{"id":453,"date":"2013-07-01T11:16:41","date_gmt":"2013-07-01T15:16:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/?p=453"},"modified":"2013-07-01T11:16:41","modified_gmt":"2013-07-01T15:16:41","slug":"law-enforcement-and-mining-social-media-wheres-the-oversight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/2013\/07\/01\/law-enforcement-and-mining-social-media-wheres-the-oversight\/","title":{"rendered":"Law Enforcement and Mining Social Media: Where’s the Oversight?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Pennsylvania detective had a nickname of a suspect, but no real name. He turned to Facebook, found a picture, and eventually apprehended the person. This anecdote from a Washington Post<\/em> investigation<\/a> into law enforcement use of facial recognition software illustrates how social media can be a boon for catching criminals.<\/p>\n

As people share more about their thoughts and actions on social media and as algorithms grow more sophisticated, law enforcement\u2019s ability to mine such information for clues into how to prevent crimes raises concerns of profiling and questions of oversight.<\/p>\n

Law enforcement profiling predates social media. From 1956 to 1971, FBI counterintelligence program COINTELPRO<\/a> tracked political organizations and their leaders<\/a>, including Martin Luther King, Jr.<\/p>\n

Recently, the ACLU\u2019s \u201cMapping the FBI\u201d project uncovered intelligence gathering that used racial and ethnic mapping<\/a>. The project’s documentation includes a 2009 memo<\/a> from the bureau\u2019s Detroit office that called Michigan\u2019s Middle East and Muslim community\u00a0\u201cprime territory for attempted radicalization and recruitment by\u201d terrorist groups. The FBI\u2019s reason: most State Department-labeled terrorist groups originate in the Middle East and South Asia.<\/p>\n

In 2010 a 20-year-old Arab-American man in California found a tracking device on his car<\/a> and learned the FBI had been surveilling him, a US citizen, for months, if not longer. Since 2011 the Associated Press has investigated<\/a> the NYPD\u2019s spying on Muslim communities, documenting what The Atlantic<\/em> calls \u201chorrifying effects<\/a>\u201d on both those surveilled, who have not been accused of any crimes, and on counterterrorism efforts as a whole\u2014in six years, the program did not generate a single lead.<\/p>\n

The NSA<\/a> and British intelligence agency GCHQ<\/a> collect raw Internet traffic that includes email, social media, and chats. US law enforcement agencies at all levels can obtain information from Internet and communication companies with court orders. But police don\u2019t need permission to monitor what already flows freely on the web. Ars Technica<\/em> reported<\/a> on the London Metropolitan police\u2019s extensive efforts to monitor social media:<\/p>\n

For the past two years, a secretive unit in the Metropolitan Police has been developing the tools for blanket surveillance of the public’s social media conversations. Operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, a staff of 17 officers in the National Domestic Extremism Unit (NDEU) has been scanning the public’s tweets, YouTube videos, Facebook profiles, and anything else UK citizens post in the public online sphere.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Several commercial tools exist to monitor social media streams, and companies actively market them to law enforcement<\/a>. \u00a0Police departments at the University of Maryland, Hampton University, and the city of Boca Raton, Florida use tools<\/a> from the Virginia-based technology company ECM Universe to surveil social media users and analyze the text of their messages. A brochure<\/a> touts that with the tool,<\/p>\n

[A] city can monitor activist groups who are using social media to organize their efforts on the ground and receive alerts in a matter of minutes from the time of the postings when dangerous radical elements emerge from the crowd.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Such language underscores the need for oversight on how to use information gathered from social media. Participating in an activist group is not a criminal activity, and \u201cdangerous radical elements\u201d do not emerge at every activist meeting.<\/p>\n

US law enforcement generally needs a reason and court permission to investigate someone. Predictive analytics involves mining data to look for undetected or unconsidered patterns. Agencies\u00a0\u201cdon\u2019t necessarily know what they need to monitor on Twitter,\u201d software company SAS\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0in a paper detailing its tools, one of which maps people\u2019s friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter. Users maintain hundreds of connections on these sites, including people they may not have contacted for years or people they don\u2019t even know. To what extent will a person’s connections implicate them?<\/p>\n

Predictive policing has helped<\/a> police departments lower crime. But such efforts used previously reported and anonymized crime data; inclusion of social media data adds another dimension of concern. People don\u2019t know what governments are doing with troves of social media data, and people can\u2019t see the algorithms that police use to fight crime. As Evgeny Morozov wrote<\/a>, \u201cIf no one can examine the algorithms…we won’t know what biases and discriminatory practices are built into them.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As people share more about their thoughts and actions on social media and as algorithms grow more sophisticated, law enforcement\u2019s ability to mine such information for clues into how to prevent crimes raises concerns of profiling and questions of oversight. Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5507,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[13363,3619,5107,1860],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-social-media","category-surveillance","category-united-kingdom","category-united-states"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4L9BV-7j","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5507"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=453"}],"version-history":[{"count":31,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":890,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453\/revisions\/890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}