Police caught using online spy tool to plot “pre-crimes”
Increasingly common.

   By Ken Macon
   Posted 12:38 pm

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Tech startup Voyager Labs helps law enforcement agencies use what you post on social media and who you interact with to predict whether you have or “plan to” commit a crime. It is one of a growing number of companies that claim they can use social media analysis to help predict and solve crimes and has opened many questions about privacy.

Non-profit organization Brennan Center obtained documents through freedom of information requests that revealed the strategies Voyager uses violate the first amendment protections. For instance, the software uses posts about Islam and social media usernames indicating Arab pride as signs of potential inclination towards extremism. But they can also be used to target any group.

Additionally, according to the documents, obtained by The Guardian, the company uses questionable processes to access data on social media, and even enables law enforcement officers to infiltrate groups and private accounts using fake personas.

The company started nine years ago and has offices all over the world including New York, Washington DC, and Israel. The company is one of a growing number of tech firms exploring social media analytics for use in law enforcement. Others include Media Sonar, Palantir, PredPol, and Geofeedia.

The technologies provided by these tech firms are attractive to law enforcement, because they promise to automate and expedite the process of preventing crime. The documents obtained by the Brennan Center show that LAPD has been trialing Voyager Labs software since 2019. The department has also worked or considered working with other such companies.

According to experts, such kinds of software are a privacy nightmare for the public and potentially illegal as they criminalize otherwise legal behavior such as associating with certain people.

The documents revealed that Voyager uses a “guilty-by-association” model. The Guardian’s coverage of the story explained:
“Voyager software hoovers up all the public information available on a person or topic – including posts, connections and even emojis – analyzes and indexes it and then, in some cases, cross-references it with non-public information.

“Internal documents show the technology creates a topography of a person’s entire social media existence, specifically looking at users’ posts as well as their connections, and how strong each of those relationships are.

“The software visualizes how a person’s direct connections are connected to each other, where all of those connections work, and any “indirect connections” (people with at least four mutual friends). Voyager also detects any indirect connections between a subject and other people the customer has previously searched for.”

New York University’s data journalism professor and author of “Artificial Intelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World” Meredith Broussard likened Voyager’s systems to the systems used for online ad targeting.

Online ad targeting systems group people into “affinity groups” based on shared interests.

“So instead of grouping people into buckets like ‘pet owners’, what Voyager seems to be doing is putting people into ‘buckets’ of likely criminals,” Broussard explained.

She added: “It’s a ‘guilt by association’ system.”

Voyager’s software supplements the publicly available data with information it acquires through warrants and subpoenas and what it calls an “active persona.”

The company obtains data such as private text messages and location of a subject through warrants and subpoenas obtained by law enforcement agencies.

John Hamasaki, a criminal defense lawyer and member of the police commission in San Francisco, said: “The degree to which private information is being seized, purportedly lawfully under search warrants, is just way over-broad.”

He added that the fact that the police can now analyze the data through AI technology provided by companies such as Voyager raises civil liberties and privacy concerns.

The documents do not contain many details on the so-called premium “active persona” service. The company states that clients can use “avatars” for the purposes of collecting and analyzing “information that is otherwise inaccessible” on several networks.

Voyager claims the service can be used to access encrypted information on Telegram, and a 2019 roadmap showed that it was planning on rolling out the “active persona” feature on WhatsApp and Instagram.

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Welcome to clown dystopia.

^writing that probably * my gudbugman score even more

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Minority Report

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Minority Report

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So the fake Twitter account I just created (and only social media account ever) with a username of a metric cartridge - I should probably nuke.
I knew I should’ve just used Ryan8940373634

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It's not really a list, just a collection of names in a thread.

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It's not really a list, just a collection of names in a thread.

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The 'Protect Act' allows US federal overseas agents to investigate and prosecute US citizens involved in child molestation in other countries (mostly SE Asia.)
There is no written agreement with the other nation (if they informally agree to allow it,) and due process is simply ignored (i.e. warrantless forensic searches/surveillance of private residences, renditions, etc.)

Watch 'The Pedophile Hunters' on Amazon if you want to learn more.

I'm fine with that.  I'm also fine with identifying and prosecuting terrorists - be they foreign or domestic.  We live in a world where giving up a little liberty is necessary if we want to protect our nation.
And yes, I see the potential for abuse, and it makes me a little fearful. But I ask myself: "Should Americans who travel overseas to abuse children have any of the protections the Constitution provides?  Should terrorists who mean to kill innocent citizens have those protections?"

My answer is a resounding "No."

Flame on...

