老澳门开奖结果

In recent years, the federal government has significantly ramped up its efforts to monitor people on social media. The FBI, for one, has repeatedly acknowledged that it engages in surveillance of social media posts. So it was surprising when the bureau responded to our Freedom of Information Act request on this kind of surveillance by saying that it 鈥渃an neither confirm nor deny the existence of records.鈥�

The six other federal agencies we submitted the FOIA request to haven鈥檛 produced a single document. The request, filed last May, seeks information on how the agencies collect and analyze posts from Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites.

Today we sued the agencies to get some answers, because the public has a right to know about the exact nature of social media surveillance 鈥� especially whether agencies are monitoring and retaining social media posts, or using surveillance products that label activists and people of color as threats to public safety based on their First Amendment-protected activities.

Based on what little information is publicly available, it鈥檚 clear that the federal government routinely tracks domestic social media users, with a particular focus on immigrants.

For example, according to official government websites, the FBI has sought to create an application that would enable it to 鈥溾�� information on social media platforms. It completed stating that it intended to contract with Dataminr, a data analytics and machine-learning vendor that for sharing data with federal 鈥渇usion centers,鈥� to obtain 鈥渢he mission critical social media monitoring needed by the FBI.鈥� And it with Pen-Link, another big data analytics firm, for 鈥渟oftware that parses and analyzes social media data.鈥�

Meanwhile, the State Department has plans to collect usernames from nearly all of the 14.7 million people who annually apply for work or tourist visas. And the Department of Homeland Security and its agencies have repeatedly expanded their manual and automated social media surveillance in efforts that include the misguided 鈥�extreme vetting initiative.鈥�

Federal law enforcement surveillance of social media associated with Black Lives Matter has already been exposed, continuing a decades-long pattern of government monitoring of minority activists and communities.

The government could be using commercial surveillance software to conduct this surveillance: Documents obtained by the 老澳门开奖结果 of Northern California in 2016 revealed how companies marketing this software had built products specifically for law enforcement monitoring. The disclosure of the documents in policy changes from Twitter and Facebook.

Social media surveillance raises a number of red flags. First, it discourages people from speaking freely 鈥� a phenomenon that and bear out.

Indeed, in its letter responding to our FOIA request, the FBI said that simply acknowledging its use of social media surveillance would 鈥渞isk circumvention of the law.鈥� The bureau seems to be saying that if people knew that the government is monitoring what they鈥檙e saying on social media, they鈥檇 be less likely to say it. That looks like an admission of the chilling effect that the First Amendment aims to prevent. But because almost all online speech is lawful, it doesn鈥檛 make sense to argue that social media users are 鈥渃ircumventing鈥� the law if they limit what they say online.

Aside from chilling expression, government monitoring of social media raises the risk that innocent people will be wrongly investigated or put on government watchlists based on that speech.

It鈥檚 clear from already public information that all of the agencies we鈥檙e targeting in our FOIA lawsuit engage in manual and automated surveillance of social media users and their speech, and it鈥檚 unacceptable for the government to withhold details about this domestic spying. The public needs to know how the government is watching us 鈥� and we shouldn鈥檛 have to think about self-censoring what we say online.