[liberationtech] Police using social media for surveillance? -- send us your thoughts

[Bruce Potter at IRF]

Fabio --

A good question (police always surveil, so what?) that I keep asking  
myself.

Personally, I think it's a matter of scale  and precision of results.  
For example, "old-style" tools could link suspects to sexual assaults,  
but they were clumsy and slow.  Now DNA tools and national databases  
can scan 10's-of-millions of individual specimens and get very limited  
matches, if not absolutely accurate results. You and I could get into  
that universe of 10s-of-millions "potential suspects" just because we  
got into a street fight one time, if current proposals for cataloguing  
all felons' or even all detainees' DNA are implemented. Processing or  
transcription errors in the testing and cataloguing process could be  
very costly if either of us were falsely charged.

I think we need filters or buffers on those sorts of tools and  
screening processes -- such as English and US common law has usually  
required a judge's decision in each individual case  that such  
searches are reasonable.

But I bet most members of this group have thought this through much  
more carefully. . . .

bruce

On Feb 20, 2012, at 9:09 AM, Fabio Pietrosanti (naif) wrote:

> Have you saw tools such as Maltego [1] and/or Palantir [2] to apply  
> deep
> OSINT techniques, including social network monitoring and analysis?
>
> Those stuff are already widely used by two kind of people:
> - Marketing
> - Security (being private/public, democratic or non-democratic)
>
> I am sometime curious to see this huge attention to surveillance
> technologies like if it's "something new", while it always existed,  
> it's
> there publicly known on the website of surveillance producers and at
> surveillance trade-expo.
>
> There are also very nice tools [3] to handle "group of investigators"
> doing infiltration in social network using multiple identities, quite
> nice tools i've evaluated in past.
>
> -naif
>
> [1] -
> http://maltego.blogspot.com/2011/10/maltego-and-social-networks-video.html
> [2] - http://www.palantir.com/labs/social-network-analysis
> [3] - http://www.terrogence.com/product.php?ID=15
>
>
> On 2/20/12 5:03 AM, Rami Khater wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Tomorrow (Monday Feb 20th) The Stream is doing a show on how police  
>> use social media.  Some say it involves the public in community  
>> policing and others raise privacy concerns.
>>
>> You can participate in the conversation live at 19:30 GMT (2:30 PM  
>> EST) via http://stream.aljazeera.com and via the hashtag #ajstream  
>> on twitter anytime.
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