ACLU Questions the Possible Purchase of Online Monitoring Service by Lowell Police, Schools
What if your local school were running an Echelon type program against local social media sites? It’s all supposed to be used in the interest of public safety…. but who gets to select the keywords? Who’s monitoring, and for what, where is the information shared, where are the lines drawn, where is free speech respected, and when do authorities intervene? This is all murky and creepy in a big brother kind of way.
The friend who tweeted this article and I had a short twitter discussion of how this all could or would work, and after the discussion of data brokers / big data /social media was all said and done, I realized that we had just had something akin to the “How does The Machine select it’s next number?” discussion from “Person of Interest” but about a real life application.
The Lowell police and school departments are poised to purchase a powerful new online tool that would monitor all public posts made within the city limits on popular social-media sites.
The program would allow officers and school administrators to identify potentially harmful situations, including bomb threats, online bullying and suicide notes, police Superintendent William Taylor said.
But civil-liberties groups warn that such tools open the door for abuses of power when used incorrectly.
“People should be able to criticize government in a free society without some cop somewhere writing down everything they say,” said Kade Crockford, director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts’ Technology for Liberty Project. “The way to solve crimes is to go after people who are suspected of specific criminal acts, not spying on the general public.”
Taylor dismissed concerns that police will use the monitoring program — if it is purchased — to spy on Lowell residents or punish them for what they post.