Is eavesdropping proportionate?
Posted: Thu Feb 13, 2025 3:08 am
The origin of the riots is ultimately a group process. An angry look from a police officer, a knocked over bicycle or a loose paving stone can be enough to light the fuse in the powder keg. Social media play no role in that. As soon as there is chaos, social media play only a limited role in the control. Of course, parts of the panic will become visible in the social messages that people share with each other and the world. But during panic, the rioters can no longer be controlled at all. Moreover, a large part of the mobile data networks in Haren went down, which meant that traffic via social media was no longer possible.
Unless there are carefully planned attacks, the behavior that emerged around the riots in Haren is the result of spontaneous social interactions between people at the time. These interactions are only partly predictable. The party could just as easily have been peaceful. Queen's Day, the street barbecue, packed train stations: often things go remarkably well and groups of people get along peacefully. At other times this is not the case.
The riots are now leading to calls for more monitoring of social media. More and more companies belgium telegram data are jumping in and the software is getting better at interpreting language and discovering network structures and connections. But what will these insights really yield? To what extent are the messages predictive? If someone tweets something about the riots, what does this say about their ultimate real role in the unplanned riots themselves at the time?
A smaller hard core of troublemakers who seize every opportunity to organize riots can possibly be tracked down, but the question is whether they are not precisely using closed networks with strict privacy settings. Tracking them down requires in advance indications and additional powers to tap or cooperation from parties such as Facebook and Twitter.
Unless there are carefully planned attacks, the behavior that emerged around the riots in Haren is the result of spontaneous social interactions between people at the time. These interactions are only partly predictable. The party could just as easily have been peaceful. Queen's Day, the street barbecue, packed train stations: often things go remarkably well and groups of people get along peacefully. At other times this is not the case.
The riots are now leading to calls for more monitoring of social media. More and more companies belgium telegram data are jumping in and the software is getting better at interpreting language and discovering network structures and connections. But what will these insights really yield? To what extent are the messages predictive? If someone tweets something about the riots, what does this say about their ultimate real role in the unplanned riots themselves at the time?
A smaller hard core of troublemakers who seize every opportunity to organize riots can possibly be tracked down, but the question is whether they are not precisely using closed networks with strict privacy settings. Tracking them down requires in advance indications and additional powers to tap or cooperation from parties such as Facebook and Twitter.