NYPD Spent Millions To Contract With Firm Banned by Meta for Fake Profiles (theguardian.com) 27
New York law enforcement agencies have spent millions of dollars to expand their capabilities to track and analyze social media posts, new documents show, including by contracting with a surveillance firm accused of improperly scraping social media platforms for data. From a report: Documents obtained by the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (Stop), a privacy advocacy non-profit and shared with the Guardian, reveal the New York police department in 2018 entered a nearly $9m contract with Voyager Labs, a surveillance company that has been sued by Meta for allegedly using nearly 40,000 fake Facebook accounts to collect data on an estimated 600,000 users. NYPD purchased Voyager Labs products that the company claims can use artificial intelligence to analyze online human behavior and detect and predict fraud and crimes, the documents show.
A separate document reveals a contract between the Queens district attorney and Israeli firm Cobwebs Technologies, which also offers social network mapping products, as well as tools to track location information through phones. It's unclear how much that contract is worth. Law enforcement across the United States have worked with social media analytics companies for years, hoping to more effectively and efficiently collect and make sense of the hordes of personal information available on the internet. But experts have argued the practice can cross ethical and legal lines, particularly when used to access private information, make inferences or predict future criminality based on the content posted on social media, or otherwise help law enforcement skip obtaining subpoenas and warrants before gathering information on someone.
A separate document reveals a contract between the Queens district attorney and Israeli firm Cobwebs Technologies, which also offers social network mapping products, as well as tools to track location information through phones. It's unclear how much that contract is worth. Law enforcement across the United States have worked with social media analytics companies for years, hoping to more effectively and efficiently collect and make sense of the hordes of personal information available on the internet. But experts have argued the practice can cross ethical and legal lines, particularly when used to access private information, make inferences or predict future criminality based on the content posted on social media, or otherwise help law enforcement skip obtaining subpoenas and warrants before gathering information on someone.
Re:Fake profiles? (Score:4, Informative)
The legality of this is questionable because the information obtained, and later provided to the LEO was obtained illegally via the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), 18 U.S.C. 1030
This raises issues on 2 reasons, 1.) How is this illegally obtained evidence being used? 2.) How can a LEO agency knowingly engage and encourage a private entity to knowingly violate federal law?
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to try and phish other users for personal information and details
a correction there, they don't "phish", they just stalk. you could do that yourself. most people will be happy accepting random "friend" requests and sharing their personal crap everyday profusely. likely not those who are actually into crime, mind you, those will be usually be much more cautious and discrete, but that won't stop the company from selling a load of irrelevant datapoints dressed with some meaningless but cool sounding analysis with some magical bullshit algorithms.
storm in a teacup, if you as
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You use the equivalent of StableDiffusion to generate a bunch of faces. Link [techxplore.com]
Note to NYPD: (Score:2)
Re: Note to NYPD: (Score:3)
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Wrong. Planning a crime is a crime.
Only because that statute was written as such. A series of unrelated social media posts that, when run through some piece of software, somehow magically make a prediction about a human's future likelihood to commit a crime (short of one of those posts actually admitting to planning a specific crime as you pointed out) is not a criminal act.
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A series of unrelated social media posts that, when run through some piece of software, somehow magically make a prediction about a human's future likelihood to commit a crime (short of one of those posts actually admitting to planning a specific crime as you pointed out) is not a criminal act.
NYPD's argument would be that those series of posts may suggest that individual is worth keeping an eye on. That argument isn't entirely without merit if you view this dispassionately. How many mass shooters follow the same basic template? Disaffected loner, rants on social media, radicalization online, fetishization of weapons, etc. Nearly all of the mass shootings that come to my mind follow this script. Earlier detection means you have a sick individual committed for mental health treatment, rather
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So it's not quite the plot line of the movie Minority Report ?
"We are not going to arrest them for Precrime. We just want to keep an eye on them."
Uh-Huh ... Yeah right !
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So its ok to watch certain people that they think might commit crimes, rather than just watch for specific crimes? Isn't that selective enforcement?
How does it not end up being "this person says a lot of stuff that I don't like, I'm going to find something to bust them on" ?
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A series of unrelated social media posts that, when run through some piece of software, somehow magically make a prediction about a human's future likelihood to commit a crime (short of one of those posts actually admitting to planning a specific crime as you pointed out) is not a criminal act.
NYPD's argument would be that those series of posts may suggest that individual is worth keeping an eye on. That argument isn't entirely without merit if you view this dispassionately. How many mass shooters follow the same basic template? Disaffected loner, rants on social media, radicalization online, fetishization of weapons, etc. Nearly all of the mass shootings that come to my mind follow this script. Earlier detection means you have a sick individual committed for mental health treatment, rather than a bunch of innocent fatalities and the mentally ill individual dead or bound for a life sentence.
