U.S. Marshals Spied on Abortion Protesters Using DATAMINR

[Nevilledog]

https://theintercept.com/2023/05/15/abortion-surveillance-dataminr/

DATAMINR, AN “OFFICIAL PARTNER” of Twitter, alerted a federal law enforcement agency to pro-abortion protests and rallies in the wake of the reversal of Roe v. Wade, according to documents obtained by The Intercept through a Freedom of Information Act request.

Internal emails show that the U.S. Marshals Service received regular alerts from Dataminr, a company that persistently monitors social media for corporate and government clients, about the precise time and location of both ongoing and planned abortion rights demonstrations. The emails show that Dataminr flagged the social media posts of protest organizers, participants, and bystanders, and leveraged Dataminr’s privileged access to the so-called firehose of unrestricted Twitter data to monitor constitutionally protected speech.

“This is a technique that’s ripe for abuse, but it’s not subject to either legislative or judicial oversight,” said Jennifer Granick, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.

The data collection alone, however, can have a deleterious effect on free speech. Mary Pat Dwyer, the academic program director of the Institute for Technology Law and Policy at Georgetown University, told The Intercept, “The more it’s made public that law enforcement is gathering up this info broadly about U.S. residents and citizens, it has a chilling effect on whether people are willing to express themselves and attend protests and plan protests.”

*snip*

[reymega life]

1. sounds like nazi Germany

[Haggis 4 Breakfast]

2. U.S. Marshals have NO GD business getting involved with this level of intimidation.

And that's EXACTLY what this is.

[reymega life]

3. this is evil

[ret5hd]

4. Y'all keep using that Twitter.

Can’t get by without it, I know I know.

[gratuitous]

5. Hey U.S. Marshals

How you coming on identifying those tourists from Jan. 6? Still a LOT of folks who aren't identified from that day.

[NullTuples]

6. "Law enforcement - Industrial complex" is quite the constitutional loophole.

Because it's all happening within corporations right up until law enforcement gets notified, there's no violation of the Constitution, right?

Then after a while, corporations are created for exactly that purpose, and whose services are paid for by taxpayers.

It reeks of Mussolini's Corporatism, except on the small but very widespread scale of individual agencies at various levels acting on their own.