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The FBI plans more social media surveillance
The FBI wants to gather more information from social media. Today, it issued a call for contracts for a new social media monitoring tool. According to a request-for-proposals (RFP), it's looking for an "early alerting tool" that would help it monitor terrorist groups, domestic threats, criminal activity and the like.
The tool would provide the FBI with access to the full social media profiles of persons-of-interest. That could include information like user IDs, emails, IP addresses and telephone numbers. The tool would also allow the FBI to track people based on location, enable persistent keyword monitoring and provide access to personal social media history. According to the RFP, "The mission-critical exploitation of social media will enable the Bureau to detect, disrupt, and investigate an ever growing diverse range of threats to U.S. National interests."
But a tool of this nature is likely to raise a few red flags, despite the FBI's call for "ensuring all privacy and civil liberties compliance requirements are met." The government doesn't have the best track record with regard to social media surveillance. Early this year, the ACLU sued the government over its use of social media surveillance of immigrants, and the Trump administration has proposed allowing officials to snoop on the social media accounts of Social Security disability recipients.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday July 16 2019, @01:08AM
The police were illegally pepper-spraying, assaulting, and arresting protesters for the heinous crime of walking down a street with signs chanting slogans starting on day 1. The protests came to an end when the police illegally beat up and robbed everybody camped in the park, while illegally detaining elected officials who were attempting to get to the scene and observe what was happening. I'm not sure exactly why you think that wouldn't have happened if the protesters had just been nicer or more reasonable or law-abiding, because the police response wasn't nice, reasonable, or law-abiding.
In general, protests that have the approval of police aren't real protests, because at least in the US the police will invariably attack protesters who are saying things that they or their bosses don't want to hear.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.