all they were doing was keeping track of when protests were happening. Protests are not private events. They are literally the most non-private event possible. That is the entire point. I dont think there is any reasonable expectation of privacy in terms of time&date of demonstrations.
- aprilthird2021 2y agoYeah it's a tool, the use of it will show the issue. For example if they only surveil certain types of protests and not others. Another worrying element of protest surveillance is the documented practice of sending in provocateurs who commit violence or break stuff or cause problems to allow a pretense for crackdowns.
- chakintosh 2y ago> but i normally assume protestors get permits, Good luck obtaining a permit for a Gaza protest from people in Israel's payroll.
- bawolff 2y agoIn most democracies there are rules about being fair in terms of issuing permits and a court system where you can sue if they aren't fair in issuing permits.
- hulitu 2y ago> In most democracies there are rules about being fair in terms of issuing permits and a court system where you can sue if they aren't fair in issuing permits. But this does not guarantee that you will get a permit.
- kazinator 2y agoSo let's get this straight. People are tweeting that they're going to protest somewhere. But when cops see these tweets, that "surveillance".
- mattigames 2y agoThat's an oversimplification, it's when cops start keeping track on people based on such data, plus analyzing their behavior as a group.
- chneu 2y agoIs it though? People are willfully submitting all this information to American companies that we know share info with police. When cops start using geolocation data that isn't enabled I'll be more worried.
- kazinator 2y agoPeaceful protest sometimes attract a few bad apples. Things have ways of going wrong. If the police weren't on top of these activities, they would look massively incompetent in their job.