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A comment on Police surveilled protests with help from Twitter-affiliated startup Dataminr. Parent comment

Re:Police surveilled protests with help from Twitter-affilia... by throwaway0a5e on Friday July 10, 2020 @08:11AM (#23790702)
>Do you really want to take the position that the government cannot monitor any group until it commits a crime?

Yes. That's better than the alternative. So many things can be construed as criminal that I don't think it's an impediment to the investigation of actual criminal in practice. If anything stops police from wasting our money surviving groups that are not actually threats to anything but the government wants under surveillance for political/ideological reasons.

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Re:Police surveilled protests with help from Twitter-affilia... by tharne on Friday July 10, 2020 @12:20PM (#23793094)
That's a nice ideal, but ultimately very naive. Your idea would work great until a neo nazi group or a terrorist organization executed an attack killing a large number of people. Then everyone would be screaming at the government demanding to know why they weren't monitoring more so they could prevent just such an occurrence.
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