Twitter Cuts API Access For Media Sonar, Spy Tool Used To Target Black Lives Matter (dailydot.com) 104
Police have now one less tool to monitor users on Twitter. The Daily Dot is reporting that Twitter has cut ties with a third-party social network surveillance firm, citing company policies intended to safeguard users against the surreptitious collection of data by law enforcement agencies. From the report: The severed contract follows Twitter nullifying the commercial data agreements of two other leading social-network-surveillance firms, Geofeedia and Snaptrends. Previously unreported, Twitter severed the access of Media Sonar, an Ontario-based company founded in 2012, which has sold surveillance software to police departments across the United States. Nineteen local government services are known to have each spent at least $10,000 on the software between 2014 and 2016, according to documents acquired under state open-records laws. Twitter informed the Daily Dot this week that it had terminated Media Sonar's access to its public API in October. If the company attempts to create other API keys, Twitter said, "we will terminate those as well and take further action as appropriate."
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More like Twitter wants to get paid directly. No discount for the cops.
Couldn't be because... (Score:2, Insightful)
Couldn't be because Jack is personal friends with BLM activists, could it?
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What I don't get is why they're willing to sell this to anyone but the police. If it's somehow private and sensitive, why are they allowed to sell it at all?
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What I don't get is why they're willing to sell this to anyone but the police.
Because overly broad government surveillance sucks and they don't want to be a willing participant?
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> Because overly broad government surveillance sucks and they don't want to be a willing participant?
But over-broad private surveillance is A-OK to sell to the highest bidder?
And it's not like the government can just set up fake companies. Why, the CIA never does that!
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Not likely. Twitter cut the same ties with two other social media surveillance companies that weren't targeting BLM activists prior to cutting ties with this one.
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And why shouldn't it? What's so wrong with being friends with civil rights activists?
What "civil rights activists"?
BLM is a pro-criminal racist hate-group advocating killing police. They are no better than the KKK.
The DoJ under Trump should prosecute Twitter and Dorsey as criminal accessories to violence/murder/assault committed against police and whites by BLM activists.
Strat
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typical libertarian slashdot nerd hates free speech, news at 11
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typical libertarian slashdot nerd hates free speech, news at 11
I'm all for free speech.
I am not for inciting violence, anarchy, and murder. Especially not based on race. There are laws against it for very good reasons. Would you want to see the KKK out there calling for people to murder blacks like BLM does regarding police/whites?
Hypocrite, much?
Strat
Something's wrong here (Score:1)
One of these things is not like the other.
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Are you sure about that? Have you seen the videos of the "protests" in Baltimore when Gray died?
There were kids walking around breaking the windows of cars trying to get home from work. How is that not harmful to people?
https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
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Ah yes, I forgot that criticizing someone's views means that you think they shouldn't be able to express them.
Random idiot makes a strawman out of people he disagrees with, news at 11.
Quite frankly, I could not give two shits about their views because their "views" are based on racism, hatred, and lies like 'hands up don't shoot'. Views, opinions, etc are like assholes...everyone has them and most stink.
What I *do* care about are the criminal acts they commit like inciting and committing acts of violence and murder. Dead cops and random white people assaulted do not a strawman make.
If you are unable to differentiate between the two you need to seek psychological help, as you are a danger
Web Scraping (Score:2)
How inconvenient, I guess.
shameful (Score:2)
There's so much market for warrantless spying that people are starting for-profit companies to support it.
Re:shameful (Score:4, Informative)
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Its called Police work to monitor people that look to do harm or break the law.
The problem is, those aren't the only people they're monitoring. You and I are being monitored, too. I don't know about you, but I'm not looking to do any harm or break the law.
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Yeah welcome to the thoughtcrime age, don't have any UnPlusThink if you are that worried about being monitored.
Re:shameful (Score:4, Insightful)
'Police Work' used to be defined as getting involved with your community and understanding your population.
What you are describing is is not Police Work, it's something else entirely.
It still is (Score:3)
'Police Work' used to be defined as getting involved with your community and understanding your population.
How does that not exactly describe monitoring Twitter? Where ELSE would you go right now to understand and interact with the community? (Other than Facebook of course).
