Liberals fret that the police might be reading their tweets

There’s a significant difference between protecting your privacy and attempting to shackle the police in their attempts to enforce the law. This is a lesson which seems to be lost on liberal protesters who are concerned that, *gasp* the cops may be checking out their social media posts. Elizabeth Dwoskin at the Washington Post has the details on this evil plan.

Hundreds of local police departments across the United States have collectively spent about $4.75 million on software tools that can monitor the locations of activists at protests or social media hashtags used by suspects, according to new research.

The research, by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit organization focusing on criminal justice issues, aims to take a comprehensive look at the fast-growing phenomenon of social media-monitoring by law enforcement. Using public records, the Brennan Center tracked spending by 151 local law enforcement agencies that have contracted with start-ups that siphon data from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other sites, largely out of the public eye.

The short version of this is that datamining companies offer services where they collect social media posts on Twitter, Facebook and other outlets and use customized tools to search them for particular hashtags, words and location identifiers. This filtered information can be used by the police to look for evidence in criminal cases or monitor explosive situations in an attempt to ward off trouble. Does that sound frightening to you? It apparently does to some liberals.

But advocates worry that the tools are being increasingly used to monitor protests and other public gatherings, and to target individual activists. The Oregon Department of Justice, for example, used software called Digital Stakeout to monitor people who used more than 30 hashtags on social media including #BlackLivesMatter, according to the American Civil Liberties Union and a lawsuit filed by one of the people who claimed to have been monitored.

I realize this is going to come as a shock to some of you, but when you have a public Facebook or Twitter page and you start updating it… everyone can see that. And everyone in this case includes data miners and law enforcement officials. You are assured privacy from unreasonable government intrusion in your persons, houses, papers, and effects unless a warrant has been issued and it’s completely reasonable in the 21st century to consider your emails and other direct, person to person electronic communications to be part of your “papers.” But your tweets and Facebook status updates are not your private papers. It’s the difference between a letter from a friend sitting on the nightstand in your bedroom and you putting up a billboard on the side of your home with the information printed on it in ten foot letters. If the cops drive by and read the billboard they aren’t intruding on your privacy.

Here’s a thought for you to ponder. If you’re doing something you don’t want the police to know about, don’t tweet about it and post selfies of you and your friends doing it on your Facebook page or repeatedly use the #ImBreakingTheLaw hashtag. Life will probably go a lot more smoothly for you.