I'm not advocating a specific side here, only pointing out that the two positions are fundamentally at odds with each other.
You can be vehemently against social media monitoring by government agencies and warrantless wiretaps and still point out the many times law enforcement and others in a position to help ignore signs of distress.
Moreover, there isn’t proof that this type of monitoring actively stops mass shootings or other attacks. Sometimes it does — for sure (though mostly when communication is happening through email and not social posts) — but we’ve seen plenty of anecdotes where concerning public postings were pointed out to authorities and nothing was done.
Does reading publicly published information constitute wiretapping?
> we’ve seen plenty of anecdotes where concerning public postings were pointed out to authorities and nothing was done
This is what I'm getting at-- responding to obviously-troubling social media posts seems entirely reasonable after the fact. Perhaps it is? But at the same time it carries an implication of law enforcement pre-emptively acting based on the content of public speech, which has its own worrying implications, as evidenced by the examples in the article.
Earnest question: What's the legal boundary in other circumstances? Can/should law enforcement take action if a person uses a megaphone in the town square to announce they're going to use their AR-15 to kill all the $x people? If they published an op-ed in the local newspaper to the same effect? (If yes, how is facebook/twitter different from a town square / op-ed column?)
1. Law enforcement shouldn't monitor social media posts
2. since they obviously already do this, why aren't they using the information they're collecting to do something useful like stop mass shooters who post about it online ahead of time?
Why shouldn't LE monitor public social media posts?
Should they also ignore Billy standing on the street corner, shouting about how he's going to shoot up <those ______ers in ________>?
I understand not wanting the police to listen to your phone calls, or read your private messages. I don't understand the police having to shut their ears, and close their eyes, at public messages that you broadcast to the world. Should I be allowed advertise a murder-for-hire business on Facebook, without any risk of the police getting involved involved? Is there some magical property of the Internet that is supposed to protect me from this?
> 2. since they obviously already do this, why aren't they using the information they're collecting to do something useful like stop mass shooters who post about it online ahead of time?
They do occasionally do something 'useful' about it. I have first hand experience.
Last month, in my city, they've arrested an off-his-meds individual in my area, within hours of making specific threats of violence against a number of public establishments. (That he has had a bad history with.)
I'd prefer it if he got medical treatment, for his issues, but the US being what it is, he's far more likely to get five to ten years of jail time, instead.
Of course, oftentimes, they also don't do anything about it. Sometimes, it's because the regional prosecutor can't be arsed to deal with the threats, so they do a catch-and-release. Sometimes, it's because the police themselves can't be arsed to take the threats seriously. I don't have any stats for how frequently these sorts of situations turn out one way, or another.
“The American people said ‘never again’, and the NSA pwned the whole planet, to try and deliver on that, for $20B/yr. They did an impressive job of an impossible task.”
Honestly, I still feel conflicted — because the truth is that the warrantless spying is what many people wanted, post-9/11.