The Geofeedia Files: Boston Police and Social Media Surveillance

Report – 2018

In December 2016, the ACLU of Massachusetts filed a public records request with the Boston Police Department to find out if BPD had used a social media surveillance system called Geofeedia. The responsive documents show that the Boston Police Department’s Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC) used Geofeedia in 2014, 2015 and 2016 to monitor First Amendment protected speech and association.

The documents reveal that analysts at BRIC collected thousands of social media posts about political and social activism, current events, religious issues, and personal matters totally irrelevant to law enforcement concerns. The BPD treated ordinary citizens discussing ordinary affairs as justifiable targets of surveillance.

Read the Report Here.

Kade Crockford & myself co-authored the report over a 6 month period. It involved my writing an algorithm to sort and extract information from nearly 2,000 emails in PDF format. The data visualizations were then made using D3 and re-designed using Sketch.