One week after Hamas’s October 7 attack, thousands rallied outside the Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles to protest the country’s retaliatory assault on Gaza. The protestors were peaceful, according to local media, “carrying signs that said ‘Free Palestine’ and ‘End the Occupation,’” and watched over by a “sizable police presence in the area.” The LAPD knew the protests were coming: Two days earlier, the department received advanced warning on Dataminr, a social media surveillance firm and “official partner” of X.
Internal Los Angeles Police Department emails obtained via public records request show city police used Dataminr to track Gaza-related demonstrations and other constitutionally protected speech. The department receives real-time alerts from Dataminr not only about protests in progress, but also warnings of upcoming demonstrations as well. Police were tipped off about protests in the Los Angeles area and across the country. On at least one occasion, the emails show a Dataminr employee contacted the LAPD directly to inform officers of a protest being planned that apparently hadn’t been picked up by the company’s automated scanning.
Based on the records obtained by The Intercept, which span October 2023 to April 2024, Dataminr alerted the LAPD of more than 50 different protests, including at least a dozen before they occurred.
It’s unclear whether the LAPD used any of these notifications to inform its response to the wave of pro-Palestine protests that spread across Southern California over the last two years, which have resulted in hundreds of arrests.
Neither the LAPD nor Dataminr responded to a request for comment.
“They are using taxpayer money to enlist companies to conduct this surveillance on social media.”
Privacy and civil liberties experts argue that police surveillance of First Amendment activity from afar has chilling effect on political association, discourse and dissent.
“Police departments are surveilling protests which are First Amendment protected political activity about a matter of public importance,” Jennifer Granick, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, told The Intercept. “They are using taxpayer money to enlist companies to conduct this surveillance on social media. This is especially worrisome now that the Administration is targeting Gaza protesters for arrest and deportation based on protected activity.”
The alerts began pouring in on October 9, when Dataminr flagged a “Protest mentioning Israel” blocking traffic in Beverly Hills, citing a tweet. Over the course of the month, Dataminr tipped off the LAPD to six different protests against the war across Los Angeles. These alerts included information about protests already in progress and information about the time and place of at least one LA protest planned for a future date.
Emails produced by the LAPD in response to The Intercept’s records request show that along with its regular feed of information about constitutionally protec
18 Comments
ryandrake
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!
rqtwteye
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.
josefritzishere
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lenerdenator
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.
jeffbee
It is not "surveillance" when the cops see your tweets.
bgschulman31
This seems like mostly a nothingburger. If you want to communicate privately there are plenty of pieces of software that allow for that.
delichon
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.
jmyeet
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bastardoperator
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.
submeta
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whatshisface
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.
VoodooJuJu
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blorkusmelorkus
Twitter started as TXT2MOB for organizing protests, and now it and social media have become surveillance tools. The irony.
ngruhn
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?
fortran77
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jmyeet
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/
neonate
https://archive.md/ofFDk
nemo44x
This whole thing is “why won’t you let us undermine you?! The law says we can subvert and overthrow you!”
Coercion has limits.