Setback for safety
Civil libertarians are cheering a decision by Boston police to abandon plans for a new social media monitoring program. How odd to celebrate “victory” when the campaign was to make it harder for authorities to sniff out and prevent terrorism plots and other criminal acts.
Memo to the professionally paranoid: Hub cops aren’t going to suddenly stop monitoring public internet posts, which is what the monitoring program would have facilitated. They’ll just have to keep hunting and pecking, rather than conducting investigations in a more efficient manner.
Three vendors had submitted bids for a program to help the Boston Police Department monitor public social media and other internet sites for warning signs of terrorist activity or threats. But late Friday Commissioner William Evans announced the plans are on hold, because “the technology that was presented exceeded the needs of the department.”
Of course the simple act of soliciting those proposals had set civil liberties advocates into panic, warning of a cyber witch hunt. Critics said minorities could be targeted unfairly, and made disingenuous claims that the mere mention of, say, Black Lives Matter in a Twitter post might get a young person brought up on charges. Mentioning that a party was “the bomb” might be considered an act of terrorism, one critic insisted.
It was both hyperbolic and insulting to the professionalism of the officers who work in counterterrorism. It also made for unpleasant headlines, and despite the city’s insistence that the program would be implemented in accordance with the law and with respect for individual privacy rights, critics didn’t let up. Evans has pledged to revisit the idea of such a program after soliciting public input, but there appears to be no time frame for doing so.
Meanwhile isn’t it curious that one of the same organizations raising alarms about Boston’s planned monitoring program is at the same time demanding that Facebook and Twitter step in and begin cracking down on “hate speech” that finds its way to those sites (see below).
To some folks privacy is everything — until it isn’t.