Chicago police used Dataminr, controversial surveillance tool
Chicago police used Dataminr, controversial surveillance tool
Formerly CIA-funded, Dataminr has been criticized for its surveillance of non-criminal protest activity, and has provided hundreds of thousands of reports to the Chicago Police Department
Emails obtained by Noir News reveal the Chicago Police Department (CPD) has made extensive use of Dataminr, a social media analysis tool criticized for providing law enforcement agencies with Big Brother-esque surveillance of global social media activity.
Dataminr, founded in 2009, processes massive amounts of social media data to rapidly generate summary reports of current events for its clients, which include government agencies, corporations, and newsrooms, using a combination of artificial intelligence and human labor. The company has plenty of data to work with, as it has access to X (formerly Twitter)’s “firehose data” — essentially anything and everything posted on the platform, per TechCrunch. At one point, Twitter owned a five percent stake in Dataminr, but has since divested. The surveillance tool also counted In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital entity, among its early investors. As of March 2021, Dataminr was valued at $4.1 billion.
The company has been under scrutiny for years. In 2016, The Wall Street Journal reported that Twitter pressured Dataminr to stop providing its social media analysis services to U.S. intelligence agencies, for the sake of combating bad optics around government surveillance. In 2020, The Intercept published a series of reports detailing the company’s work on behalf of local police agencies, including its reportedly haphazard and racially-biased approach to gang surveillance and its monitoring of protests following the killing of George Floyd (not just the protests that included violence and looting, but those that remained peaceful as well). In April 2024, the Brennan Center for Justice and Data for Black Lives revealed that D.C. police used Dataminr to track planned protests against police brutality and COVID-19 restrictions; this revelation was particularly chilling given that the report claims Dataminr included personal information about individuals planning protests in its emails to the police.
Noir filed several requests for email communication between Dataminr and CPD using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), a law that requires government agencies to provide requestors any and all desired documents in their possession, with some exceptions. We wanted to determine whether CPD was using Dataminr and the extent to which it was using it. It turns out CPD has used Dataminr — a lot.
In a letter denying a FOIA request dated April 15, 2024, CPD told us that the Department and Dataminr had emailed each other “more than 254,316” times between January 1, 2022 and March 30, 2024, and that providing these emails to Noir would prove too burdensome. While some of these emails consist of correspondence between Dataminr’s customer service professionals and CPD officers, the vast majority likely resulted from Dataminr’s provision of its First Alert reports for its clients — the same service it provided other law enforcement offices that resulted in the sloppy gang monitoring and protest surveillance.
.jpg){kind=link}
CPD and Dataminr did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding how CPD used Dataminr’s services.
In fact, Dataminr provided so many First Alert reports to CPD that the Department was usually able to deny Noir’s requests for Dataminr emails for time periods as small as one day, stating the requests were too burdensome. We tried only requesting one hour’s worth of emails, but CPD stated that was too small an increment of time for the Department to process.
This has made it difficult to discern more about CPD’s use of Dataminr. We did manage to obtain one slow day’s worth of Dataminr emails from October 24, 2023, which included 92 pages of First Alert emails. Recipients of these alerts included Superintendent Larry Snelling, a police captain, a detective, and a CPD intelligence analyst.
We also obtained email correspondence from June 2022 between several CPD officers and a Dataminr Illinois government client specialist. This revealed that intelligence officers for CPD and the Chicago-based Crime Prevention and Investigation Center (CPIC), a Fusion Center based in Chicago, also received First Alert reports. Fusion Centers are specialized centers of collaboration between local police departments and the Department of Homeland Security.
This correspondence also revealed Dataminr First Alert reports were sent to CPD Director of Community Policing Glen Brooks, CPD Deputy Chief Duane DeVries, a CPD media liaison, a deputy director of CPIC, non-specialized officers, and a police sergeant.
As mentioned previously, the sheer scope of CPD-Dataminr emails has made it difficult to determine the degree to which concerns around privacy, bias, and surveillance of First Amendment-protected activities are relevant for Chicago. One finding that could be worrying was the rejection of a FOIA request trying to determine whether CPD had used Dataminr to monitor pro-Palestinian protests. In its denial, CPD said it had exchanged 11,573 emails with Dataminr that included the keywords “Palestine,” “Palestinian,” “Pro-Palestine,” and “Pro-Palestinian” from Oct. 15, 2023 to August 2024. The request was denied for being “unduly burdensome.”
Noir has submitted more FOIA requests aimed at uncovering the what, where, when, why, and how regarding CPD’s use of Dataminr. We are particularly interested in whether the Department has used it to digitally surveil lawful protest activity.
What we do know is they used Dataminr, and they used it a lot.