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Dataminr tracked Gaza-related protests by jbegley

Dataminr tracked Gaza-related protests by jbegley

18 Comments

  • Post Author
    ryandrake
    Posted March 17, 2025 at 5:34 pm

    Headline 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!

  • Post Author
    rqtwteye
    Posted March 17, 2025 at 5:38 pm

    Unless 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.

  • Post Author
    josefritzishere
    Posted March 17, 2025 at 5:41 pm

    [flagged]

  • Post Author
    lenerdenator
    Posted March 17, 2025 at 5:57 pm

    Is 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.

  • Post Author
    jeffbee
    Posted March 17, 2025 at 6:06 pm

    It is not "surveillance" when the cops see your tweets.

  • Post Author
    bgschulman31
    Posted March 17, 2025 at 6:19 pm

    This seems like mostly a nothingburger. If you want to communicate privately there are plenty of pieces of software that allow for that.

  • Post Author
    delichon
    Posted March 17, 2025 at 6:20 pm

    Imagine 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.

  • Post Author
    jmyeet
    Posted March 17, 2025 at 6:23 pm

    [flagged]

  • Post Author
    bastardoperator
    Posted March 17, 2025 at 6:26 pm

    LAPD and LASD are going to bankrupt Los Angeles. They're more concerned with being a paramilitary police force versus stopping or preventing neighborhood crime.

  • Post Author
    submeta
    Posted March 17, 2025 at 6:59 pm

    [flagged]

  • Post Author
    whatshisface
    Posted March 17, 2025 at 7:18 pm

    Here'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.

  • Post Author
    VoodooJuJu
    Posted March 17, 2025 at 9:41 pm

    [dead]

  • Post Author
    blorkusmelorkus
    Posted March 17, 2025 at 9:49 pm

    Twitter started as TXT2MOB for organizing protests, and now it and social media have become surveillance tools. The irony.

  • Post Author
    ngruhn
    Posted March 17, 2025 at 10:42 pm

    Don’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?

  • Post Author
    fortran77
    Posted March 17, 2025 at 10:52 pm

    [flagged]

  • Post Author
    jmyeet
    Posted March 17, 2025 at 11:23 pm

    For 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/

  • Post Author
    neonate
    Posted March 17, 2025 at 11:31 pm
  • Post Author
    nemo44x
    Posted March 18, 2025 at 3:10 am

    This whole thing is “why won’t you let us undermine you?! The law says we can subvert and overthrow you!”

    Coercion has limits.

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