CHICAGO · SOCIAL MEDIA · GEOFEDIA / DUNAMI

CPD bought tools for large-scale social-media monitoring and used social media to monitor political protests and gatherings.

Public posts → automated monitoring → political activity enters police intelligence workflow

WHERE

Chicago · Cook County · IL

View this place in the Illinois surveillance directory →

Records obtained through Illinois FOIA litigation showed that Chicago Police contracted with Geofeedia from 2014 to 2016 and later used Dunami for social-media analysis. ACLU of Illinois records also documented CPD monitoring social media around protests and gatherings associated with the January 2017 presidential inauguration.

The concern is not that looking at a public post is itself secret. Software changes the scale: hashtags, locations, relationships and large volumes of posts can be searched, collected and analyzed together rather than encountered one at a time.

Why it matters: “I posted it publicly” answers who could theoretically see a post. It does not answer whether government should continuously aggregate political speech, associations and location signals into an intelligence workflow.

Sources: ACLU of Illinois FOIA litigation · ACLU of Illinois — CPD social-media monitoring records

WHY THIS LIBRARY EXISTS

This page preserves the anecdote and its caveats separately from the shorter Why Privacy Matters explainer. The goal is to keep the argument readable without hiding the receipts.