Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

Bark louder, little dog.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

Prediction: the GOP will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

In my day, never was longer.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

Let there be snark.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

Infrastructure week. at last.

Consistently wrong since 2002

You are here: Home / Careful What You Post to Social Media, Volume 1984

Careful What You Post to Social Media, Volume 1984

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This is bad:

For years, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook have provided data to a company marketing social media surveillance tools to police, according to a newly published investigation by the ACLU of Northern California. Geofeedia used the company’s APIs to create real-time maps of social media activity in protest areas, maps which were subsequently used to identify, and in some cases arrest, protestors shortly after their posts became public. All three services have terminated Geofeedia’s access to the relevant APIs.

The ACLU’s report includes direct evidence the tool was used to monitor unrest after the Freddie Gray verdict in Baltimore, in the form of a testimonial provided by Geofeedia to an unnamed police department. As protests escalated, police and Geofeedia representatives monitored social media posts in real time, in some cases running photos through a facial recognition systems to locate protestors with outstanding warrants.

The testimonial describes one specific case at a local high school, where students planned to walk out of class to join the crowds. “We were able to turn around and alert local police, who intercepted the kids — some of whom had already hijacked a metro bus — and found their backpacks full of rocks, bottles, and fence posts,” Baltimore police Sergeant Andrew Vaccaro says in the testimonial. “They planned to do a lot of damage.”

Geofeedia demonstrated similar capabilities in a public demo compiled around the Ferguson protests. Notably, the resulting map makes no distinction between posts by protestors and credentialed press, drawing all relevant posts into the same graphic. All the data included in the map is drawn from publicly available metadata — specifically images, geolocation data, and screen names available on Instagram’s public feed. Still, it’s easy to see how such a tool could be used by police to identify and retain data on protestors at an otherwise impossible scale.

Precrime.

Reader Interactions

102Comments

  3. 3.

    Ken

    Fence posts secreted in back packs?! My dog, how big were these back packs?!

    This is sort of ‘Minority Report ‘ish’…

  6. 6.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    @Ken: Oh is that what Minority Report was about? I think maybe I saw it but oddly I can’t remember anything about it. First time I saw the concept was the Red Dwarf book above.

  11. 11.

    Baud

    This is the headline

    Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram surveillance tool was used to arrest Baltimore protestors

    The story, however, does not give an example of a single protestor who was arrested.

  13. 13.

    Mike J

    @scav: There have been complaints before about police using publicly posted info to know what demonstrators were going to do. This seems to go beyond that to give out location data that would not normally be public.

    If the high schoolers openly talked on twitter about their walk out plans, I don’t really feel sorry for them if the school admin read their public tweets.

  14. 14.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    So based on this I expect a swarm of ambulances and rescue vehicles to converge on John’s new house any minute. “We were alerted by his online postings that he planned to do some of the remodeling himself..”

  18. 18.

    Schlemazel

    @eldorado:
    between your car, your phone, tv cameras on every intersection and major highway plus their ability to suck up every email, tweet and FB post we could easily be entering an era where no criminal is safe because they can be identified, tracked and convicted so easily. The teensy-eensy down side is you are not free to go anywhere, do anything or say anything that is not approved by the authorities.

  21. 21.

    different-church-lady

    Yeah, and not only that, but when you use those sevices everyone else in the world can see your idiotic thoughts.

  22. 22.

    ThresherK

    Chuck Todd, on Jeopardy!, read a clue which described Joe McCarthy as “controversial”. No idea if he wrote it.

  24. 24.

    Schlemazel

    @shomi:
    good thing nobody ever has ever, never ever, tried to misuse data like that.

    I’d say you have shit for brains but it would be insulting to shit. You and svr should go somewhere quiet and have a nice long talk.

  25. 25.

    Mike J

    Hillary en español ‏@Hillary_esp 55 minutes ago
    Gmar Jatimá Tová para aquellos celebrando Yom Kippur. Deseándoles un día de reflexión y un ayuno liviano. -H

  26. 26.

    Chris

    @Pogonip:

    Why do people use social media?

    Because why hide from the NSA when you could be burying it in an avalanche of useless data? Let the NSA strain itself sifting through cat videos, relationship updates, and pictures of everybody’s food, until it collectively short-circuits under the strain like one of the artificial intelligences from original Star Trek.

  27. 27.

    Major Major Major Major

    Yeah, in many respects right now… with regard to personal information and the government/advertisers/other interested parties… things about you are unknown not because they’re unknowable but because nobody happens to be digging in that particular spot. The idea is not new but the scale is.

