The intelligence revolution

What you do on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter can help law enforcement agencies keep a close eye on you.

The next time you consider tweeting your rallying cry from the crowd at a street protest, think again. The police may identify you as an agitator based on your social media messages and, if you have tagged your location, move in to keep a closer eye on you.

If that sounds far-fetched, consider the revelations earlier this month from the American Civil Liberties Union that California law enforcement agencies have been using sophisticated data-mining tools that monitor Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to keep track of activists at peaceful protests.

Chicago company Geofeedia bought access to the social media platforms, which serve up masses of location-based data on social media users that can be mined for key words useful to Geofeedia’s government clients. In effect, it was a supercharged method of browsing thousands of Facebook pages in real-time; public tweets, posts, trending topics and events were sucked into the data feed.

In that respect, the use of socialmedia-mining tools isn’t illegal and doesn’t necessarily require warrants or special permission by law enforcement agencies. But it shows how technology can provide useful surveillance tools in ways that weren’t possible before the era of big data – and highlights our morphing definition of privacy in the age of social media.

It has raised the ire of civil liberties advocates who see a too cosy relationship emerging between the social media giants and a host of software start-ups feeding their data to government departments and law enforcement agencies to be used for social surveillance.

Fearing a user backlash, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter moved to cut off or limit Geofeedia’s access to their data feeds following the union’s investigation. The social giants know where their bread is buttered – advertisers paying to reach a wide audience of social media users.

But dozens of companies have financial relationships with them similar to Geofeedia’s. They range from news outlets trying to pinpoint key influencers on social media to soft-drink makers plotting their next guerrilla marketing campaign.

Geofeedia is unlikely to have customers in New Zealand yet. But another specialist in big data mining, Silicon Valley-based Palantir, has a presence in Wellington and in 2013 listed a job advert for an embedded government analyst. The company, which works for the US National Security Agency and is rumoured to have served as a consultant to our own spy agencies, sought a recruit who believed “a revolution in intelligence is imminent”.

Geofeedia argues that this intelligence revolution, powered by social media, also sees it help save lives and aid recovery efforts in the wake of such events as the Boston Marathon bombing and Hurricane Matthew.

Which shows we are still getting to grips with the pros and cons of aggregating and interrogating all that social media chatter. loathe Facebook and can manage without it. But my wife found she was missing out on important information from university and so reluctantly set up a Facebook account.

Similar story for Webster. “I’m not on Facebook but my wife is, and if we weren’t on Facebook we couldn’t get communications about our children’s school and sports activities, so we are locked into it.”

How much of a choice do we really have, then, to opt out of the surveillance society? You could pull your kid out of the schools that use the ClassDojo, but would you? The company reacted angrily to concerns the New York Times raised about its product. It denies it will sell student information on and says records “not explicitly saved by a parent or student” are deleted after a year. Webster isn’t convinced and is vowing to look into it more closely when he returns home.

SOCIAL MEDIA RULES

As I write up our interview – I’ve used a recording app downloaded to my smartphone – up pops an image of my daughter at day care, playing with her friends. The childcare centre emails the images to parents. There was a very cute one of her sharing a podium with two other children when they did the Preschool Olympics. I was about to send it out over Twitter but stopped. I hadn’t asked permission from the other parents. What say one parent had told a partner, or relative, a white lie, saying the child wouldn’t be at preschool that day? Or perhaps the picture landed in the middle of something more serious, like a custody dispute.

Webster says his family enforces strict rules about social media photos. “We don’t allow our friends to put pictures of our children on their Facebook pages, and if they do, we ask them to take them down.” Facebook pictures contain more than just the image. “They are not just photographs – they include metadata about where and when they were taken, and Facebook has very sophisticated face recognition, so they can ‘recognise’ just about anyone.”

What, I wonder, would George Orwell have made of all this? “Well, in 1984, the state had Big Brother, but part of the coercive power of the state was also its ability to resort to violence. What we see in the modern surveillance society is surveillance and power being exercised in quite subtle ways. It doesn’t need physical violence.”

No, no violence needed at all. Most of this happens while we work and play, and most of us seem happy to go along with it.