US Police Social Media Surveillance Unfairly Targeted Muslims, Report Says
08 February 2018Islamophobia Watch
A social media monitoring tool used by the Boston Police Department to
identify potential threats swept up the posts of people using the hashtag #MuslimLivesMatter
and a lawmaker's Facebook update about racial inequality, according to a
report released Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union of
Massachusetts.
The ACLU says in a report based on documents obtained through a public records
request that the police department's use of Geofeedia to mine the internet
appears to have had little benefit to public safety while unfairly focusing on
groups such as Muslims. Boston police say the ACLU's conclusions are misguided
and that the program helped police successfully monitor events that could lead
to demonstrations or crowds and threaten security.
'Our main focus in all of this is public safety, not targeting speech, not
targeting people's political affiliations,' said Lt. Det. Michael McCarthy.
'And quite frankly, to have the ACLU to even make that insinuation is not only
insulting, but it's completely misinformed,' he said.
Boston police used Geofeedia for two weeks in 2014 and again for more than a
year starting in January 2015, according to the documents. The department's
use of the program became public in late 2016 after it solicited bids to spend
$1.4 million for another social media monitoring software.
Police later dropped those plans amid backlash from groups like the ACLU.
The now-defunct location-based program allowed officials to set up email
alerts for when certain keywords were used on social media. The alerts were
vetted by analysts in the department's Boston Regional Intelligence Center and
the data was discarded once it was determined it wasn't a potential public
safety issue, McCarthy said.
Geofeedia was used by police departments across the country until social media
companies cut off access to its data after concerns raised by the ACLU of
northern California in 2016. The software was also widely used by companies
interested in what their customers were saying about them online, and news
organizations for reporting.
The documents show Boston police searched for keywords they identified as
'Islamic extremist terminology,' including words like 'ISIS' and 'caliphate'
as well as Arabic words such as 'ummah,' which means 'community.'
In the wake of the killing of three Muslim students near the University of
North Carolina in Chapel Hill, police also tracked the hashtag #muslimlivesmatter,
according to the report. After unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, over the fatal
shooting of a black man by a white police officer, police searched for the
terms like 'protest' and 'Ferguson.'
The ACLU and the Boston-based Muslim Justice League say the tracking of common
Arabic words, like 'ummah,' is troubling. The ACLU said posts captured by the
program that mentioned 'ISIS' were either jokes or references to issues in the
news.
'The Boston Police Department should never conduct surveillance targeting
political speech or religious expression, but that's exactly what their own
records show they did when they used this social media monitoring software,'
said Kade Crockford, co-author of the report and director of the group's
Technology for Liberty Program.
McCarthy said police didn't target individuals but chose keywords in response
to events happening around the country or based on information from federal
law enforcement. In the wake of the Chapel Hill shooting, for example, there
were concerns about possible demonstrations or backlash against the Muslim
community, he said.
'If we weren't diligent in our efforts to provide safe events for those
participating and attending ... then we wouldn't be doing our job as police
officers,' he said.
Among those whose social media use prompted an alert was then-City Councilor
Tito Jackson, for a 2014 Facebook post about homelessness and poverty that
mentioned Ferguson, according to the report. City council was unaware at the
time that police were using the Geofeedia program, Jackson said.
'I spoke out about their 2016 plan to spend $1.4 million on a social media
surveillance system in part because I worried that the tool would be used to
track people not because they did something wrong but because of their
political views,' he said.
'Little did I know that that had already happened,' he said.
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