  28. 28.

    Felonius Monk

    @Chris:

    Because why hide from the NSA when you could be burying it in an avalanche of useless data?

    Right on. Everybody should be creating their own nsa-destructor bot to keep their hoppers full of useless, meaningless shit.

  31. 31.

    Roger Moore

    @Mike J:

    There have been complaints before about police using publicly posted info to know what demonstrators were going to do. This seems to go beyond that to give out location data that would not normally be public.

    I don’t know how much of that really isn’t public. Tweets often have a location associated with them, and most phones these days will automatically geotag their photos. People just don’t realize how much information they’re leaking. I wouldn’t expect the kind of people who think they can plan a public disturbance on an open social media site and keep it secret to be especially good at scrubbing their metadata.

  32. 32.

    opiejeanne

    @Mike J: The recent occupiers (Snack Team Six) of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge posted lots of info on Facebook about what they planned to do. Many of us kept pestering the FBI with notes that read: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS???? They assured us that they were paying attention, but what was amazing was the reaction of these ninnies: “No fair! You aren’t supposed to be reading our public Fb pages!”

  34. 34.

    scav

    @Mike J: I think I mentioned the difference in scale (both in terms of number of people and coverage in time), but that last is true — the geographic coordinates are a specific issue. I’ve been following the basic dynamic because I was doing some work on geographic privacy about 16 years ago. I think in this instance, the scale(s) and the commercialization issues rather matter. Private companies don’t have to worry about getting permission for surveillance and this is sort of carpet surveillance — I wonder how evidence gathered this way will stand up in any ensuing trials. The intelligence about posting things clear-text should be pretty obvious.

  36. 36.

    Enhanced Voting Techinques

    @Schlemazel:

    good thing nobody ever has ever, never ever, tried to misuse data like that.

    Let us consider the true horror here; all these programs that are written to monitor and judge dangerous social activity are written by the most poorly socialized segment of our society; programmers.

  37. 37.

    JMG

    I seriously wonder if/when there’s another major coordinated attack on the US, it’ll be coordinated and planned by snail mail. The ultimate Purloined Letter gambit.

  39. 39.

    Mike J

    @Felonius Monk:

    Everybody should be creating their own nsa-destructor bot to keep their hoppers full of useless, meaningless shit

    If you use emacs to read your email, as all thinking people do, you can “M-x spook” to add NSA bait to all your email.

    I took 5 minutes and ported spook mode to a greasemonkey script that runs on balloon juice a year or two ago. I could probably dig it out if you want to append stuff like:

    assassination DES NORAD Delta Force Waco, Texas SDI explosion Serbian Panama Uzi Ft. Meade SEAL Team 6 Honduras PLO NSA

    to your comments,

  42. 42.

    opiejeanne

    @Roger Moore: I visited an upscale mall nearby last year around Christmas and two stores somehow tagged my phone and texted me ads as I walked past. I had the devil of a time blocking them and still don’t understand if what they did is legal or just a royal nuisance.

  47. 47.

    Jay Noble

    The Kids have probably got a pretty good handle on this. Many of we Olds get it. The big thing the Olds, (esp. GOP’ers) don’t seem to grasp is if it’s digital, it’s not going away. They are operating under the old rules where “deny and lie” could be gotten away with.
    Your permanent record is permanent and WILL follow you forever and it doesn’t stop being recorded when you graduate high school.

  48. 48.

    p.a.

    You could get the them half way to info overload just by feeding them the Montreal Canadiens fbook feed. They’ll post if a player farts.

  49. 49.

    Chris

    @Emma:

    Even as a kid, in the early 2000s when things weren’t quite as digitized yet, I remember reading “1984” for school and thinking that the number of technicians and analysts behind the scenes required to monitor every telescreen in Oceania must’ve been stupendous. (And of course, you need other analysts and technicians watching those analysts and technicians, and a separate group of other analysts and technicians to watch THOSE analysts and technicians, and…)

  53. 53.

    Chris

    @Baud:
    @Emma:

    Wait. You’re right. I just fucking solved the un/under-employment problem. Holy shit.

    WE WANT BIG BROTHER!
    WE WANT BIG BROTHER!
    WE WANT BIG BROTHER!

  58. 58.

    JPL

    OT OT Obama was in NC today for Hillary and gave a great speech. He really does unload.
    link

    One line that rang true , with that tape, he couldn’t get hired by 7/11

  63. 63.

