Metadata Comes Home With New 'Threat Score' Policing Tools

Police in the U.S. are rolling out new technology that gives them “unprecedented” power to spy on citizens and determine their “threat score” based on metadata, the Washington Post reported on Monday.

Fresno, California’s police department was one of the first to adopt the software, known as “Beware,” which allows officers to analyze “billions of data points, including arrest reports, property records, commercial databases, deep Web searches and…social-media postings” to calculate an individual’s alleged potential for violence, the Post explained.

Officers say the tool, made by a company called Intrado, can help them thwart mass shootings and other attacks like the ones that took place in Paris and San Bernardino last year. But critics say it’s just another weapon in the mass surveillance arsenal, one that further threatens privacy and civil liberties and fuels police overreach.

Journalist D. Brian Burghart, who operates FatalEncounters.org, a searchable database of police killings of citizens, told Common Dreams that the swell of surveillance technology was an “outgrowth” of post-9/11 fear-mongering. “I’m not sure what’s new about this except they put a name on it,” Burghart said. “I don’t think it’s going to get any better. Nobody ever puts away technology.”

Jennifer Lynch, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told the Post, “This is something that’s been building since September 11. First funding went to the military to develop this technology, and now it has come back to domestic law enforcement. It’s the perfect storm of cheaper and easier-to-use technologies and money from state and federal governments to purchase it.”

Rob Nabarro, a civil rights lawyer in Fresno, added, “It’s a very unrefined, gross technique. A police call is something that can be very dangerous for a citizen.”

The Post continues:

A potential threat that comes from an individual should not be addressed by a machine, he said.