Police Chief Tries To Blame Newspaper Shooting On The Loss Of Social Media Monitoring Tool, But It Doesn't Add Up

from the please-show-your-work dept

The first response to a tragedy by many public officials is to capitalize on it. That's what the Anne Arundel County police are doing in the aftermath of the shooting at the Capital Gazette newspaper that left five journalists dead. Police Chief William Kampf seems to believe this could have been prevented if the department hadn't been locked out of its social media snooping tool. (h/t WarOnPrivacy)

The acting police chief of the Anne Arundel County Police Department said a controversial tool could've helped investigators track down the Capital Gazette gunman before his deadly rampage.

Geofeedia is a social media intelligence tool that helps identify a user’s location based on where they post to their social media account. Acting police chief William Kampf said his department lost access to the tool, which has limited their abilities to track individuals like suspected gunman Jarrod Ramos.

I don't think Chief Kampf is lying. But he is wrong. Very wrong. And he should have gathered all the facts before using a shooting in his town to complain about this loss of access. At the very least, he perhaps should have demonstrated Geofeedia's crimefighting value using other cases in which something was actually prevented. But nothing was presented -- not even Kampf's ability to fully apprise himself of the situation before opening his mouth.

Geofeedia's social media monitoring service was a big hit with both local and federal government agencies. Documents obtained by the ACLU showed the company marketed the software with a "stay ahead of the rioters" tagline in the wake of Ferguson protests. This implicitly encouraged the monitoring of First Amendment-protected activities since the dividing line between "riot" and "protest" is sometimes nothing more than law enforcement's response to the situation.

Once these documents were made public, Facebook and Twitter revoked Geofeedia's access to their respective firehoses. This drastically limited the usefulness of the tool. This appears to be what Chief Kampf is referring to when he says his department "lost access." This cutoff happened in October of 2016. This cutoff date makes the chief's assertions about Geofeedia's usefulness highly suspect. By the time the cutoff happened, there would have been nothing to monitor.

Since Nov. 20, 2011, [the shooter] mentioned in tweets @ethartley or his last name 107 times, Marquardt by name or as "Evil Tom" nearly 100 times and @capgaznews more than 50 times, according to a USA TODAY analysis.

The account regularly attacked the newspaper and its journalists, including a reference to the deadly shooting at the French newspaper Charlie Hebdo in 2015.

It had been dormant since January 2016.

Even if Geofeedia hadn't lost its API access, the monitoring tool would have done nothing to warn the police about the shooter's activities or plans. Social media monitoring software is useless when targets aren't using social media.

It's also unclear why the police would have continued to monitor a dormant account belonging to someone it had already investigated and found nothing to arrest him for.

A detective who investigated threats shooting suspect Jarrod Ramos made years ago against The Capital Gazette told the newspaper's staffers he did not believe Ramos was a threat to them.

The newspaper itself declined the detective's offer to forward what he had to the State Attorney's Office to see if it thought there was something criminal about the shooter's social media activities, but the paper demurred, feeling it would be "a stick in a beehive."

For this to work out the way Chief Kampf wants us to believe it does, the shooter's social media account would had to have been active and his posts would have needed to contain enough targeted keywords to make his tweets appear on the PD's Geofeedia dashboard. Even if all of that were true, the tweets would have needed to be unambiguously threatening to give law enforcement a reason to interact with the shooter again. Nothing stated by the police department in multiple comments indicates the shooter was being monitored with Geofeedia prior to the newspaper bringing its threat/harassment complaints to the police.

There are too many unresolved "ifs" to make Chief Kampf's complaint plausible. And there is one undeniable fact that makes his claim completely bogus: the account was dormant -- invisible to Geofeedia. The tool would not have helped police head off this tragedy before it could occur. Claiming it would have after the fact is nothing more than opportunism.

Filed Under: capital gazette, monitoring, police, shooting, social media, surveillance, william kampf
Companies: geofeedia, twitter

Geofeedia, In Damage Control Mode, Issues Bogus DMCA Over Brochure Posted By Reporter

from the copyright-as-censorship dept

And it's time for yet another story of copyright being used for out and out censorship. Remember Geofeedia? That's the creepy company that was selling its services to law enforcement agencies and school districts promising to spy on social media feeds to let law enforcement/schools know when people are planning bad stuff. After a big ACLU investigative report, basically all the major social media companies cut ties with Geofeedia, claiming that it was violating their terms of service. I'd imagine that the various law enforcement agencies and school districts who paid tens of thousands of dollars for this data may be asking for their money back.

So what does Geofeedia do? Well, for starters, it abuses the DMCA to try to take down information. The Daily Dot's Dell Cameron had actually written about how the Denver police spent $30k on Geofeedia back in September, a few weeks before the ACLU report dropped (nice scoop and great timing). Cameron then followed up with a detailed story following the ACLU report as well, noting that there were still plenty of other Geofeedia competitors on the market. At the end of that post, Cameron included a brochure that Geofeedia had apparently sent to a police department last year. But you can't see it now, because (yup) Geofeedia issued a DMCA takedown to Scribd, the company that was hosting it. Cameron tweeted about this as well, (correctly!) wondering why Scribd would fold over such a bogus copyright takedown. Now, sure, Geofeedia likely has a copyright on its brochure. But this is clearly a case of fair use. It's posted for reporting purposes, not competitive ones, on a topic of interest. It's not harming the market for the copyright in the brochure (which has no market). This is just ridiculous, both on the part of Geofeedia, and on Scribd for caving.

