Once again, histrionics and not calm, rational thought is guiding a government department’s policies. According to the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California (ACLUNC), the Fresno Police Department has been spying on Black Lives Matter activists using social media software.
Back in November, the state of Oregon’s Justice Department was busted for spying on local residents’ Twitter accounts using software. The surveillance caught up one of the department’s own employees.
The ACLUNC took the Fresno police department to task earlier this year about its social media witch hunts; as part of that task, they asked them for documents. Fresno PD sent them 88 pages worth. You can check them out for yourself here.
The software the Fresno PD is using is called MediaSonar. The ACLUNC says the company’s promotional materials—the stuff they use to sell their software to prospective buyers—says the following:
“… Promotional materials from MediaSonar encourage the surveillance of hashtags like #blacklivesmatter, #dontshoot, and #imunarmed. In an email to Fresno Police, the company’s co-founder announced that these “keywords” could “help identify illegal activity and threats to public safety.”
How on earth—or Mars—could someone using the hashtag #imunarmed or #dontshoot be a threat to public safety, or engaged in illegal activity? If someone truly believes that #blacklivesmatter, why would they announce any illegal activity online? Oregon’s Justice Department also used the keyword #blacklivesmatter as part of their search. As I stated when I wrote on this in November:
“If that’s true, then that’s really, really sad. It’s sad because that would mean that whoever this person is, they have conflated criticism of police behavior and calls for accountability with being against police, which is not the case 99 percent of the time.”
This is beyond sad, and its beyond outrageous. It is dangerous, it is akin to police state and fascist behavior to equate criticism of police behavior and calls for accountability with being against police. We, the public, must state this forcefully and loudly. And we, the public, must state it in one, unified voice.