    RaflW

    I’m sure glad Trump is down by, what, 8% or so. Because now we can have interminable threads where regulars here can call each other shit for brains and other insults over topics other than him.

    Later, y’all.

  64. 64.

    Ruviana

    @srv: I’m no fan of Erick but I followed Booman’s link on WaMo. Think what you will (this more to other commenters than to srv) but I felt so terribly bad for him and his wife, thinking about their small children. I hope they do recover.

  73. 73.

    geg6

    @Ruviana:

    That’s three of us. I’m always paranoid about phones and I turn off all my location settings on mine. I don’t deal or buy any more but the paranoia of my youth never leaves.

  75. 75.

    raven

    @geg6: I took a different approach, fuck it! I will say that when I quit drinking I got pulled over three times in as many weeks and if that had happened to me any other time prior my ass would have been in jail. I took that as a sign to not go back.

  78. 78.

    germy

    Trump surrogate Boris Epshteyn was apparently unimpressed with Al Gore’s Florida rally appearance with Hillary Clinton today, and made no bones about it.

    While trying to explain to Jake Tapper why Trump “unshackled” was going to be so much, much better than Trump “in chains,” Epshteyn took a swipe at Clinton, Florida, Gore, mosquitoes, and Zika.

    “[The race] will be even clearer between [Trump] as the ultimate outsider and Hillary Clinton, the ultimate insider,” he argued. “Today, having the rally with Al Gore. I felt pretty bad for her sitting there. Sounded pretty boring talking about mosquitoes’ metabolism and all that stuff.”

    Tapper retorted, “The mosquitos carry the deadly Zika virus so probably the people in Florida were paying attention.”

    (crooksandliars)

  82. 82.

    Villago Delenda Est

    Baltimore police Sergeant Andrew Vaccaro says in the testimonial. “They planned to do a lot of damage.”

    Like we should believe you, blue uniformed asshole.

  83. 83.

    Chip Daniels

    Part of what makes this unnerving is that the average citizen has no idea of what sort of data/ metadata is being stored and analyzed, and what is not.

    I have no idea of my cell phone calls can or are being listened to; or my emails being read, or Facebook posts, or this post, or maybe it is just a log of what sites I visit, or maybe none of this. I just don’t know, and have no way to really know for certain.

    With traditional forms of surveillance, citizens grasped what was public (my window shades are open, or the outside of a mailed envelope) and what was private (my shades are down, the contents of an envelope).

    I constantly see a lot of harumphing from tech savvy people lecturing us about paranoia and how this is all overblown.

    But really, how the fuck do you really know? The game of lockpick and locksmith is never over, and as soon as you learn how to spot one eavesdropping method, another one is developed that you are completely unaware of.

    What we do know, for an absolute fact from stories like this, is that the police WANT to do this, very very badly.

  84. 84.

    danielx

    @Schlemazel:

    good thing nobody ever has ever, never ever, tried to misuse data like that.

    He does tend to miss the point, which is not filing charges (although that’s okay too if possible), but leverage. The infamous files maintained by J. Edgar Hoover were used to, ah, influence people into seeing things Hoover’s way. You’ll never – ever – see a congressional hearing or legislation which seriously threatens No Such Agency’s funding or freedom of action in any real sense, and for much the same reasons.

  85. 85.

    danielx

    @Chip Daniels:

    After the last few years, one thing of which I am tolerably certain is that whenever a spokesperson for a government agency makes a statement about what sort of information they collect, and why, he or she is lying like a Persian carpet. For chrissakes, the head of the NSA perjured himself in a public congressional hearing, and the result was….crickets.

  87. 87.

    SiubhanDuinne, liberal mob enforcer bitch

    @Ruviana:

    Today was an amazing trifecta for me. Erick’s piece moved me to tears. I don’t care how blinded by the right he is, that is terrible that he and his wife both have such serious illnesses, and I wish both of them, and their young children, many happy years together.

    Then there were George Will and David Brooks. I honestly never thought I’d applaud anything either of them wrote, but their fear, disdain, and loathing of Trump has done it.

    Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t turned stupid, nor have I gone over to the Other Side. But let’s give credit where it’s due, and compassion where it’s needed. Thank you to three columnists I never thought I’d even acknowledge.

  88. 88.

    Major Major Major Major

    @Chip Daniels: I know a fair bit of that as of about 18 months ago, but obviously things could have changed. There aren’t that many non-advertiser people listening, the danger for you is the fact that all these private companies you click through EULA’s for are *storing* it. Often poorly. This is one of the reasons the San Bernadino phone was so important.