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Passive monitoring isn't 'getting involved'. Where do you guys even come from with this logic? Is there some kind of training course for this?
Whoosh (Score:1)
Passive monitoring isn't 'getting involved'.
That is the "understanding your community part", second section.
The first part is using Twitter to reach out to people, which IS getting involved. That is true of my own local police department.
Where do you guys even come from with this logic?
It's called "reading comprehension", you should try it sometime. Maybe if someone diagrammed out the single sentence for you?
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Passive monitoring isn't 'getting involved'. Where do you guys even come from with this logic? Is there some kind of training course for this?
What the fuck do you think police are doing on routine patrols? The primary function of police is to prevent and respond to crime. Part of that is passive monitoring of the public. You can argue about the scope, but that's been a part of police work for as long as there have been police.
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Well, isn't this getting involved and understanding the population? I'm sure they understandd the population much better after analyzing their Twitter feeds.
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Privacy is never expected when you are standing on a soap box on a street corner shouting at the top of your lungs. What is there to understand here?
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How is it spying when its ALL Public info?
My bad. Mod me down if you can spare the points.
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The same way it's stalking if you follow someone walking around town, even though they have no reasonable expectation of privacy as they walk down public sidewalks. Intent matters.
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It's more like following people as they move around in public, i.e. surveillance. I guess the author just confused spying and surveillance, and to be fair they are often one and the same these days.
Just like if you started following and photographing people in a public space you might be asked to leave by the owner of that space, Twitter has decided to boot these guys out.
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No. Its shameful that companies make a business in selling data of their customers, and the state is just another entity who buys them. What happened here was that they used a proxy company to purchase the data, because out of some reason (probably the snowden relevations), twitter didn't want them to give the data directly. Probably if everything you say (in private) on the platform will automatically lead to investigations against you, people will stop using twitter and maybe go to competitors that encryp
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> There's so much market for warrantless spying that people are starting for-profit companies to support it.
I can't believe how many of you people are spying on my post right now...
Public information? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't have any sympathy for secret spy schemes or the mass warrantless interception of private data or communications. The people behind those belong in jail.
But Twitter isn't a private communication. It's public. When you stand up on a soapbox on the street corner and start shouting, yes, that's your free speech right. But a cop can stand there and listen to what you say, even record it if they want. It's a public place.
If you want to communicate privately, use a private medium. The police should certainly be disallowed from monitoring that without probable cause and a proper warrant. But you can't on one hand put something out there to the general public, and on the other expect it to stay private. People need to stop having the illusion that what they post publicly on the Internet has any reasonable expectation of privacy.
The actual problem is this:
No, no, and no. If you want to use evidence in court, you must tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, including the specifics of how you gathered it. All of that should be available for the opposing party to challenge; that's part of their due process rights. If you don't want to reveal the method of gathering it, you don't get to use the evidence. If you want to defend it as legitimate when challenged, you must reveal the details to show that it in fact is. You don't just get to say "No, it's fine, we promise."
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The problem is that BLM are the neo-marxist's useful idiots that thye msut be protected to advance (((their))) cause.
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Oh, (((their))) cause, is it?
You know, the meaning of the triple parentheses isn't exactly a big secret any more. If you want to spew anti-Semitic crap, then at least have the balls to do it openly.
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Do us both a favor, and don't presume either one of us for stupid. Here's what that actually means: Triple parentheses [wikipedia.org]
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You realize that Jews, like everyone else, are individuals?
There are some Jews who support BLM. There are some who oppose it. There are some who support their principles but question their tactics.
Like, you know, all the rest of us.
Enforcing rights (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't have any sympathy for secret spy schemes or the mass warrantless interception of private data or communications. The people behind those belong in jail.
But Twitter isn't a private communication. It's public. When you stand up on a soapbox on the street corner and start shouting, yes, that's your free speech right. But a cop can stand there and listen to what you say, even record it if they want. It's a public place.
This is where I think we missed the boat on free speech.
In the free speech debate, everyone points out that no one is required to give you a public forum for your speech. But all these forums actually *are* public, and yet we think it's OK if the companies suppress speech in various ways because it's not the government that's doing it. This fails rational logic in two ways.
