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by mwfunk
3535 days ago
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Based on this article at least, this doesn't sound like a big deal? It sounds like the service helped police discover when and where protests were happening. If bad cops used that information to illegally interfere with those protests (or the protesters themselves), that's obviously a bad thing, but that wasn't stated in the article. I would expect good cops to also want that same information as part of doing their jobs. Protesting isn't illegal, but if a large group of people are legally gathering someplace to vent anger about something (anything really, it doesn't even have to be a political flashpoint), I would expect police would want to know about that too, for non-sinister reasons (like general awareness WRT potentially disruptive events happening in their city that day). To police who are just doing their (non-evil) jobs, protests are important to know about for the same reasons that it's important for them to know about any other potential sources of civic chaos that day (concerts, etc.). It feels like the article presents the facts with an unstated assumption of "bad cops using intel for nefarious purposes", but if that's true, there wasn't any supporting evidence presented in the article. |
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That forces protest movements to organize more and more potential protest sites, and have more and more logistical organization to gather people into same location.
It becomes an escalation of logistical requirements to even get people organized enough _to_ protest. When you add in the fact that police are also using social network monitoring (and I mean that not just in the online term of social network websites, but as in social network monitoring overall), and regularly use face recognition at protest events (I'm speaking mostly about nypd here), and what you're left with is the bitter truth that if the NYPD truly doesn't want you to have a protest, you're not going to be able to do it. The sites you try to go to will be locked down before people arrive. The people you send to help route people to impromptu backup collections will be arrested on first sight. etc, etc, etc.
Sure, is this all wildly illegal and unconstitutional behavior on the part of the police? Absolutely. But anyone who has ever worked for any politicized cause knows that its also par de course. New York, Chicago, and Oakland are famous for a break-the-law-now, pay the fines later type of police enforcement, but I've watched cops plow SUVs through 50 person hippie protest marches, light their own cars on fire, or attack protestors with knives and chainsaws (seriously, chainsaws) in more places than I care to admit, just so tomorrow's papers can say "Peaceful protest goes violent", and anyone who sells this sort of data to the police is aware that that's the reality on the ground.
When the governor says jump, the police always do, regardless of legality, and this type of info just makes them that much more effective.