  90. 90.

    randy khan

    @shomi:

    Not that long ago, all of the major incumbent local phone companies (in those days, Southwestern Bell, Verizon, BellSouth, and Qwest) had programs under which they essentially sent all international traffic to the NSA. It was big news when it came out, but nobody in the business was surprised in the least. There’s a long tradition of telecom companies more or less doing whatever police and the national security apparatus ask, partly because some of that business is lucrative, partly because they want other business and figure their competitors will get it if they don’t play ball, and partly because they don’t really care about customer privacy (and, in fact, would be very happy if there were no protection of customer privacy at all). Heck, there were whole departments devoted to giving NSA et al. whatever they wanted. My expectation is that many of the companies in the social media business reached the same conclusions as the telephone companies, particularly since they’re all hot to monetize their customer data. (Or, to paraphrase Steve Jobs, if the thing you’re getting is free, you’re not the customer – you’re the product.)

    And, of course, there are plenty of stories of abuse of the information once it got into the hands of law enforcement and, particularly, the NSA. So I guess what I’m saying is that it doesn’t take much in the way of conspiracy theorizing to believe that the same kinds of things are likely to happen with social media.

  92. 92.

    JR in WV

    @shomi:

    Your ignorance knows no bounds; you could completely fill the Grand Canyon in mere moments with what you don’t know or understand.

    So glad you could spend time here, what an anti-role-model for all~!!

  93. 93.

    JR in WV

    @srv:

    It appears to be real. In the same piece he talks about wanting his children to believe in the Garden of Eden, and Jesus, and know that their parents love them.

    Not sure which part is fantasy to him…

    I don’t wish illness on anyone, we’ve had plenty of it. But the religious fantasies don’t do it for me. Cruelty to children to teach them illogical absurdities before they have the faculties to distinguish between reality and fantasy. The Snake and the evil apple of knowledge is one of the most dangerous myths ever invented, and he’s proud of it.

  95. 95.

    JR in WV

    @Mike J:

    I have a friend who names WiFi routers “FBI surveillance node 327” and such. I wonder who would try to link to such a named node. He can be quite inventive about the names…

  97. 97.

    eldorado

    @shomi: no. you are simply wrong. everything is being tracked and recorded and it is just a matter of who cares enough to use that against you, and how competent the trackers (sites you might have accounts at or their 3rd party parasites) are at tracking and also keeping that data safe (or selling it). are you a target of a state actor? oh sorry, no hope. a big group of some issue based hacker group? you will need to hire professional services and even that, as the krebs deal showed last week it might not be enough. after that, depending on how much time and particular skill you have managed your online presence you might be able to keep people out. but that takes a very very real discipline that most people aren’t going to be able to manage.

    and i say that as someone who is (nearly) anon on this stupid internet since the early nineties.

    ETA: all the doxxed ladies who thought they had protected themselves, but the mra dudes figured out by piecing together accounts and figuring out (or buying) passwords

  98. 98.

    burnspbesq

    @Schlemazel:

    I take comfort in the fact that in order for this techno-dystopian fanrasy to become reality, police departments would have to become competent.

  101. 101.

    Plantsmantx

    @Mike J:

    Police said the riots that roiled through West Baltimore last April 27 started after about 100 students walked out of Douglass in protest, one of many demonstrations that transpired in the city following the funeral of Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old man who died from injuries he sustained while in police custody.

    Shortly after the walkout a violent standoff between youth and residents unfolded at Mondawmin Mall, which is adjacent to Douglass, and where its nearly 1,000 students go to take the bus to and from school.

    It was later revealed that the Mondawmin bus transportation hub was shut down, leaving Douglass students and more than 5,000 other students who pass through the hub daily stranded. To this day, no city agency has taken responsibility for ordering the shutdown.

    After watching his students explain how they were blamed perhaps because their bright orange uniform shirts were the most visible as they attempted to get home from Mondawmin that day, Jesse Schneiderman, an American government teacher interjected.

    “We deserve an explanation, too,” he said. “I want to know who stranded 1,100 of my students.”

    One year after riots, Frederick Douglass students seek to reclaim narrative of Mondawmin

  102. 102.

    mr_gravity

    @shomi: @danielx: Kind of late to the party but I think the main takeaway is:

    1. The ability to parse the data is only getting better.
    2. People are willing to pay for the tasty bits.
    3. Nothing is ever deleted.

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