You're not paranoid, the police are watching

TOMS RIVER – The next time you post a message or status update to social media, choose your words carefully: the Ocean County Sheriff's Office is watching.

Since the fall, the sheriff's office has been using software called Geofeedia to monitor and collect all tweets, Facebook and other social media posts sent from smartphones and other mobile devices inside Ocean County, with an eye toward thwarting crime. Other law enforcement offices do the same, though most are reluctant to talk about their efforts.

"It's not the NSA," quipped Sheriff Michael G. Mastronardy, in reference to the international furor that erupted in 2013 over the National Security Agency's mass surveillance, data-mining program revealed by Edward Snowden.

The Sheriff's Office and county Corrections Department — in a shared acquisition — purchased the software and subscription service from Geofeedia, a Chicago-based company of the same name as the technology, at an annual cost of $12,500.

A spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey said such collection efforts were inevitable, given that social media are not private, and therefore ripe for the picking.

Not even Ocean County Prosecutor Joseph D. Coronato, the top law enforcement officer in the county, was informed about the software, learning about it instead from an Asbury Park Press reporter. But both public and private enterprises use the same technology to monitor social media.

"There are always some potential civil liberties issues" with technology such as this, Coronato said.

Geofeedia did not respond to a request for an interview about the software. Likewise, Monmouth County officials did not respond to requests seeking comment. The patented, cloud-based social media monitoring platform allows anyone — who wants to purchase it and can afford its cost — to search, monitor and analyze real-time social media content by location, from anywhere in the world, the company touts on its website.

Mastronardy said the software is primarily utilized in Ocean County to monitor school campuses for potential threats of violence and cyberbullying; protect Lakewood's Orthodox Jewish population, a potential soft terrorist target; and monitor areas around the Oyster Creek nuclear power plant in Lacey and Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson over similar concerns.

He said the Corrections Department picked up half the cost, so the Ocean County Jail in Toms River could be actively kept under surveillance for threats from outside and within. The Sheriff's Office does the same for the adjacent Ocean County Courthouse.

For example, if an individual sought to do harm to a Superior Court judge or a law enforcement officer, and posted his intent on social media, algorithms would detect the threat in real time and an alert would be issued to law enforcement.

"It will then send us an email on my phone," Mastronardy said, who noted that only he and two superior officers in his office receive such alerts or have access to the technology.

Just before he murdered two New York City Police officers in Brooklyn on Dec. 20, Ismaaiyl Brinsley wrote on an Instagram account from a smartphone: "I'm putting wings on pigs today. They take 1 of ours, let's take 2 of theirs." Officials said the online threat reached the NYPD too late.

Brinsley, who took his own life after shooting the two officers, used the hashtags "Shootthepolice RIPErivGardner (sic) RIPMikeBrown," in apparent reference to last year's police chokehold death of Eric Garner on Staten Island and the police shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

"Bomb, explosive, jihad ... bullying, suicide," Mastronardy said, mentioning some of the "key words" that would prompt the software to generate an alert. But even while the sheriff demonstrated to a reporter how the software works, an automated alert was received during the interview when the word "crazy" harmlessly appeared in someone's tweet, somewhere in Ocean County.

Geofeedia scans social media for such key words, but does not filter for context. So a reporter sitting in Mastronardy's office, tweeting details of his interview with the sheriff about the software, also generated an alert simply because the word "bomb" was used in a tweet as part of a description about what the technology does.

Nevertheless, Mastronardy recoils at the use of the metaphor "Big Brother."

"The mere fact is, when you say 'Big Brother,' this is the big brother who looks out for little brother who's in trouble, as opposed to the big brother who is trying to look at everything everyone is doing," he said.

"As a public safety official, our goal is to keep people safe," he explained. "And if there's technology that enhances the public safety, we're going to go see if we can provide it and make the residents of the county safe."

Since the software went online, Mastronardy said the technology has already stopped a suicide and intervened in a case of online bullying.

From the desktop computer in his office, Mastronardy demonstrated how he can go to any location on Earth and use his mouse to draw a virtual perimeter around an area, no matter how big or small. Inside that perimeter, all posts made to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Flickr and Picasa, come up instantaneously from electronic devices broadcasting a geographic location.

"From there, users visualize, organize and analyze the geo-tagged social data using five different views, filter and search by keywords, usernames and date ranges, and store or export the data for additional data mining," according to the Geofeedia website.

When asked about its constitutionality, an official with the ACLU conceded the inevitability of such monitoring, given that social media platforms are by their nature not private. The official declined further comment.

And it's not just law enforcement that is using Geofeedia and other real-time, social media monitoring software that is available on the market.

"More than 300 of the world's leading brands and most respected organizations, including Fortune 500 companies like McDonald's and Dell, leading news outlets like the AP (Associated Press), BBC and CNN, and major law enforcement agencies like the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, utilize Geofeedia's powerful subscription-based service to gain real-time, actionable intelligence through hyper-local social media monitoring," according to its website.

Erik Larsen: 732-557-5709 or elarsen@app.com