Using Geofeedia, a social media monitoring platform, the Ventura County Sheriff's Office said this month it was able to determine the identity of the 17-year-old girl and arrest her before the start of the school day.
Sheriff's officials said Geofeedia has also helped them track down a juvenile who threatened on Facebook to bomb Moorpark High School, Craigslist posters who advertised children for sale and a tagger who defaced the city of Thousand Oaks' gateway sign overlooking Highway 101.
Geofeedia is designed to allow users to select defined geographic areas and quickly search for all public posts on social media that contain geotags or other geolocation data linking the posts to those areas.
The Chicago-based developer of the platform, also named Geofeedia, says the software has been used by more than 500 law enforcement and public safety agencies.
"What we're trying to do (by using Geofeedia) is abbreviate, if you will, the scanning process," said sheriff's Capt. Dave Wareham, Fillmore's police chief.
Use of Geofeedia by local law enforcement — the sheriff's office and the Simi Valley Police Department — ended in October when Twitter, Facebook and Instagram suspended Geofeedia's access to the social media data feeds, the agencies said. That came after the American Civil Liberties Union of California raised concerns about law enforcement's use of Geofeedia.
The suspensions "significantly hindered Geofeedia from providing its service," the sheriff's office said in an email to the Star sent in response to an inquiry about the department's use of Geofeedia. "Geofeedia has been in talks with the ... social media platforms in order to reinstate" the feeds.
Geofeedia was used by the sheriff's Special Services Division to monitor potential threats to public safety in cities that contract with the sheriff's office for police services — Camarillo, Fillmore, Moorpark, Ojai and Thousand Oaks — and in unincorporated areas, said Cmdr. Bill Ayub, who oversees the division.
In addition to the Special Services Division, the sheriff's Thousand Oaks office has its own contract with Geofeedia, said Thousand Oaks Police Chief Tim Hagel.
The Oxnard, Port Hueneme, Santa Paula and Ventura police departments said they have never used Geofeedia.
Invoices obtained by the ACLU through public records requests show that the sheriff's office paid $6,000 in March 2015 and another $6,000 this March for yearly subscriptions to Geofeedia for its Special Services Division. Ayub said the money came from the department's general fund.
The Thousand Oaks Police Department started using Geofeedia in July 2015, and to date, has paid $10,000 in state asset seizure money for the platform, Hagel said.
Simi Valley obtained Geofeedia with $7,250 from an assets forfeiture fund in fiscal year 2015-16 and $8,700 from its general fund in 2016-17, said Deputy City Manager Samantha Argabrite.
Privacy concerns
The ACLU gleaned details of police use of Geofeedia from responses to public records requests it filed with 63 California law enforcement agencies, including the Ventura County sheriff's and district attorney's offices.
Matthew Cagle, a lawyer with the ACLU of Northern California, said such use raises privacy concerns.
"Users on services like Facebook and Twitter do not expect or desire law enforcement agencies to be making use of sophisticated software to track their social media activity," he said.
Phil Harris, Geofeedia's chief executive officer, said in a statement that his company "provides some clients, including law enforcement officials across the country, with a critical tool in helping to ensure public safety while protecting civil rights and liberties."
Even so, he said, "Geofeedia will continue to engage with key civil liberty stakeholders, including the ACLU, and the law enforcement community to make sure that we do everything in our power to support the security of the American people and the protection of personal freedoms."
Local law enforcement officials downplayed the privacy concerns, stressing that Geofeedia only enables them to monitor public social media posts, "open-source data," not private messages.
"I understand the concerns for privacy, but the information that we were able to get is open-source data," said Simi Valley Deputy Police Chief Joseph May. "And when I say open source, that means it's accessible to anybody."
Hagel agreed.
"It's called social media for a reason," he said. "It's not called private media. So in today's world, something that you post open source is for the entire 7 billion people in the world to look at. It's really important to emphasize the word 'social.'"
The ACLU said Geofeedia was marketed to law enforcement as a tool to monitor activists and protesters such as Black Lives Matter and that it could have a chilling effect on political and social discourse.
The Ventura County Sheriff's Office and Simi Valley police said they haven't used Geofeedia for that purpose.
"It's purely used as an intelligence tool to help us apply resources for public safety, particularly surrounding schools," Ayub said.
Besides, he added, "We have very little of those types of events (political demonstrations) in our county."
May also said that his department's use of Geofeedia to gather intelligence was strictly for public safety, "not to stop or impede someone's or some group's constitutional rights to assemble, speech, etc."
Monitoring threats
Hagel said Geofeedia was primarily used by his office's school resource officers.
"It was purchased for school safety," he said. "And on numerous occasions, our school resource officers have been able to thwart violence on campus where fights were going to break out ... and also confiscate knives."
The officers have also used Geofeedia to prevent teenage suicides, Hagel said.
"We put in search words like 'kill' and 'suicide' and Geofeedia uses really powerful algorithms to search all the social media databases," he said.
From late 2015 to early 2016, Hagel's department also used Geofeedia to monitor for possible threats to the Islamic Center of Conejo Valley in Newbury Park, he said.
"This was a time when there was a lot of violence going on toward Muslim centers on the East Coast," he said. "We let them know we were using it for their protection."
Hagel said Geofeedia helped his officers identify and arrest a Palmdale man on suspicion of covering Thousand Oaks' 10-foot-by-40-foot gateway sign near Westlake Boulevard with extensive graffiti. The suspect had bragged about the July incident on social media, Hagel said.
"Geofeedia was an incredible assistance," he said.
May said Simi Valley police primarily used the software for monitoring threat terms throughout the city.
"A threat to a school," he said. "A threat to a city facility. A threat to the Reagan Library."
"When the Reagan Library was hosting a large event, we would put search parameters in so we would get alerted if there was something that spoke about the library, terrorism, bomb, weapons — those types of things," he said. "That would key us into looking at the information to determine whether or not there was a threat to the location."
No such threats ever materialized, May said.
Another time, Geofeedia helped Simi Valley police produce a witness to a violent crime, he said.
"Geofeedia can be a good tool," May said. "Obviously, in an area like Simi Valley where there's less going on criminally, it's not as effective as it would be in a large metropolitan, higher-crime area."
Hagel said he's bullish on social media monitoring by law enforcement.
"We've intervened on suicides with it," he said. "So the idea that we can save lives as people post up socially, yeah, I'm high on saving lives."
Thus, even though his office won't be renewing its contract with Geofeedia, Hagel said it will likely start using one of the company's competitors such as MentionMap or Warble.
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