Dataminr tracked Gaza-related protests

I remember, back when cannabis was illegal in most states, a common argument was that white and black people reported using cannabis at the same rate when surveyed. However, many, many more black people ended up in prison for it.

Here is a survey of US youths that supports this premise: https://monitoringthefuture.org/data/panel/demographic-subgr...

Do you know of some society in which "petty crimes and code violations" are more or less similar socially to homicides? I'd suggest pondering a comment more carefully. People mostly don't contemplate gunning someone down anywhere near as frequently or thoughtlessly as they might jaywalk, or get a speeding ticket. (though there are exceptions of course)

> Do you have data backing this claim? For example, homicides (that are not a subject for reporting bias) don’t follow a uniform distribution, so I would expect other crimes to also be non-uniform.

Crime rates are likely different for different socioeconomic classes for many reasons, but also the socioeconomic class likely determines in part the types of crimes.

For example, poor people are more likely to do petty crime and physical crimes, while rich people tend to do complex frauds involving large sums.

So you cannot compare rates for one particular crime across socioeconomic groups because they will gravitate towards the opportunities that are present to their class.

> Do you have data backing this claim?

I read it as a scenario / "even if" for the presented thought experiment, not a load-bearing assertion about reality. As in the argument being made works equally well whether either way, and trying to challenge it misses the point.

homicide is not a "petty crime" or a "code violation" - that should be all the data you need.

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Beautifully written. I especially adore:

> Honest statistical reports may even be written highlighting the frequency of lost-key-findings under streetlights.

The fact you note them as honest is so rhetorically powerful that I'm dead certain to reference this concept/phrasing again in the future.

Sounds like that estimate is doing all of the heavy lifting and cannot, by definition, ever be verified.

Also arrests are going to be targeted at people selling more so than using, so it isn't the correct metric to begin with.

I suppose the implication could be that the set petty crimes and code violations, which includes many things, among which are parking violations and music piracy (two things that vary dramatically between demographics), has an equal distribution between all demographics.

If parking violations are an old demographic problem, and music piracy are a young demographic problem for example (even though it is assumed that more things are in the set than just these two) then it could be that they roughly cancel each other out.

I guess one would really need to know what the full set petty crimes and code violations consists of to be sure.

What exactly is a "good demographic"? This sounds an awful lot like judging people based on their inherent characteristics.

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That is kind of the central idea of democracy.

Instead of revolution and all its upheavel & damage, you get a mini controlled revolution every 4 years.

Instead of unmitigated riots, you get demonstrations but with some crowd control & beurocracy to prevent injuries (and well chaos, riots and looting).

Democracy is kind of a deal - you get to have the popular discontent but without the extreme forms that end up damaging bystanders.

In most democracies there are rules about being fair in terms of issuing permits and a court system where you can sue if they aren't fair in issuing permits.

If we remove the tech from the story and consider the old "colonial village test":

A man walks up and down the street either shouting about, or handing out flyers, that say "We should get together and blockade main street in protest of the illegitimate taxes Congress has passed on our whiskey." Is it legal for the cops to stop him? Probably not.

Is it legal for the cops to move their plans around to show up on main street that day? I can't see why it wouldn't be.

Police in my city go to pretty much every protest and take video and photos (with big zoom lens) from the roofs of nearby buildings. It's always surprising to me that more people don't notice.

Acts in public are not protected. This, however is:

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

For the same reason they use ancestry databases to narrow the field of potential serial killers to a few that can be investigated through legally-admissible means.

There is a vast gap between what the cops can do in general and what holds up in court, but to a first approximation: the things they aren't allowed to do because it would taint the case are in general explicitly spelled out, and if it isn't spelled out it's legal to use as a stepping stone to conventional, more-understood-protections police tactics. Thus arresting someone for a general Twitter post is probably off-limits (the incitement-to-riot or sedition laws are narrowly tailored), but taking someone online who says "Hey let's all get together and do a riot" seriously, and allocating police resources to prepare for it as if they're telling the truth about their intentions, is almost certainly legal.

(This is the battleground that the ACLU fights on in this day and age).

They do it more than you'd think. There're a ton of pictures of La Cosa Nostra members walking around in Brooklyn taken by FBI agents. They even made sure to get the good side of Casso and Gotti.

Walking around and talking to each other? Constitutionally protected.

When the police watch you walk down the street they are also monitoring constitutionally protected activity.

Because it involves gatherings of large crowds in public spaces. It is their job to make sure that such gatherings result in no harm of either the protesters nor the local community.

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Is it though? People are willfully submitting all this information to American companies that we know share info with police.

When cops start using geolocation data that isn't enabled I'll be more worried.

Peaceful protest sometimes attract a few bad apples. Things have ways of going wrong. If the police weren't on top of these activities, they would look massively incompetent in their job.

Even then, it isn't often enforced. A few times a year people walk out into freeways in groups to shut down traffic and get at most a slap on the hand for it.

This is a really great piece of wisdom. Thank you!

What are “the other” two here?

As you say, expansive. As in: it expands the definition of surveillance in a way that isn't widely accepted.

It "technically is" if you redefine it to include it. In other words, it isn't.

That's basically the approach taken in Carpenter v. United States. The Supreme Court said, sure, the police could track people in public with dozens of cars and thousands of man hours, but using CLSI data means it can be done with a few mouse clicks.

You can't apply the "reasonable expectation of privacy" standard when you get into these new electronic forms of surveillance. It's become far too cheap and easy to surveil.

Not that I fully endorse their broaded view of privacy, I see it as much more of a fundamental right. That said, I was impressed that this court(who constantly misunderstands technology) understood this.

I mostly agree with you, but there’s a difference between using a non-covert method of communication like telephone or SMS, and a social media post, which is designed to be relayed and amplified.

That said, if you put a classified advert in a newspaper and police read it,i wouldn't call it survelience, and that feels more similar to reading twitter posts.

Or eating Portillos. Or napping in their cars.

You could always make sure it could only increase and not decrease privacy or what have you.

Similarly, the "expire every 19 years" must always be included and must never be removed.

Gotta keep this small though, because then what's the point...

...and simply not including the 19 year expiration in the new version because why would you?

We are about to watch that show!

Jefferson wanted 19 years to make it something each generation gets the chance to do, based on life expectancy at the time.

>And the half of those of 21 years and upwards living at any one instant of time will be dead in 18 years 8 months, or say 19 years as the nearest integral number. Then 19 years is the term beyond which neither the representatives of a nation, nor even the whole nation itself assembled, can validly extend a debt.

>[...] On similar ground it may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation. [...] The constitution and the laws of their predecessors extinguished then in their natural course with those who gave them being. This could preserve that being till it ceased to be itself, and no longer. Every constitution then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right.

You can! Just have to get the votes.