by Paul Joseph Watson
Police departments across the United States are now
using a program that mines Internet comments and social media posts to
determine the “threat score” of a suspect before cops arrive on the
scene.
Reuters reports
that law enforcement authorities have utilized an application called
Beware since 2012 that takes just seconds to crawl billions of records
in commercial and public databases to assign a threat rating to an
individual – green, yellow or red.
“Yet it does far more — scanning the residents’ online
comments, social media and recent purchases for warning signs.
Commercial, criminal and social media information, including, as Intrado
vice president Steve Reed said in an interview with urgentcomm.com,
“any comments that could be construed as offensive,” all contribute to
the threat score.”
The program also “allows the routine code enforcement of
a nanny state,” allowing homeowners who have failed to trim their trees
to be targeted, as well as being used for fishing expeditions and
revenue generation.
An annual subscription to Beware costs police
departments around $36,000 dollars a year, the majority of which is
covered by federal grants. The program represents another step towards
“predictive policing,” with the report noting that one recent speaker at
a national law enforcement conference “compared future police work to Minority Report, the Tom Cruise film set in 2054 Washington, where a “PreCrime” unit has been set up to stop murders before they happen.”
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