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I bet if I had unrestricted access to Facebook I could look at the accounts of local criminals and predict that many of their Facebook friends are involved in drugs and theft

Quoted:
The 'Protect Act' allows US federal overseas agents to investigate and prosecute US citizens involved in child molestation in other countries (mostly SE Asia.)
There is no written agreement with the other nation (if they informally agree to allow it,) and due process is simply ignored (i.e. warrantless forensic searches/surveillance of private residences, renditions, etc.)

Watch 'The Pedophile Hunters' on Amazon if you want to learn more.

I'm fine with that.  I'm also fine with identifying and prosecuting terrorists - be they foreign or domestic.  We live in a world where giving up a little liberty is necessary if we want to protect our nation.
And yes, I see the potential for abuse, and it makes me a little fearful. But I ask myself: "Should Americans who travel overseas to abuse children have any of the protections the Constitution provides?  Should terrorists who mean to kill innocent citizens have those protections?"

My answer is a resounding "No."

Flame on...

Quoted:
The 'Protect Act' allows US federal overseas agents to investigate and prosecute US citizens involved in child molestation in other countries (mostly SE Asia.)
There is no written agreement with the other nation (if they informally agree to allow it,) and due process is simply ignored (i.e. warrantless forensic searches/surveillance of private residences, renditions, etc.)

Watch 'The Pedophile Hunters' on Amazon if you want to learn more.

I'm fine with that.  I'm also fine with identifying and prosecuting terrorists - be they foreign or domestic.  We live in a world where giving up a little liberty is necessary if we want to protect our nation.
And yes, I see the potential for abuse, and it makes me a little fearful. But I ask myself: "Should Americans who travel overseas to abuse children have any of the protections the Constitution provides?  Should terrorists who mean to kill innocent citizens have those protections?"

My answer is a resounding "No."

Flame on...

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There's some program probation departments use that "predicts the chance at reoffending" through the use of questions, not trolling social media.

There was an old study that tried to make a connection between tattoos and criminality.

I bet if I had unrestricted access to Facebook I could look at the accounts of local criminals and predict that many of their Facebook friends are involved in drugs and theft

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I can predict criminals by the shit box they drive.

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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jun-30-bk-radosh30-story.html




This is just as irrational as people going to mediums to have their palms read or horoscope reading to predict your day. It's literally that dumb.

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Most cops I know barely know how to use a computer.

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The 'Protect Act' allows US federal overseas agents to investigate and prosecute US citizens involved in child molestation in other countries (mostly SE Asia.)
There is no written agreement with the other nation (if they informally agree to allow it,) and due process is simply ignored (i.e. warrantless forensic searches/surveillance of private residences, renditions, etc.)

Watch 'The Pedophile Hunters' on Amazon if you want to learn more.

I'm fine with that.  I'm also fine with identifying and prosecuting terrorists - be they foreign or domestic.  We live in a world where giving up a little liberty is necessary if we want to protect our nation.
And yes, I see the potential for abuse, and it makes me a little fearful. But I ask myself: "Should Americans who travel overseas to abuse children have any of the protections the Constitution provides?  Should terrorists who mean to kill innocent citizens have those protections?"

My answer is a resounding "No."

Flame on...

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Here’s an amazing “pre-crime” tool:

When you arrest a guy for attempting to murder a woman by running her over with an SUV, and then you release him with no bail and hand him the keys to that SUV…

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Those large groups of folks in the greater bay area that have been on a multi-night crime spree better think twice about their next heist...

Quoted:
The 'Protect Act' allows US federal overseas agents to investigate and prosecute US citizens involved in child molestation in other countries (mostly SE Asia.)
There is no written agreement with the other nation (if they informally agree to allow it,) and due process is simply ignored (i.e. warrantless forensic searches/surveillance of private residences, renditions, etc.)

Watch 'The Pedophile Hunters' on Amazon if you want to learn more.

I'm fine with that.  I'm also fine with identifying and prosecuting terrorists - be they foreign or domestic.  We live in a world where giving up a little liberty is necessary if we want to protect our nation.
And yes, I see the potential for abuse, and it makes me a little fearful. But I ask myself: "Should Americans who travel overseas to abuse children have any of the protections the Constitution provides?  Should terrorists who mean to kill innocent citizens have those protections?"

My answer is a resounding "No."

Flame on...

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Words have meaning, especially when uttered by a POTUS. When Biden said that there is a war on "domestic terror" it should have stunned this nation. It didn't which in and of itself is terrifying

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What is the definition that you use for "terrorist", in particular domestic terrorist?

I was active duty in JSOC, in Ops, when the Patriot act was passed. It's something to see a group of people who perhaps are collectively the most aggressive war fighters on the planet look at each other and pretty much say…."wow, that's going to come back and bite us…."

You're naive if you don't understand how these sets of laws and authorities are being used against political opponents.  You should be terrified.