Did NOT happen under Trump...NOT NOT NOT.
------------------
How Police Are Watching You on Social Media
In October, the ACLU released emails showing that a social media monitoring company called Geofeedia had tracked the accounts of Black Lives Matter protesters for law enforcement clients. The revelations of social media spying made headlines and led Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to cut off Geofeedia’s access to bulk user data (which in turn prompted the company to slash half its staff). Since then, two more social media monitoring companies, Snap Trends and Media Sonar, lost Twitter data access for similar surveillance activities.
Civil liberties advocates have celebrated these decisions, but new documents suggest police still have plenty of other tools to spy on social media users.
Jennifer Helsby, co-founder of the police accountability group Lucy Parsons Labs, provided CityLab with a slideshow prepared by a former employee of the Cook County Sheriff’s Office Intelligence Center that sheds some light on how police use social media. The presentation shows intelligence analysts how to mine location and content data from Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram—and advises them on setting up fake accounts and assembling dossiers on persons of interest.
One tip shows sites such as Statigram and Instamap, which can help law enforcement analyze photo trends or collect photos on individuals in targeted areas. This example points to images of individuals collected using Instamap near the Cook County Jail, which the Cook County Sheriff’s Office operates, as well as images of a child, a young woman, and families in Chicago.
Other slides reveal more advanced monitoring techniques. Geofeedia, the presentation states, can be used to geolocate users and conduct a “Radius and Polygram search” of an area for social media content. Echosec, a lesser known tool can monitor and geofence users, which allows police (and marketers) to track and collect users’ posts as soon as they are disseminated within a bounded area.
These tools rely on individuals’ public social media posts, but the slideshow also explains that police can use “catfishing”—creating fake accounts—to get non-public social media data, even though such accounts are not permitted on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
While social media surveillance is often thought of as targeting certain locations or terms, such as hashtags, the Cook County Sheriff’s Office records suggest that intelligence analysts are also compiling information on persons of interest for longer term retention, not just for “situational awareness” at public events. Here’s a sample “Intelligence Information Report,” for example, to collect photos and other information.
The presentation doesn’t get into whether there are limits on who can be the target of these operations, or what legal safeguards they are ensured. One slide mentions terms such as “probable cause” and “search warrant” but there is no explanation if or how legal procedures affect the monitoring. Some of the slides suggest this police monitoring is not necessarily focused on dangerous criminal suspects. For example, the presentation links to an ABC news clip featuring a specialized LAPD unit “dedicated to tracking teen parties in real time by monitoring social media.” (The Cook County Sheriff’s Office declined CityLab’s requests for comment on its social media monitoring program.)
