Abstract
This article considers how recent developments in open source intelligence impact the inclusion of social media data in policing, and how these changes are a reflection of technological affordances by platform developers and private third-party companies, as well as police cultural and institutional constraints. It explores the institutional contexts in which social media open source intelligence is trialled in Europe by drawing on interviews with police officials and privacy advocates from 13 European Union member states. Respondents considered their adoption of open source social media monitoring technologies in their jurisdiction, locating this uptake within a context of technological scepticism. While open source intelligence infused with social media data enables an immediate access to social life for investigators, so too do they provoke a preoccupation with the origins and circulations of this content. This tension dovetails with institutional concerns, including a lack of specialised staff, budget constraints, along with a lack of clear legal and procedural protocols.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Andrejevic
M
(2009 ) Surveillance in the digital enclosure . In:
Magnet
S
Gates
K
(eds) The New Media of Surveillance . New York : Routledge , pp.18 –40 .
2.
Andrejevic
M
(2013 ) Infoglut: How Too Much Information Is Changing the Way We Think and Know . New York : Routledge .
3.
Ball
J
Lewis
P
(2011 ) Twitter and the riots: How the news spread . The Guardian , 7 December . Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/dec/07/twitter-riots-how-news-spread (accessed 25 April 2014 ).
4.
Bartlett
J
Miller
C
Crump
J
. (2013 ) Policing in an Information Age: CASM policy paper . DEMOS , March . Available at: http://www.demos.co.uk/files/DEMOS_Policing_in_an_Information_Age_v1.pdf?1364295365 (accessed 25 April 2014 ).
5.
Bolter
JD
Grusin
R
(2000 ) Remediation: Understanding New Media . Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press .
6.
Brighenti
A
(2007 ) Visibility: A category for the social sciences . Current Sociology 55 (3 ): 323 –342 .
7.
Buley
T
(2008 ) When everyone can mine your data . Forbes.com , 21 November . Available at: http://www.forbes.com/2008/11/21/maltego-data-mining-identity08-tech-cz-tb_1121maltego.html (accessed 28 May 2014 ).
8.
Crump
J
(2011 ) What are the police doing on Twitter? Social media, the police and the public . Policy & Internet 3 (4 ). Available at: http://www.psocommons.org/policyandinternet/vol3/iss4/art7 (accessed 25 April 2014 ).
9.
Degli Esposti
S
(2014 ) When big data meets dataveillance: The hidden side of analytics . Surveillance and Society 12 (2 ): 209 –225 .
10.
Deisman
W
Derby
P
Doyle
A
. (2009 ) A report on camera surveillance in Canada . Surveillance Camera Awareness Network (SCAN) . Available at: http://www.sscqueens.org/sites/default/files/SCAN_Report_Phase1_Final_Jan_30_2009.pdf (accessed 25 April 2014 ).
11.
Deleuze
G
(1995 ) Negotiations, 1972–1990 . New York : Columbia University Press .
12.
Ericson
RV
Haggerty
KD
(1997 ) Policing the Risk Society . Toronto, ON, Canada : University of Toronto Press .
13.European Urban Knowledge Network (EUKN) (2007 ) Digital bridge provides digital monitoring system to citizens – Shoreditch, UK . EUKN , 29 March . Available at: http://sampac.nl/EUKN2015/www.eukn.org/E_library/Security_Crime_Prevention/Tackling_Crime/Enforcement_Civil_Intervention/Digital_Bridge_provides_digital_monitoring_system_to_citizens_%E2%80%93_Shoreditch_UK.html (accessed 19 March 2015 )
14.
Fioretti
J
(2014 ) EU privacy watchdogs give Google guidelines to change privacy practices . Reuters , 26 September . Available at: http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/09/26/us-google-eu-privacy-idUKKCN0HL11320140926 (accessed 20 October 2014 ).
15.
Friedmann
R
(1992 ) Community Policing: Comparative Perspectives and Prospects . New York : Palgrave Macmillan .
16.
Fuchs
C
(2011 ) Web 2.0, prosumption, and surveillance . Surveillance and Society 8 (3 ): 288 –309 .
17.
Gandy
O
(1993 ) The Panoptic Sort: Political Economy of Personal Information . Boulder, CO : Westview Press .
18.
Gandy
O
(2009 ) Coming to Terms with Chance: Engaging Rational Discrimination and Cumulative Disadvantage . Farnham : Ashgate .
19.
Graham
S
(2002 ) CCTV: The stealthy emergence of a fifth utility? Planning Theory & Practice 3 (2 ): 237 –241 .
20.
Haggerty
KD
Ericson
RV
(2000 ) The surveillant assemblage . British Journal of Sociology 51 (4 ): 605 –622 .
21.
Juris
J
(2012 ) Reflections on #Occupy Everywhere: Social media, public space, and emerging logics of aggregation . American Ethnologist 39 (2 ): 259 –279 .
22.
Kelly
H
(2012 ) Police embrace social media as crime-fighting tool . CNN.com , 30 August . Available at: http://edition.cnn.com/2012/08/30/tech/social-media/fighting-crime-social-media/ (accessed 10 October 2014 ).
23.
Klauser
F
Albrechtslund
A
(2014 ) From self-tracking to smart urban infrastructures: Towards an interdisciplinary research agenda on Big Data . Surveillance and Society 12 (2 ): 273 –286 .
24.
