FBI Expands Dataminr Contract During George Floyd Protests for Social Media Surveillance of Demonstrations

The FBI signed an expedited agreement to extend its relationship with Dataminr on June 9, 2020, just days after nationwide demonstrations erupted following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The expanded contract provided FBI agents with enhanced access to Dataminr’s “First Alert” service, which delivered real-time monitoring of Twitter posts, protest locations, and activist organizing activities across the country. Documents obtained by The Intercept revealed that Dataminr provided police departments with detailed alerts identifying specific protest locations, including addresses like “US Bank Stadium on 400 block of Chicago Avenue,” along with images and eyewitness accounts posted by protesters and ordinary social media users.

The surveillance extended far beyond the FBI, with Dataminr serving as the primary social media monitoring tool for major police departments including NYPD, LAPD, Chicago Police, Louisiana State Police, and Minneapolis Police Department. Internal Dataminr materials instructed staff to monitor for “lethal force used against protesters,” “widespread arson or looting,” and “officer-involved shootings,” creating comprehensive records of scheduled protests and real-time protest activity across dozens of cities. The company bundled publicly available social media posts—including constitutionally protected speech about peaceful demonstrations—and forwarded them directly to law enforcement agencies, effectively converting First Amendment-protected expression into intelligence products for police consumption.

Civil liberties organizations condemned the surveillance as a direct threat to constitutional rights and democratic participation. The ACLU stated that “social networks like Twitter need to protect users and ensure developers aren’t sharing First Amendment expression with law enforcement,” while groups including Color of Change and MediaJustice argued the practice facilitated “racist policing” by enabling targeted surveillance of Black activists and communities. Law professor Andrew Ferguson noted that “monitoring activities and forwarding information to police is clearly surveillance,” regardless of Dataminr’s framing of its service as “news alerts.” The surveillance created a chilling effect on protest participation, with activists and legal experts warning that real-time monitoring of demonstrations would deter people from exercising their constitutional rights due to fear of government tracking. Despite Twitter’s 2016 ban on intelligence agencies using Dataminr, the platform’s terms of service continued to allow law enforcement access, creating what critics described as a massive loophole that enabled systematic surveillance of racial justice movements during one of the largest civil rights mobilizations in American history.