The secretive industry of social media monitoring
Schools and police turn to private firms to help address school violence, but measuring their success is nearly impossible.
It was midafternoon on a Brooklyn college campus when an unexpected phone call sent a chill through the school. The caller warned that a student, shortly before, posted the sort of message that every campus feared – one that threatened mass murder at the school.
"I sit in class and think about how I would kill each person," the student tweeted. Each person would die, he wrote, in their "own special way."
The caller was not a cop, a campus security guard, or even a student. He was an employee of an obscure eight-year-old company called GEOCOP that had no ties to the school.
GEOCOP, short for Geospatial Common Operating Picture, is the oldest of three social media monitoring companies that have gained momentum in the wake of the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary school, when a gunman killed 20 children and six adults before fatally shooting himself. In the wake of that tragedy, many schools and law enforcement agencies are searching for ways to more effectively detect and prevent school violence before it happens. Catering to law enforcement and school officials, the companies use a combination of open-source feeds, knowledge of school communities, and intelligence strategies gained from military and law enforcement experience.
That incident two years ago at New York City College of Technology, a City University of New York (CUNY) school, illustrates both the promise and the pitfalls of this cottage industry.
On one level, it was a success for GEOCOP. The school eventually confirmed that GEOCOP was legitimate and called the police. The student, Bishoy Elgawly, then an 18-year-old Staten Island resident attending the school, was arrested and charged with second-degree aggravated harassment and second-degree harassment, according to local media reports. Mr. Elgawly did not respond to multiple requests for comment, and his records are currently sealed.
Yet an examination of GEOCOP’s records and history raises questions about the company’s effectiveness, and the ability of this nascent industry to address school violence. The effectiveness of the social media monitoring firms is nearly impossible to measure. False alarms, the firms’ opaque business and tracking practices, and a lack of legal guidelines for how the companies track and monitor student communications has put privacy advocates on edge.
“We believe that social media monitoring does not foster a hospitable school environment,” said Brendan Hamme, staff attorney at the southern California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union. “It breeds an environment of distrust between youth and teachers and administrators. And there are far more efficacious ways of getting to the cause of the issue than spying on students.”
An examination of these firms’ business records, promotional materials, and contract bids, along with interviews with company officials, school administrators, and privacy experts, reveals a secretive industry that jealously guards its tradecraft, revenue, and even their physical location.
A TICKING CLOCK
The call to the CUNY school from GEOCOP came a full hour-and-a-half after the tweet originally appeared. It took another four hours for the school to vet the credibility of GEOCOP and the tweet, partly because the caller’s remarks were so cryptic. The caller refused to provide any identifying information beyond a GEOCOP “agent number.” And GEOCOP’s website – which now redirects to a Twitter feed – provided scant details about the company’s operations.
“What makes us unique is we’re used to operating under the pressure of a clock ticking by seconds,” said Bob Dowling, founder of GEOCOP.
Elgawly’s prior threatening tweets also went undetected. According to screenshots of Elgawly’s tweets taken by the Staten Island Advance, Elgawly tweeted three other threats against the school between October 2012 and the tweet he was arrested for in February 2013. In a November tweet, he threatened to “shoot up my school” if his class was canceled after he traveled to Brooklyn during a storm, and just over a week later, “I think I’m going to snap and shoot up my school.”
When asked about the timeline for the CUNY incident, Mr. Dowling said he could not comment on anything that resulted in law enforcement action, nor confirm details, but speculated that the three earlier tweets could have simply slipped through GEOCOP’s system. According to news reports, Elgawly later told police he was “bored and that [he] wasn’t going to do it.”
Lionel Presume, director of public safety at the New York City College of Technology, headed the school’s response to GEOCOP’s call. Despite the delays in confirming the tweet’s validity, Mr. Presume now considers social media monitoring integral to ensuring safety at his school, though the school district still does not have a contract with any social media monitoring company.
“At that time I didn’t know much, but it is very important,” he said. “On our level, at colleges, it’s very important.”
A PERCEIVED NEED
Social media monitoring is not a new phenomenon. Law enforcement officers have used the practice in recent years to suss out potential threats around large events such as the Republican National Convention, and to track protests such as the Occupy movement. More recently, schools have turned to social media monitoring to head off signs of violence that would otherwise have not been detected.
Because of students’ pervasive use of social media, many schools consider the online world an important indicator of potentially concerning behavior that warrants school attention. According to a Pew Research study on teenage social media use, 75 percent of teens age 13 to 17 have The secretive industry of social media monitoring - Yahoo News: