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Dataminr<\/b>, la compa\u00f1\u00eda de inteligencia artificial (creada por la Cia) que ofrece alertas de informaci\u00f3n en tiempo real, colabor\u00f3 con la polic\u00eda de Estados Unidos en el marco de las protestas contra el racismo y la violencia policial en ese pa\u00eds.<\/p>\n
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Para ello Dataminr us\u00f3 \u201cfirehouse\u201d de Twitter, un flujo en tiempo real de todos los tweets que se realizan en la plataforma y que no es proporcionado usualmente a los desarrolladores por la red social.<\/p>\n
Por otra parte, usando esos datos Dataminr tambi\u00e9n habr\u00eda establecido registros de los planes para pr\u00f3ximas protestas<\/b> con el fin de ayudar a la polic\u00eda a trazar sus planes de monitoreo.<\/p>\n
\u201cDataminr rastre\u00f3 meticulosamente no solo las protestas en curso, sino que mantuvo registros exhaustivos de las pr\u00f3ximas manifestaciones contra la violencia policial en ciudades de todo el pa\u00eds para ayudar a su personal a organizar sus esfuerzos de monitoreo, incluido el tiempo esperado de los eventos y el lugar de inicio dentro de esas ciudades\u201d,<\/i> dice el reporte de Intercept. <\/i><\/p>\n
\u201cUn calendario de protestas visto por The Intercept muestra que Dataminr estaba expl\u00edcitamente vigilando docenas de protestas grandes y peque\u00f1as, desde Detroit y Brooklyn hasta York, Pennsylvania, y Hampton Roads, Virginia\u201d.<\/i><\/p>\n
En su reglamento, Twitter prohibe el uso de los datos que entrega a los desarrolladores con fines de monitoreo. Por lo que mientras Dataminr no se ha pronunciado respecto a este reporte, la compa\u00f1\u00eda rechaz\u00f3 esta acci\u00f3n.<\/p>\n
\u201cVemos un beneficio social en los datos p\u00fablicos de Twitter que se utilizan para alertas de noticias, apoyo de primeros auxilios y ayuda en caso de desastres\u201d, \u201cTwitter proh\u00edbe el uso de nuestros servicios para desarrolladores con fines de vigilancia\u201d.<\/b> S<\/i>e\u00f1al\u00f3 un vocero de la compa\u00f1\u00eda Dataminr.<\/p>\n
El reporte sobre la colaboraci\u00f3n de Dataminr y la polic\u00eda de Estados Unidos naturalmente gener\u00f3 preocupaci\u00f3n entre las organizaciones civiles y la Uni\u00f3n Americana de Libertades Civiles de Minnesota (ACLU, por sus siglas en ingl\u00e9s), la organizaci\u00f3n Color of Change y MediaJustice emplazaron a Twitter para que tomar acciones para prevenir este tipo de utilizaci\u00f3n de sus datos.<\/p>\n
\u201cTwitter apoya vocalmente Black Lives Matter y se comercializa a s\u00ed mismo como una herramienta para organizarse contra la injusticia, mientras comparte datos con asociados que contin\u00faan utilizando la informaci\u00f3n para ayudar a la vigilancia policial\u201d, <\/i>dijo Brandi Collins-Dexter, directora de campa\u00f1a de Color of Change. \u201cTwitter no puede tener las dos cosas\u201d.<\/i><\/p>\n
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Est\u00e1 claro, que una cosa es lo que Twitter (como las dem\u00e1s empresas de vigilancia masiva y recolecci\u00f3n de datos) dicen, y otra cosa es lo que en realidad hacen.<\/p>\n
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Ak\u00ed la noticia en ingl\u00e9s desde la p\u00e1gina The Intercept :<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Leveraging close ties<\/u> to Twitter, controversial artificial intelligence startup Dataminr helped law enforcement digitally monitor the protests that swept the country following the killing of George Floyd, tipping off police to social media posts with the latest whereabouts and actions of demonstrators, according to documents reviewed by The Intercept and a source with direct knowledge of the matter.<\/p>\n The monitoring seems at odds with claims from both Twitter and Dataminr that neither company would engage in or facilitate domestic surveillance following a string of 2016 controversies. Twitter, up until recently a longtime investor in Dataminr alongside the CIA, provides the company with full access to a content stream known as the \u201cfirehose\u201d \u2014 a rare privilege among tech firms and one that lets Dataminr, recently valued at over $1.8 billion, scan every public tweet as soon as its author hits send. Both companies denied that the protest monitoring meets the definition of surveillance.<\/p>\n Dataminr helps newsrooms, corporations, and governments around the world track crises with superhuman speed as they unfold across social media and the wider web. Through a combination of people and software, the company alerts organizations to chatter around global crises \u2014 wars, shootings, riots, disasters, and so forth \u2014 so that they\u2019ll have a competitive edge as news is breaking. But the meaning of that competitive edge, the supercharged ability to filter out important events from the noise of hundreds of millions of tweets and posts across social media, will vary drastically based on the customer; the agenda of a newspaper using Dataminr to inform its breaking news coverage won\u2019t be the same as the agendas of a bank or the FBI. It\u2019s this latter category of Dataminr\u2019s business, lucrative government work, that\u2019s had the firm on the defensive in recent years.<\/p>\n In 2016, Twitter was forced to reckon with multiple reports that its platform was being used to enable domestic surveillance, including a Wall Street Journal report on Dataminr\u2019s collaboration with American spy agencies\u00a0in May; an American Civil Liberties Union\u00a0report on Geofeedia, a Dataminr competitor, in October; and another ACLU\u00a0investigation into Dataminr\u2019s federal police surveillance work in December. The company sought to assure the public that attempts to monitor its users for purposes of surveillance were strictly forbidden under its rules, and that any violators would be kicked off the platform. For example, then-VP Chris Moody wrote in a company blog post that \u201cusing Twitter\u2019s Public APIs or data products to track or profile protesters and activists is absolutely unacceptable and prohibited.\u201d In a letter to the ACLU, Twitter public policy chief Colin Crowell similarly wrote that \u201cthe use of Twitter data for surveillance is strictly prohibited\u201d and that \u201cDatatminr\u2019s product does not provide any government customers with \u2026 any form of surveillance.\u201d<\/p>\n Twitter also said that Dataminr, one of its \u201cofficial partners,\u201d\u00a0would \u201cno longer support direct access by fusion centers\u201d\u00a0to information such as tweet locations; fusion centers are controversial facilities dedicated to sharing intelligence between the federal government and local police. Dataminr at the same time announced it would no longer provide a product for conducting geospatial analysis \u201cto those supporting first reponse\u201d\u00a0and added that such clients did not have \u201cdirect firehose access.\u201d<\/p>\n But based on interviews, public records requests, and company documents reviewed by The Intercept, Dataminr continues to enable what is essentially surveillance by U.S. law enforcement entities, contradicting its earlier assurances to the contrary, even if it remains within some of the narrow technical boundaries it outlined four years ago, like not providing direct firehose access, tweet geolocations, or certain access to fusion centers.<\/p>\n Dataminr relayed tweets and other social media content about the George Floyd and Black Lives Matter protests directly to police, apparently across the country. In so doing, it used to great effect its privileged access to Twitter data\u00a0\u2014\u00a0despite current terms of service that explicitly bar software developers \u201cfrom tracking, alerting, or monitoring sensitive events (such as protests, rallies, or community organizing meetings)\u201d via Twitter.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n And despite Dataminr\u2019s claims that its law enforcement service merely \u201cdelivers breaking news alerts on emergency events, such as natural disasters, fires, explosions and shootings,\u201d as a company spokesperson told The Intercept for a previous report, the company has facilitated the surveillance of recent protests, including nonviolent activity, siphoning vast amounts of social media data from across the web and converting it into tidy police intelligence packages.<\/p>\n Dataminr\u2019s Black Lives Matter protest surveillance included persistent monitoring of social media to tip off police to the locations and activities of protests, developments within specific rallies, as well as instances of alleged \u201clooting\u201d and other property damage. According to the source with direct knowledge of Dataminr\u2019s protest monitoring, the company and Twitter\u2019s past claims that they don\u2019t condone or enable surveillance are \u201cbullshit,\u201d relying on a deliberately narrowed definition. \u201cIt\u2019s true Dataminr doesn\u2019t specifically track protesters and activists individually, but at the request of the police they are tracking protests, and therefore protesters,\u201d this source explained.<\/p>\n \u201cAt the request of the police they are tracking protests, and therefore protesters.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n According to internal materials reviewed by The Intercept, Dataminr meticulously tracked not only ongoing protests, but kept comprehensive records of upcoming anti-police violence rallies in cities across the country to help its staff organize their monitoring efforts, including events\u2019 expected time and starting location within those cities. A protest schedule seen by The Intercept shows Dataminr was explicitly surveilling dozens of protests big and small, from Detroit and Brooklyn to York, Pennsylvania, and Hampton Roads, Virginia.<\/p>\n Company documents also show the firm instructed members of its staff to look for instances of \u201clethal force used against protesters by police or vice-versa,\u201d \u201cproperty damage,\u201d \u201cwidespread arson or looting against government or commercial infrastructure,\u201d \u201cnew instances of officer-involved shootings or death with potential interpretation of racial bias,\u201d and occasions when a \u201cviolent protests spreads to new major American city.\u201d Staff were also specifically monitoring social media for posts about \u201cOfficers involved in Floyd\u2019s death\u201d \u2014 all of which would be forwarded to Dataminr\u2019s governmental customers through a service named \u201cFirst\u00a0Alert.\u201d<\/p>\n The Dataminr documents on protest monitoring seen by The Intercept do not specify if they are used for news clients, police clients, or both. But a Dataminr document from October 2019 listed within the company\u2019s \u201claw enforcement footprint\u201d the New York Police Department, Los Angeles Police Department, Chicago Police Department, and Louisiana State Police. The LAPD told The Intercept it conducted a trial of Dataminr but chose not to enter a contract and did not use the system in connection with BLM protests. The Louisiana State Police declined to comment, citing a state secrecy law. NYPD did not comment and CPD could not be reached for comment. In January 2019, a New York court ordered the NYPD to turn over records about its use of Dataminr resulting from a New York Civil Liberties Union lawsuit over alleged surveillance of Black Lives Matter activists.<\/p>\n \u201cDataminr is providing information for local police, including [many] metropolitan police departments in cities facing protests,\u201d the source said. \u201cThey are some of Dataminr\u2019s biggest clients and they set the agenda.\u201d Dataminr spokesperson Kerry McGee declined to comment on the company\u2019s clientele.<\/p>\n And Dataminr alert emails sent to the Minneapolis Police Department, obtained via a public records request, show the company collected, bundled, and captioned Twitter content relevant to the anti-police\u00a0brutality protests and forwarded it directly to police as these events unfolded, including information on apparently nonviolent protests. The emails show Dataminr relaying the locations and images of Black Lives Matter protesters in the city where George Floyd lived and was killed, and where the nationwide wave of outrage against police abuse was launched, a fact difficult to square with the company\u2019s claim that it doesn\u2019t provide its governmental customers with \u201cany form of surveillance.\u201d The location information in the alerts underline that while Dataminr may not technically have direct access to the geolocational data attached to many tweets by Twitter, the texts and images of the tweets relayed to the police often contain overt geographical references, or have such references added manually by Dataminr staff.<\/p>\n While some of the alerts are sourced from the tweets of local and national news reporters, many are attributed to the accounts of ordinary bystanders \u2014 what the system calls \u201ceyewitnesses\u201d \u2014 who were either watching or attending the rallies and tweeting in a completely personal capacity. In one First Alert message relayed to the MPD on May 31, six days after Floyd\u2019s murder, Dataminr alerted police to a tweet reading \u201cpeaceful protest outside US Bank Stadium in downtown Minneapolis. End racism. End police brutality. End inequality and inequities. #JusticeForFloyd #Minneapolisprotest #BlackLivesMatters,\u201d along with a photo snapped by the tweeter. The accompanying caption, provided by Dataminr\u2019s human staff, specified that this group of protesters had been \u201cseen at US Bank Stadium on 400 block of Chicago Avenue.\u201d Another First Alert notification sent to the MPD three days prior tipped off police to this supposed public safety threat: \u201cProtesters seen sitting on street in front of security officers in Oakdale, MN.\u201d Another monitored tweet and accompanying photo relayed to MPD by Dataminr reads, simply, \u201cPeaceful protest at Lake & Lyndale.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n A tweet and photo relayed to Minneapolis police reads, simply, \u201cPeaceful protest at Lake & Lyndale.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n First Alert also scans other popular platforms like Snapchat and Facebook, the latter being particularly useful for protest organizers trying to rapidly mobilize their communities. On at least one occasion, according to MPD records, Dataminr was able to point police to a protest\u2019s Facebook event page before it had begun.<\/p>\n Some of Dataminr\u2019s alerts passed along dubious information. For example, on May 28, the company passed along a discredited claim about billionaire philanthropist George Soros, informing the MPD that \u201cCommentator Candace Owens claims Minneapolis, MN chief of police says many protesters are not from the city and claims investor George Soros is funding protesters through Open Society Foundation.\u201d<\/p>\n This apparently glaring contradiction by Dataminr, still publicly claiming it would never engage in surveillance while simultaneously facilitating the surveillance of\u00a0 protests, hasn\u2019t been lost on the company\u2019s staff. At a virtual staff meeting in June, a recording of which was obtained by The Intercept, a Dataminr manager attempted to explain why the company\u2019s persistent monitoring of First Amendment activity on behalf of the police was not, in fact, surveillance. The manager,\u00a0identified by the source as executive vice president Jason Wilcox, granted that there were likely Dataminr staff pondering some difficult questions: \u201cHow does our technology, how does our company, how does our platform, play in these types of unfolding events that are out there?\u201d \u2014 an allusion to the nationwide protests that were by then in their heady first week. \u201cWe sell to law enforcement. What does that mean?\u201d Wilcox\u2019s defense of Dataminr was based mostly on a sort of linguistic distinction: that relaying data to the police isn\u2019t a form of surveillance, but a form of ideologically neutral newsgathering. In an alternate euphemism, Wilcox described the surveillance alerts forwarded to police as \u201csituational awareness through real time events, [in] many of which people\u2019s lives are at stake, and they can respond more quickly and save lives.\u201d<\/p>\n This is generally the same reason Twitter and Dataminr\u2019s PR teams describe this governmental product as a source of \u201cnews alerts,\u201d not intelligence \u2014 a rationale that largely obscures the major differences between what, say, a newspaper might do with rapidly updated information about a protest against policing versus what the police might want to do with that same data.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Wilcox added that Dataminr\u2019s protest surveillance, far from presenting any chilling effect on political expression or free assembly, was a force of progressivism and reform: \u201cWe alert on events where members of law enforcement overstep their bounds,\u201d Wilcox claimed. \u201cWe found abuse of power. \u2026 Ultimately what we\u2019re doing is we\u2019re providing a check and balance for [police]. \u2026 Those alerts provide context to the world keeping people safe, and enabling people to do so in a way that isn\u2019t about trying to invade user privacy, but quite the opposite. It helps magnify their voice.\u201d<\/p>\n Asked about the comments, Dataminr\u2019s McGee wrote, \u201cDataminr does not comment on internal company meetings.\u201d Wilcox did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n Wilcox also defended Dataminr\u2019s work with police by emphasizing the firm\u2019s close ties to Twitter, the great firehose benefactor, which, according to Wilcox, \u201cis often one of the first social media platforms to reach out and protect privacy, they seem to be most attuned to it, they\u2019re very concerned with ensuring that their platform is not misused.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThose alerts provide context to the world, keeping people safe.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Dataminr\u2019s internal justification of its work for police also rested in part on the argument that it\u2019s not as nefarious as it could be: \u201cWe look at lots of different companies leveraging social media, and they have often, not everyone, but often, a very different set of goals,\u201d Wilcox explained. \u201cTheir goal is to help with surveillance. They build users graphs, they track users as they go across different social media platforms, they follow what a person says over time. And we do not do that.\u201d Wilcox named a few other mechanisms he said showed how he\u2019d \u201cworked hard to ensure that our technology cannot be casually misused here,\u201d namely built-in limits on what keywords police can use to tailor their \u201cnews alerts.\u201d<\/p>\n But according to the source with direct knowledge of Dataminr\u2019s protest monitoring, this is misleading: There\u2019s nothing built into First Alert that would prevent police from filtering or manually searching the intelligence they receive from Dataminr for specific terms, such as \u201c#BLM\u201d or \u201cantifa.\u201d Once a protest tweet is run through Dataminr\u2019s system and spit out the other end into a police department\u2019s inboxes, in other words, Dataminr loses control over how the information is used. This image of technological restraint also differs considerably from the pitch Dataminr gives police. An apparent 2019 Dataminr slide deck from a company presentation to the FBI, included in a recent online data dump known as \u201cBlueLeaks,\u201d stated that \u201cDataminr\u2019s mission is to integrate all publicly available data signals to create the dominant information discovery platform,\u201d and touted a client\u2019s ability to customize \u201cuser-defined criteria\u201d for alerts like \u201ctopic selection\u201d and \u201cgeographic filters.\u201d The end goal: \u201cReduce the time between an event and client action.\u201d<\/p>\n When asked about Dataminr\u2019s work with law enforcement as outlined above, both Twitter and Dataminr adopted a similar defense: This isn\u2019t surveillance because we have a policy against surveillance, which therefore means we don\u2019t engage in surveillance. Neither firm would comment or discuss how exactly the above does not meet the definition of surveillance, nor would they provide the institutional definitions of such as defined by either company.