Firstly, there was a time when companies would hand over user details on request of law enforcement without a warrant. The government thought this was OK because the companies were free to deny the request, and they also thought it wasn't a violation of the user's rights (4th amendment) because it wasn't the government doing it.
The companies were sued, and the government passed "telecom immunity" laws which effectively shut those lawsuits down.
Allowing companies to censor speech will follow that same arc - eventually the government will be able to "request" that a site suppress some news article or opinion or whatever, with a wink and a nudge, and it'll be the companies doing it and not the government.
Secondly, we don't allow a company to only hire whites (14th amendment) or only men (19th amendment), because that would be a violation of their rights. We don't allow a company to deny services to gays (such as wedding cakes) either.
Why do we allow companies to deny 1st amendment rights?
I think the distinction has to be made between public and private forums. Breitbart can post right-leaning articles, and the NYT can post left-leaning ones, because those are private to the company. Not everyone can get an article published on the NYT website, it's the company product built by employees.
But the article comments sections are public - anyone can log in and post a reply, an opinion, or even a rant. To have those sections monitored and curated is a violation of free speech by the public. Companies shouldn't be in the business of curating free speech, and their response to illegal speech should be to alert the police.
We're rapidly approaching the point where *no* opposing speech or controversial ideas will be available, simply because the big players will go in and remove the ones they don't like. Look at the election coverage for proof of this - constantly insulting Donald Trump in the media wasn't enough to get Hillary elected, because the opposing views were available. There's a move on to remove those opposing views from the public eye.
I think we're losing freedoms here. Free speech means literally *all* speech, including speech you disagree with, or that disagree with you.
We shouldn't let companies run public forums without enforcing free speech.
It could be the downfall of our republic.
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This. There is a difference between you saying something and enabling someone else to say something. To use the car analogy: There is a difference between driving a car and taking a bus. Similar activities on the same infrastructure with different responsibilities for each operator to ensure the public interests without discrimination.
What is frustrating is that when it comes to protected classes, if you use the right politikspeak you can bypass the intent of those laws. You cannot deny service to a couple
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I could see that to a degree. But that's a different question.
Right now, the First Amendment only covers government action. The Fourth does too. Now, when the government was seeking records, that absolutely should implicate the Fourth Amendment. That should similarly happen with the First if it's the government asking for certain types of speech to be disallowed somewhere.
But the Fourteenth and Nineteenth don't create those employment and public accommodation laws. They, too, only restrict the government. I
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No, the issue is not even free speech really, it's that everyone should have access to some kind of platform in healthy democracy.
Even publicly owned spaces usually have limits on behaviour and speech, which are necessary for everyone to enjoy them. Even if you could day what you liked in any public space, you wouldn't because freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences.
Fortunately there are places like 8chan where pretty much anything goes. You might be frustrated that the most popular platforms don
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You might be frustrated that the most popular platforms don't allow your particular speech (although Twitter will tolerate pretty much anything other than harassment and child pornography)
For leftist-favoring definitions of harassment and child abuse.
but you are not being silenced.
Only if you're leftist. If you're conservative, the policy will be used at a moment's notice to purge.
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This is where you show us you're a hypocrite.
Yes, because BitZtream knows a thing or two [slashdot.org] about being a hypocrite.
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Twitter has a direct messaging feature, which is private. You can also block people you don't want to see your tweets, and make them only available to logged in users, or users you whitelist.
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It's certainly my hope that Twitter's API doesn't allow access to private or "whitelist only" communication. If it does, that's a problem that goes well beyond this one instance. I can't say I'm terribly familiar with it myself, but I imagine if it had massive security flaws in it like that, we'd have heard about it by now. And if it does and we haven't, we certainly should.
As far as allowing access by non-blocked or logged in only users, that's such a low bar that you're still speaking publicly. For the bl
Narrative Control Tools, Twitter Edition. (Score:2)
You can also block people you don't want to see your tweets, and make them only available to logged in users, or users you whitelist.
If there was sanity at Twitter, they'd purge those features after purging the "Trust and Safety" team.
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Imagine if everytime a particular person spoke in public, they had a court stenographer following them and recording everything they say. Would that have a chilling effect on free speech? Twitter has a vested business interested in having people use it's services more. Government based monitori
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Well, just like it's Twitter's service, it's their API. They can restrict access to it in any way and for any reason they see fit.