And it's pointless too, because it just calls more attention to how ridiculous Geofeedia is. Of all the things it should be focusing on right now, trying to take down a sales brochure in an article should be pretty low on its priority list. And if the idea was to get Daily Dot and Cameron to stop reporting on the company, well, that's failed too. Cameron has a new article out about how Geofeedia's stalking system was marketed to public schools as well.

Filed Under: censorship, dmca, takedowns
Companies: daily dot, geofeedia

ACLU Dumps Docs On Social Media Monitoring Firm Geofeedia; Social Media Platforms Respond By Dumping Geofeedia

from the if-access-is-the-only-thing-you're-selling,-what-happens-when-it's-gone? dept

Surveilling citizens engaged in First Amendment-protected activity? That's just how Geofeedia rolls.

Records obtained by the ACLU show the private company pitched its "firehose" connection to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram as a way to monitor the situation in Ferguson (during the 2014 protests) and "stay one step ahead of the rioters."

Geofeedia itself didn't do anything illegal. It simply provided a one-stop shop for social media monitoring of public posts. It's the way it was pitched that was a problem. Rather than sell it as a way to keep law enforcement informed of criminal activity, its sales team highlighted its usefulness in monitoring protestors and other First Amendment activity.

The documents the ACLU obtained show the company paid these three social media services for "firehose" attachments -- beefed-up API calls that allowed Geofeedia to access more public posts faster than law enforcement could do on its own.

Instagram had provided Geofeedia access to the Instagram API, a stream of public Instagram user posts. This data feed included any location data associated with the posts by users. Instagram terminated this access on September 19, 2016.

Facebook had provided Geofeedia with access to a data feed called the Topic Feed API, which is supposed to be a tool for media companies and brand purposes, and which allowed Geofeedia to obtain a ranked feed of public posts from Facebook that mention a specific topic, including hashtags, events, or specific places. Facebook terminated this access on September 19, 2016.

Twitter did not provide access to its “Firehose,” but has an agreement, via a subsidiary, to provide Geofeedia with searchable access to its database of public tweets.

Of all of these companies, only Twitter took proactive steps to prevent API calls from being used for proxy surveillance.

In February, Twitter added additional contract terms to try to further safeguard against surveillance. But our records show that as recently as July 11th, Geofeedia was still touting its product as a tool to monitor protests. After learning of this, Twitter sent Geofeedia a cease and desist letter.

Well, it's all over now. It's not just Twitter demanding Geofeedia stop turning its service into an extension of law enforcement's worst urges. It's everyone. The ACLU dumped its documents and, shortly after, the companies dumped Geofeedia.

After reviewing the report, Facebook cutoff Geofeedia’s access to commercially available data from its social platform and from Instagram, which it owns.

On Tuesday, Twitter said they were also cutting off the Chicago social media company’s access.

So much for the business model. Twitter cited its long-standing policy of preventing its service from being used as a surveillance tool -- a policy it exercised earlier this year when cutting off Dataminr's access to its APIs for selling its collected communications to US intelligence agencies.

Facebook simply stated that Geofeedia's API use was "unauthorized," something it probably should have realized well before the ACLU shamed it into cutting off the company's access.

Geofeedia, meanwhile, has stated it will meet with all "stakeholders," which apparently means Twitter, Facebook, and various government agencies. Users of these services haven't been invited to do anything more than vote with their digital feet.

For all the call-and-response, the underlying fact is that Geofeedia didn't have access to anything any individual user didn't. It may have had more of it faster and a front end that made surveillance/monitoring easier, but it wasn't gathering tweets or posts from private accounts or otherwise accessing anything not already viewable by the public.

But its sales tactics were a bit concerning. The company pretty much encouraged law enforcement agencies to engage in some very questionable monitoring.

Using Geofeedia’s analytics and search capabilities and following the recommendations in their marketing materials, law enforcement in places like Oakland, Denver, and Seattle could easily target neighborhoods where people of color live, monitor hashtags used by activists and allies, or target activist groups as “overt threats.” We know for a fact that in Oakland and Baltimore, law enforcement has used Geofeedia to monitor protests.

Geofeedia claims to be interested in protecting the civil liberties of Americans, while at the same time nudging law enforcement agencies towards undermining those protections. Because of that, it's now probably looking at handing out some refunds, seeing as its all-seeing-APIs have been cut off and all it can really offer at this point is part-owner positions in a fast-growing pariahship.

Filed Under: apis, government, monitoring, social media, surveillance
Companies: aclu, facebook, geofeedia, instagram, twitter