Los Angeles Police have been requesting social media account information on Field Interview cards

[thewayne]

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and email addresses.

If that's not bad enough, here's the lovely bit:
The LAPD's social media user guide encourages officers to monitor social media but imposes few restrictions on the practice, Dwyer wrote. The guide encourages officers to use "fictitious online personas" to conduct investigations and says that using these fake personas "does not constitute online undercover activity."

"Few limitations offset this broad authority: officers need not document the searches they conduct, their purpose, or the justification," she wrote. "They are not required to seek supervisory approval, and the guide offers no standards for the types of cases that warrant social media surveillance. While officers are instructed not to conduct social media surveillance for personal, illicit, or illegal purposes, they seem otherwise to have complete discretion over whom to surveil, how broadly to track their online activity, and how long to monitor them."

Hottie in the red Camaro convertible? Could be linked to some gang bangers a couple of blocks over! REALLY! It's not stalking, it's an investigative lead! Honest!

You don't have to give an officer this social media information, just like you don't have to consent to an officer searching your car without a warrant. If they tell you to stay and they're going to produce one, tell them you're going to call for an attorney and do so while you're waiting. If you're arrested with probable cause, bit of a different matter.

It's possible several other law enforcement orgs are trying to collect social media info. In the case of LAPD, it's being fed into a massive surveillance database called Palantir. Palantir is a somewhat shadowy company created by the co-founder of Paypal, Peter Thiel, and has an interesting and complex Wikipedia page.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/09/lapd-officers-collect-social-media-account-info-from-people-they-detain/

Comments

[kathmandu]

I saw a guy in a Palantir employee T-shirt here a few years ago, and wanted to hiss at him.

[thewayne]

I think making the sign of the cross and looking around for some holy water might also be not too far out of line.

[captainsblog]

Good thing they're not lawyers. Because if they were, they could be disbarred for that.

We ARE allowed to contact potential clients, witnesses, opponents through social media under the same rules we are allowed to contact them if we walked up to them on the street. Mainly: we cannot conceal who we are, and if we know they are represented by counsel, we cannot communicate with them.

Can we look at their public social media posts? Yes. Can we send them a friend request? Yes. Does that have to blare out I'M A LAWYER AND I'M NOT HERE TO HELP YOU? No. But we can't make up a fake one, or lie if we're asked what we do for a living, or use the media to do anything but look if we get friended and then know they have counsel.

PS: If a disciplinary organization gets a grievance on one of us? OUR social media postings are fair game to be disclosed to them, even friends-only ones.

[silveradept]

I'm sure we're just supposed to trust that police officers wouldn't monitor someone's social media feed for any anti-police sentiment posted after they were detained, so they could find some excuse to arrest them on one or another of the more obscure parts of the criminal code.

It's not like we have massive amounts of evidence that police are more like a protection racket full of thugs who want to do violence than civic-minded people who want to serve and protect their populations.

[rain_gryphon]

Why would anyone take issue with that? They're just picking up information that's publicly available, AND they're using it to the public's advantage (i.e., to the disadvantage of criminals). So far as using "fictitious online personas", I'm at a loss to immediately think of anyone who doesn't, in some fashion. There's always Donald Trump on Telegram, of course, but they mark him as a 'fake account' anyway, so that ironically the posts inevitably carry that amount of false information.

[thewayne]

It’s one thing to pull information like this from suspects or arrestees or convicts, they’re trying to get this information from everyone whom they interview. People in car accidents and witnesses to events. It’s far too broad a dragnet. Additionally, there’s no oversight in place, which lets them trawl the data with no recourse, which leads to cyberstalking. Taking it to another level, there’s most likely zero oversight at the Palantir level, meaning they can combine every subscriber’s information into a massive contact database and make all sorts of nasty inferences. This is not good stuff. This goes far beyond “If you have nothing to hide, you shouldn’t be afraid."

[rain_gryphon]

I just don't see anything at all wrong with any of that. They're viewing publicly available data.

[thewayne]

Similar things was said about the metadata revelations by Edward Snowden about what was being hoovered up by the NSA regarding phone conversations. Yes, some of the data is publicly available. But it’s being unsupervised, and the officers are maintaining investigations far outside of what should be done.

[thewayne]

Some of this data is not public. We don’t know what capabilities Palantir has. They could be using zero days and viewing private communications without warrants. And if you know Bob through furry connections, and Bob knows Alex through Bronie connections, and Alex happens to be a gang banger in L.A., regardless of guilt, LAPD may view you with suspicion because you indirectly seem to know Alex regardless of any connections because that’s how inferences through metadata works.

[rain_gryphon]

And should I (or anyone) be falsely suspected by the police, what harm is done, other than to waste their time on an unproductive lead? A waste of time which is most easily avoided by giving the police access to more data, rather than less.