It's not a crime to rant online. It's also not a crime for the cops to focus their attention on the dude standing in the town square (virtual or real) ranting about [insert some minority group here] while posting pictures of himself with weapons, rather than focusing their attention on the dude standing in the town square ranting about the potholes on his street, the Mayor's mistress, or any other mundane political thing.
Make no mistake, I am discomforted by this. Historically NYPD doesn't limit themselves to monitoring. It begins with monitoring, sometimes illegal, and then moves onto more aggressive and often extralegal measures. They've swept up more Martin Luther King Jr's in these dragnets than Muhammad Atta's.
This is also bad police work. They've spent millions of dollars on a vaporware product that isn't terribly likely to produce actionable intelligence. Any that it does stumble upon will be buried beneath a mountain of irrelevant nonsense that some poor slob will have to filter through. They'd do better to recruit good old fashioned human informants in some of the more radical corners of the Internet. But that's harder than writing a check to some corporation selling a product that promises to solve all your problems.
If you're discomforted by THIS, take a look at "Shot Spotter," a piece of software and related hardware that claims to be able to pinpoint the location of a gunshot.
It also:
I suspect THIS software will be used similarly,
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The NYPD does not care about reducing crime. They care about looking tough and reporting good numbers.
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The NYPD does not care about reducing crime. They care about looking tough and reporting good numbers.
and apparently becoming more fascistic over time. And they wonder why people don't trust them when crap like this leaks out time after time.
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Indeed.
So you can do basically anything w/o a warrant (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:So you can do basically anything w/o a warrant (Score:4, Interesting)
They're using this for intelligence gathering. By the time something progresses to the point of a criminal investigation/prosecution they don't need a third party to scrape your data from Meta, they hand Meta a subpoena/warrant and Meta turns everything over, including private messages and other things this third party outfit can't see.
Not saying this is okay. NYPD has a shitty history of engaging in these sorts of gray area tactics to suppress civil rights activists, critics of the department, and other types that are not criminals. Conversely, NYC is a very high profile target for everyone from the mentally ill basket-case with manifesto to international terrorists, so they'd be derelict in their duty if they weren't trying to be proactive about sniffing out threats to the city.
In this case, they are likely wasting a shitton of taxpayer money for little to no gain, along with the finite time of their officers, and they're shitting all over privacy and civil rights to do it. It's a fail no matter how you look at it. As a native New Yorker, it offends but does not surprise me. :(
That'd be great if it was true (Score:2)
Cops have stats, just like everyone else. They're graded and paid based on how many arrests they get and how many lead to convictions. Why do all the work of walking a beat if you can send a computer out to find people to arrest for you.
Normally that kind of broad search requires a warrant, but buying the data is getting them around that. If you've got a good lawyer you can probably get the conviction squashed, af
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Normally that kind of broad search requires a warrant
It's not a "search" if you voluntarily release the information to the world (or one of your moronic friends does it for you)
If the cops were trolling my private iCloud or Google photo library, looking for crimes, with or without warrant, I'd agree wholeheartedly with you. The term for that with warrant would be 'fishing expedition' and any lawyer worth their salt would get it tossed. The term without warrant would be 'illegal'
Perhaps people who commit crimes, even if those crimes are justified and/or vi
Re:So you can do basically anything w/o a warrant (Score:4, Insightful)
Law enforcement can't come into your home without a warrant. But if some company were to make a fleet of micro-drones that surreptitiously flew through everyone's homes and examined everything and then sold these videos on demand to law enforcement, insurance companies, prospective employers
These social media break-ins are exactly this in the digital world. These companies collect data that the police can't legally obtain themselves, but somehow it is alright for them to buy it? Makes no sense.
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This isn't really analogous to sending a drone through your house. Everything you put on social media is at least somewhat public, to varying degrees based on the privacy settings of the post and its context, so a better analogy would be paying for a drone to fly by your house and read that sign you put on your front lawn. If you want to extend it to a post with some basic privacy settings (e.g., "friends only"), then the analogy would be sending a drone to fly over your house and read the sign in the bac
It's the whole "if it's the Internet it's legal" (Score:2)
So the NYPD is even scummier than Meta? (Score:2)
Not really a surprise...
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Victims of their own arrogance. Yes. They could just ask independent experts and not simply assume they are so superior than they do not have to. Unfortunately, law enforcement draws people with very specific personality defects.
PD will always prefer fake control over real co-op (Score:3)