Dataminr is an artificial intelligence startup that has close ties to Twitter and provides social media monitoring tools to newsrooms, corporate settings, and law enforcement agencies. The powerful program is best described as an AI spy. It can be and has been used as a predictive policing tool.

According to the National Institute of Justice, “ Predictive policing tries to harness the power of information, geospatial technologies, and evidence-based intervention models to reduce crime and improve public safety. 

“This is a technique that’s ripe for abuse, but it’s not subject to either legislative or judicial oversight,” said Jennifer Granick, an attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.

The program flags the social media posts of protest organizers, participants, and even bystanders. And it leverages privileged unrestricted access to Twitter data in order to monitor constitutionally protected speech.

 “The more it’s made public that law enforcement is gathering up this info broadly about U.S. residents and citizens, it has a chilling effect on whether people are willing to express themselves and attend protests and plan protests,” Mary Pat Dwyer, the academic program director of the Institute for Technology Law and Policy at Georgetown University claims.

Dataminr controversies continue

Some of its most known controversial uses by U.S. law enforcement include:

The real-time ai app alerted a federal law enforcement agency to pro-abortion protests and rallies in the wake of the reversal of Roe v. Wade. From April to July 2022, it is confirmed that the company aided law enforcement agencies monitor mass pro-abortion demonstrations.

In 2020 Dataminr was used to track the Black Lives Matter movement. It sent alerts to various police departments, including New York, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis, to monitor BLM protests in the wake of George Floyd's murder.

There are reports that Dataminr has been extensively used to track the election protestors and even people that never made it to the Capitol but were in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021. But there is no way to confirm whether law enforcement used the program on this particular occasion. 

Twitter has a long-standing policy prohibiting the use of its data for surveillance. And in 2016, the company cut off access to Dataminr for federally funded "domestic spy centers." 

The move came after the ACLU uncovered public records revealing a fusion center in southern California had access to the program's "geospatial analysis application." And the government was free to do location-based tracking, as well as searches tied to keywords.

Despite these controversies, Dataminr continues to provide information for local police, including many metropolitan police departments in cities facing protests. 

The company has tried to assure the public that it doesn’t monitor its users for surveillance purposes.  And claims that is strictly forbidden under its operating rules.

Investigations and public record releases show that the AI spy continues to enable what is essentially surveillance by U.S. law enforcement.