Social Media Surveillance by the Government and Law Enforcement Agencies 1. Introduction Social media surveillance has become a tool used by law enforcement, ranging from monitoring and counter-surveillance to public gatherings such as protests. Civilians were unknowingly surveyed by enforcement agency who used their data gathered from 3rd parties to track where gatherings were going to be held, and monitor activists. Apart from the monitoring of protesters, enforcement agencies use social media to monitor illegal activities and threats to public safety. The use of social media surveillance is a growing concern. Over the years as more protests and terrorist attacks occurs from previous years reveal the power of law enforcement use for gathering …show more content…
An example of this is when Apple restricted content to the FBI in the case of San Bernardino attack. This case brought awareness about the FBI’s surveillance and, if it was already in place, how did it slip through their watch (Selyukuh). 2. Background The use of social media by law enforcement agencies is a widespread phenomenon as technology is progressing with many outlet for citizens to interact to a broader audience compared to years of dial-up modem and limited mobile phone usage of the past. This has brought up issues of 4th Amendment rights violation, the 4th Amendments right guarantees every citizens against unreasonable search and seizure by the government (“U.S Constitution” Cornell Law School). With technology rapidly changing every day, the law of protecting citizens’ rights guaranteed by the 4th Amendment has become a tangle field of how to incorporate law enforcement agencies surveillance while safeguarding the public and unreasonable gathering of information from its …show more content…
The information gathered are used to generate a profile like places user visited frequently, store visited online and music listened. With the information from 3rd parties they provide business with targeted sales area (“Social Media Has Us under Surveillance” Freedland). Information from 3rd parties in social media site were originally used for marketing purpose but when the data could be used for other things they were made accessible to law enforcement agencies. 3rd Party site such as Geofeedia was originally used to let media site like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram view their consumer’s data at different location, this site was later accessible to surveillance agencies(”Dozens of police-spying tools remain after Facebook” Cameron). Protest against police brutality in recent years, saw increase in targeted surveillance against the organizers. This led to outspoken concerns over infringement of 1st Amendment rights. There are concerns protesters and organizers were wrongfully targeted through social media surveillance even though they had freedom of speech. Protesters were surveilled and risk to unreasonable search of their media use (”ACLU Finds Social Media Sites Gave Data”