In December 2016, the Boston City Council held a hearing to discuss the Boston Police Department’s plan to spend $1.4 million on a social media surveillance system. Police Superintendent Paul Fitzgerald and Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC) director David Carabin spoke of...
In December 2016, the ACLU of Massachusetts filed a public records request with the Boston Police Department to find out if BPD had used a social media surveillance system called Geofeedia. The responsive documents show that the Boston Police Department’s Boston Regional...
By Nasser Eledroos and Kade Crockford¹, 2018 Executive Summary The ACLU of Massachusetts obtained documents through the Massachusetts Public Records Law revealing that the Boston Police Department’s (BPD’s) Boston Regional Intelligence Center used a social media surveillance system called Geofeedia to conduct...
The people of Boston just scored a major victory for privacy, civil liberties, and people power. After thousands of Bostonians took action to demand the City drop a dangerous proposal to spend as much as $1.4 million on Orwellian social media surveillance software,...
Over the past couple of months, Twitter has cut off three separate social media surveillance software companies from access to its ‘firehose’ of data: Geofeedia, Snaptrends, and Media Sonar. The social media giant pulled the data plug on these companies after my...
Today 21 civil rights, civil liberties, religious, and community organizations sent Boston Mayor Marty Walsh and Boston Police Department Commissioner William Evans a letter calling on the city leaders to drop a controversial proposal to spend $1.4 million on social media monitoring...
The Boston Police Department plans to buy a $1.4 million social media surveillance tool capable of building out complex associational profiles of users, tracking posts by location, performing ‘sentiment’ analysis, and much, much more. A detailed description of what the department is looking...
According to publicly available budget records, the Boston Police Department contracts with a social media monitoring company that received start-up funding from the CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel. The company, Geofeedia Inc., sells its software to police departments nationwide, as well as to...
Muckrock's Michael Morisy requested a copy of the Boston Police Department Intelligence Unit's social media monitoring policy. In response, he got this uninformative and vague, one page document.
What’s the BRIC? The Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC) is one of nearly 80 “fusion centers” the federal government’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funded and built after the 9/11 attacks. The BRIC was established in 2005, as a “counterterrorism intelligence” center...