Is DATAMINR being used by U.S. law enforcement as an AI spy?

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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.