<\/p>\n \u201cWe see a societal benefit in public Twitter data being used for news alerting, first responder support, and disaster relief,\u201d said Twitter spokesperson Lindsay McCallum, who added that Dataminr\u2019s First Alert tool \u201cis in compliance with our developer policy\u201d banning surveillance. \u201cFirst Alert is not permitted to be used for surveillance of any kind by First Alert users,\u201d Dataminr\u2019s McGee told The Intercept. In response to a screenshot copy of the tweet Dataminr forwarded to Minneapolis police regarding the exact location of a group of protesters, McGee claimed that this was flagged for the department because it showed traffic problems, not protesters. \u201cAlerts on an intersection being blocked are news alerts, not monitoring protests or surveillance,\u201d said McGee. \u201cA local news organization would also cover major intersections being blocked as a news story \u2014 this is not surveillance.\u201d<\/p>\n But to some surveillance scholars, legal experts, and activists, there\u2019s little doubt about what Dataminr is up to, and what Twitter is enabling, no matter what careful terminology they use. According to Brandi Collins-Dexter, a campaign director with the civil rights group Color of Change, Dataminr\u2019s practices are an example of \u201cif it walks like a duck and talks like a duck,\u201d with regards to surveillance. \u201cWe know that law enforcement agencies spend a breathtaking amount of money to aggressively track, target, and surveil Black communities,\u201d said Collins-Dexter. \u201cTwitter can\u2019t have it both ways, courting Black activists and marketing themselves as the pre-eminent tool for organizing against injustice, while turning a blind eye to the number of companies that are contracting with them for the clear intent of surveillance.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cTwitter can\u2019t have it both ways, courting Black activists and marketing themselves as the pre-eminent tool for organizing against injustice, while turning a blind eye to companies that are contracting with them for the clear intent of surveillance.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Steven Renderos, the executive director of civil rights group MediaJustice, echoed this sentiment. \u201cIt\u2019s troubling that that Dataminr is providing services to police and it\u2019s flawed logic to think there\u2019s no harm in turning over Twitter posts to cops,\u201d said Renderos. \u201cThe police have a history of using social media to track Black activists. Dataminr\u2019s\u00a0practices is just the latest example of how tech companies are fueling racist policing in the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIf Dataminr is sharing posts about demonstrations and protesters with police, that would be incredibly concerning and it would be difficult to understand how that practice doesn\u2019t facilitate police surveillance in violation of Twitter\u2019s own policies,\u201d said Matt Cagle, an attorney with the ACLU of Northern California. \u201cSocial networks like Twitter need to protect users and ensure that developers are not sharing their First Amendment expression with law enforcement agencies, a practice that potentially exposes people \u2014 particularly Black, Indigenous, and people of color \u2014 to further surveillance and state\u00a0violence.\u201d<\/p>\n Andrew Ferguson, a visiting law professor at American University, rejected the companies\u2019 contention that because Dataminr only ingests public tweets, the system is only capable of news gathering \u2014 as if police snapping pictures of demonstrators would be better understood as photojournalism, not photo surveillance. \u201cMonitoring activities and forwarding information to police is clearly surveillance,\u201d explained Ferguson, author of \u201cThe Rise of Big Data Policing: Surveillance, Race, and the Future of Law Enforcement.\u201d\u00a0\u201cIf the police were a data-based advertising company we would say this was consumer surveillance. If the police were tracking protestors directly we would call it government surveillance. A forwarding of the same information and calling it \u2018news\u2019 is still surveillance.\u201d<\/p>\n Whether Twitter\u2019s hundreds of millions of users will buy the argument that automatically relaying tweets to the police is mere innocent newsgathering remains an open question, but for most of them a moot one: Outside of laborious public records requests, it\u2019s hard to imagine how someone could learn if their protest tweets were swallowed into the algorithms by a government\u00a0contractor. Or, one could think of it the way Jason Wilcox urged his staff: \u201cAll those voices, where we get to amplify that for everybody. \u2026 It\u2019s pretty impressive. It\u2019s an amazing\u00a0event.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dataminr, la compa\u00f1\u00eda de inteligencia artificial (creada por la Cia) que ofrece alertas de informaci\u00f3n en tiempo real, colabor\u00f3 con la polic\u00eda de Estados Unidos en el marco de las protestas contra el racismo y la violencia policial en ese … Continue reading \nA History of Police Work<\/h3>\n
\nKeeping an Eye on Peaceful Protests<\/h3>\n
\n\n\nSurveillance as a Public Service<\/h3>\n
\n\nSurveillance or \u201cNews Alerts\u201d?<\/h3>\n
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