Lippert
R
(2010 ) Mundane and mutant devices of power: Business improvement districts and sanctuaries . European Journal of Cultural Studies 13 (4 ): 477 –494 .
25.
Lyon
D
(2001 ) Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life . Buckingham : Open University Press .
26.
Marwick
A
boyd
d
(2010 ) I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience . New Media & Society 13 (1 ): 114 –133 .
27.
Mayer-Schönberger
V
Cukier
K
(2013 ) Big Data: A Revolution that Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think . New York : Harcourt Publishing .
28.
Meeder
B
Tam
J
Kelley
PG
. (2010 ) RT @IWantPrivacy: Widespread violation of privacy settings in the Twitter social network . In: Web 2.0 privacy and security workshop – IEEE symposium on security and privacy . Available at: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bmeeder/papers/Meeder-SNSP2010.pdf
29.
Mitchell
D
(2010 ) Sacked and fined £1,000 for a joke about an airport? You cannot be serious . The Guardian , 16 May . Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/may/16/britain-turns-serious-david-mitchell (accessed 25 April 2014 ).
30.
Mosco
V
(2004 ) The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace . Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press .
31.NiceTrack (2014a ) NiceTrack Monitoring Center . Nice.com . Available at: http://www.nice.com/intelligence-lea/monitoring-center (accessed 25 April 2014 ).
32.NiceTrack (2014b ) NiceTrack Open Source Intelligence . Nice.com . Available at: http://www.nice.com/Intelligence-lea/open-source-intelligence (accessed 25 April 2014 ).
33.
Norris
C
Armstrong
G
(1999 ) The Maximum Surveillance Society: The Rise of CCTV . New York : Berg Publishers .
34.
Omand
D
Bartlett
J
Miller
C
(2012 ) A balance between security and privacy online must be struck . DEMOS . Available at: http://www.demos.co.uk/files/_Intelligence_-_web.pdf?1335197327 (accessed 25 April 2014 ).
35.
Papacharissi
Z
(2002 ) The virtual sphere: The Internet as a public sphere . New Media & Society 4 (1 ): 9 –27 .
36.
Procter
R
Vis
F
Vos
A
(2011 ) How riot rumours spread on Twitter . The Guardian , 7 December . Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/uk/interactive/2011/dec/07/london-riots-twitter (accessed 25 April 2014 ).
37.
Ratcliffe
J
(2002 ) Intelligence-led policing and the problems of turning rhetoric into practice . Policing and Society 12 (1 ): 53 –66 .
38.
Reisinger
D
(2011 ) CIA’s ‘vengeful librarians’ track Twitter, Facebook . CNet , 4 November . Available at: http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/cias-vengeful-librarians-track-twitter-facebook/ (accessed 25 April 2014 ).
39.
Richards
J
Lewis
P
(2011 ) How Twitter was used to spread – And knock down – Rumours during the riots . The Guardian , 7 December . Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/dec/07/how-twitter-spread-rumours-riots (accessed 25 April 2014 ).
40.
Savage
M
Burrows
R
(2007 ) The coming crisis of empirical sociology . Sociology 41 (5 ): 885 –899 .
41.
Schneider
C
(2014 ) Police image work in an era of social media: YouTube and the 2007 Montebello Summit Protest . In:
Trottier
D
Fuchs
C
(eds) Social Media, Politics and the State . New York : Routledge , pp.227 –246 .
42.SFPD (2014 ) SFPD anti bike theft . Available at: https://twitter.com/sfpdbiketheft (accessed 10 October 2014 ).
43.
Shearing
C
Wood
J
(2003 ) Nodal governance, democracy, and the new ‘Denizens’ . Journal of Law and Society 30 (3 ): 400 –419 .
44.
Smith
G
(2004 ) Behind the screens: Examining constructions of deviance and informal practices among CCTV control room operators in the UK . Surveillance and Society 2 (2/3 ): 376 –395 .
45.
Steele
RD
(1992 ) United States Marine Corps Comments on Joint Open Source Task Force Report and Recommendations , 6 January . Available at: http://www.oss.net/dynamaster/file_archive/060324/9906ba66ee5fe750bb8fe5712b1e20e7/92%20Jan%2011%20Steele%20on%20IC%20OSINT.pdf
46.
Stone
B
(2010 ) Tweet preservation . Twitter Blog , 14 April . Available at: https://blog.twitter.com/2010/tweet-preservation (accessed 25 April 2014 ).
47.
Trottier
D
(2011 ) A Research agenda for social media surveillance . Fast Capitalism 8 (1 ).
48.
Trottier
D
(2012a ) Social Media as Surveillance: Rethinking Visibility in a Converging World . Farnham : Ashgate .
49.
Trottier
D
(2012b ) Policing Social Media . Canadian Review of Sociology 49 (4 ): 411 –25 .
50.
Trottier
D
(2013 ) Crowdsourcing CCTV Surveillance on the internet . Information, Communication & Society 17 (5 ): 609 -26 .
51.
Van Dijck
J
(2014 ) Datafication, dataism and dataveillance: Big Data between scientific paradigm and ideology . Surveillance and Society 12 (2 ): 197 –208 .
52.
York
J
(2014 ) Social media has been privatised. Why do we treat it as a public space? New Statesman , 11 June . Available at: http://www.newstatesman.com/internet/2014/06/social-media-has-been-privatised-why-do-we-treat-it-public-space (accessed 26 December 2014 ).