Aren’t the tweets ingested by Dataminr public? I agree this would be problematic if they were using private data, but using data available to anyone on the platform feels like fair game.
If the supreme court can learn new tricks, I'm confident HN can finally learn the difference between a police officer on his beat and a fully-automated data firehose mined in realtime or other perversions of technology. Witness United States v. Jones, the opinion delivered by Scalia:
The Government contends that the Harlan standard
shows that no search occurred here, since Jones had no
“reasonable expectation of privacy” in the area of the Jeep
accessed by Government agents (its underbody) and in the
locations of the Jeep on the public roads, which were
visible to all. But we need not address the Government’s
contentions, because Jones’s Fourth Amendment rights
do not rise or fall with the Katz formulation. At bottom,
we must “assur[e] preservation of that degree of privacy
against government that existed when the Fourth
Amendment was adopted.”
Viewing a public tweet is not trespassing - its the point of the entire platform. US vs Jones determined that installing a tracker on a private vehicle is trespassing.
As a tax payer, I would prefer my tax dollars are used as efficiently as possible - so if the alternative is to hire human police officers to manually search twitter and create reports then I would oppose that in favor of automated technology. I don't think the technology is the debate here, it simply enables us as humans to be more efficient. The decision to surveil is the debate here, and I can see it both ways. Do I think the police should be aware of a large gathering (regardless of purpose) in their cities? Yes, I think that's prudent for a variety of public safety reasons. Do I want this done in a way that does not interfere with protests or have a chilling effect? Yes, absolutely.
This is an ever present issue as technology advances and what was not possible to efficiently or effectively do before is now possible through these new techniques. And it is not limited to government and law enforcement either, the worst transgressions are from the private sector and political campaigns.
As a society we are only starting to become aware of the implications. "Fair game" is the biggest misnomer - it is anything but.
Speed of any car currently travelling on US public roads is public information, it is publicly observable, people have no expectation of privacy on this. Now imagine some technology made it possible to observe and mine this data en masse, and to issue speeding tickets all at once based on it, as often as speeding occurs. This would be so massively disruptive that the speed limits and/or the law itself would have to change to make things work back again.
This is not to have a blanket claim that law enforcement should always have less data. The point is that innovation in law enforcement tech has to be balanced with accountability, experience and changes in the actual law. Especially in a climate in which rightful use of authority is in question, the last thing we would want is to empower further asymmetry.
We don't even need to change the law. An even simpler fix is to simply veto the idiot who thought it was a good idea to mass issue those tickets without leniency. Personally I think this human factor already exists in our government. Police can give warnings even when they have you dead to rights. And they are subject to pressure both to write more tickets or to write fewer, depending on the climate.
However I'd say changing the law is the best option of them all. Restricting surveillance protects people out in suburbia from cops who are almost never there anyway, while poor schmucks downtown have to deal with the "broken window policies" getting tickets for a lot of nonsense.
> ...very pessimistic of law enforcement getting anywhere near politics.
> Many of the ugliest chapters in our history involve failing to uphold this standard.
I don’t have data to back this up, but I certainly would not be shocked to read a study which showed that police, rather than enforcing laws universally, are far more likely to be using their discretion attempting to steer society by selectively punishing segments of people who they view as “unamerican.” Whether it’s done to juggalo types from “the wrong side of the tracks”; strange religions; different races; or like in the past, pot smokers, guys with long hair, or punks with colors in their hair. etc... etc... etc...
I don’t know how we fix this problem, but I suspect the tendency to view “others” as problematic and applying pressure to other groups in a misguided attempt to steer them into compliance is part of the problem.