If you're in public and attracting attention, it's foolish to presume you're not being recorded. With everyone having an audio and video recorder in their pocket, as well as the massive number of stationary recording devices, chances are good you probably are being recorded at any given time, especially if you're attracting attention. The stenographer would be largely redundant.
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"Would that have a chilling effect on free speech?" No. At least not in the US. Some of the most incendiary public speech in the history of the country has been documented in one format or another and distributed to the widest audience possible. Today the Internet has made capturing a large audience easy and fast. The people testing the limits of their 1st amendment rights go out of their way to draw attention to themselves and their statements.
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No, it differs from Stingray in that fundamental respect.
Cell phone conversations are presumed to be private. If you make a cell phone call from a private place, to someone else who is also in a private place, you most certainly have a reasonable expectation of privacy for that call. But Stingray could be intercepting that.
On the other hand, when I post this on Slashdot, I can't reasonably expect that to be private. I'm posting it for anyone who wants to read it.
That's the fundamental difference. It's the d
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The difference is that it used to take some effort to track what one person was saying in those public places. With technology making it nearly free, we're all facing every public moment of our entire lives being stored forever in some law enforcement database.
I'm fine with the local police getting copies of business' surveillance tapes, interviewing people, and checking telco logs to piece together my action
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No, I'll still be the first to assert that private communication has a genuine expectation of privacy, and law enforcement has no right to monitor that without probable cause and a warrant. As I said above.
But what you say in public is public. If someone wants to scrape it all and analyze it, well, you made it all public. You said it to the general public, and the general public has the right to do what they will with it. Including analysis.
You don't get to on one hand shout out something to the public and
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So you're okay with someone waiting outside your door, at all times, with a video camera, waiting to follow you around and record everything you ever say and do in public, for your entire life? Correct?
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It doesn't matter if I'm alright with it or not. They're allowed to do that. That in fact happens with many celebrities, they're called paparazzi. As long as they only film and photo in public, it's perfectly legal for them to be doing it.
If I ever got that famous, I suppose that'd be a good problem to have. If the person acts threatening or harasses you in any way, they could be prosecuted under harassment or stalking laws. But if they just want to waste their time taping me, hey, have fun being bored to d
White supremacists banned, Black ones -- protected (Score:1, Interesting)
What other than racism could explain Twitter banning the White-supremacists [slashdot.org], while protecting the Black ones [abcactionnews.com]?
Fook Twitter...
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while protecting the Black ones [abcactionnews.com]?
Did you link the right story? I don't see what it had to do with Twitter.
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while protecting the Black ones [abcactionnews.com]?
Did you link the right story? I don't see what it had to do with Twitter.
What I linked to had to do with BLM containing Black Supremacists, bent not merely on subjugating or mocking, but outright killing Whites. That Twitter protects them is covered by TFA itself.
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If you want to be hidden from the Police (Score:2)
DONT USE A PUBLIC TOOL! seems obvious but i guess it isnt.
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Just because news papers and political meetings are public doesn't mean that the police should be creating a database of "communists sympathizers". Such databases invites abuse and heavily undermines democracy. In many democracies there are tight regulation on what kinds of database the police is authorized to keep. In particular wh
Who? What? Why? (Score:1)
What do the founders of Black Lives Matter: Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi have in common?
They are members of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, avowed Marxists.
That's why Twitter cut the API access. They don't want law enforcement to track the activities of subversives trying to destroy our Republic, the Bill of Rights and the Constitution on which it is based.
Gotta protect the echo chamber! (Score:2)
Heaven forbid we stop violent, racist thugs before they rip up a city!
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I wouldn't say BLM are the ONLY racists.
But yeah.
So what? (Score:2)
What, you think a government now controlled by big fans of authoritarianism isn't going to rapidly pass exactly that the Tories have just done in the UK? Then you're as big a fool as rust-belt voters believing the lies of a reality TV star.
So Twitter protects criminals. (Score:2)
Given Twitter's support of protecting criminals of similar leanings, this isn't surprising. I wonder how long this will go until they have to actually defend someone significant they hate (or purge someone significant they favor), if only to be consistent with policy.
There's always Lockheed Wisdom.