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

[kpete]

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


http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/11/13243890/facebook-twitter-instagram-police-surveillance-geofeedia-api