from Hacker News

Dataminr tracked Gaza-related protests

by jbegley on 3/17/25, 5:25 PM with 220 comments

  • by neonate on 3/17/25, 11:31 PM

  • by whatshisface on 3/17/25, 7:18 PM

    Here's an interesting thought about how preferential surveillance can lead to repression even when it's public and not itself acted on:

    1. Every demographic commits petty crimes and code violations at about the same rate (things like parking violations and music piracy).

    2. However, people who are being watched will be caught more often.

    3. The end result is that people in the "wrong" crowd on average are punished more than people in the "right" one at an equal level of misbehavior.

  • by bawolff on 3/18/25, 5:19 AM

    Am i weird in that this feels kind of normal (im not american)?

    Protests should be protected, but i normally assume protestors get permits, and a reasonable police presence is around. Not to intimidate anyone, but just to make sure nobody gets too rowdy, keep protestors and counter-protestors away from each other (to prevent violence), provide aid if anyone gets hurt (big masses of people is always a trample risk). Otherwise just do normal crowd control sort of things.

    If they were surveiling individuals who participated afterwards, maybe that would be something, but it seems like (according to the article) all they were doing was keeping track of when protests were happening.

    Protests are not private events. They are literally the most non-private event possible. That is the entire point. I dont think there is any reasonable expectation of privacy in terms of time&date of demonstrations.

  • by lenerdenator on 3/17/25, 5:57 PM

    Is this really surprising to anyone?

    If you're out in public and using public websites to organize protests, it's a given that data will be mined about that.

    The trick is to make it unattractive for those doing the enforcing to act upon their analysis of that data.

  • by delichon on 3/17/25, 6:20 PM

    Imagine the reverse: A police department vows not to use social media to help predict where to deploy their forces to protect public safety. That sounds like malpractice. A commitment to civil rights doesn't restrict them from gathering real time public intelligence, a.k.a. situational awareness, to do their job.

  • by kazinator on 3/18/25, 7:09 AM

    So let's get this straight. People are tweeting that they're going to protest somewhere. But when cops see these tweets, that "surveillance".

  • by ngruhn on 3/17/25, 10:42 PM

    Don’t you have to register protests in the US? So if there registered the police already knows about them, right? And if not they are illegal, no?

  • by blorkusmelorkus on 3/17/25, 9:49 PM

    Twitter started as TXT2MOB for organizing protests, and now it and social media have become surveillance tools. The irony.

  • by nemo44x on 3/18/25, 3:10 AM

    This whole thing is “why won’t you let us undermine you?! The law says we can subvert and overthrow you!”

    Coercion has limits.

  • by jeffbee on 3/17/25, 6:06 PM

    It is not "surveillance" when the cops see your tweets.

  • by rqtwteye on 3/17/25, 5:38 PM

    Unless there is a massive rethink of a lot of laws we are running into a surveillance state worse than Orwell could have come up with. "No expectation of privacy in a public space" made sense when there were no databases that could record and analyze everything that's going on and people didn't live half of their lives on the internet. And tech is only going to accelerate the ease of total surveillance.

    I think Jefferson proposed to let the constitution expire every 19 years. I think he had a point there. Instead of viewing the "Founding Fathers" as the ultimate source of wisdom we should accept that they made decisions that made sense during their time but times have changed so some decisions should change.

  • by ryandrake on 3/17/25, 5:34 PM

    Headline is kind of clickbaity. They could have just as easily used "LAPD Surveilled Gaza Protests Using A Tool Called Dataminr". Bonus: The tool name is in the URL itself!

  • by bastardoperator on 3/17/25, 6:26 PM

    LAPD and LASD are going to bankrupt Los Angeles. They're more concerned with being a paramilitary police force versus stopping or preventing neighborhood crime.

  • by bgschulman31 on 3/17/25, 6:19 PM

    This seems like mostly a nothingburger. If you want to communicate privately there are plenty of pieces of software that allow for that.

  • by jmyeet on 3/17/25, 11:23 PM

    For a long time tech people lived in a bubble believing the idealistic BS spun by Silicon Valley. What we've seen over the last few years is how the mask has come off. There are two factors at play here:

    1. The wealthy, and by extension Silicon Valley founders, inevitably end up moving in lockstep with US government policy. Wealthy people inevitably become conservative to protect and grow their wealth. Any idealism is a temporary recruiting tool. Ultimately, all tech companies become defense contractors and end up aiding the surveillance state, repressing speech and supporting gencoide (eg Myanmar); and

    2. Transhumanism [1]. I can remember hearing about this from tech people a decade ago. I really had no idea how popular this was (and has become). Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are all transhumanists. The central idea here is "what can I do now to ensure the best future for the gene pool?" And of course all these weirdos think their genes are superior because they're rich. It's why the likes of Elon can't stop having children.

    It's not surprising Dataminr (who I'd honestly never heard of until now) is providing material support to repression. This is every tech company.

    [1]: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT2goBEvS/