Navigate 360 bills itself as an all-in-one safety package, capable of monitoring social media, productivity software, G-Suite, and email for threats ranging from school shooters to mental health crisis. Social Sentinel sold itself similarly to UConn police, marketing materials obtained by CT Insider show.
CT Insider investigated the program following reports last year from the Dallas Morning News that Social Sentinel was used by schools to monitor political dissent, mental health and potential violence.
Out of roughly 100 police investigations prompted by Social Sentinel across the entire UConn system, only three led to referrals for mental health services, according to emails and police record documents obtained by CT Insider via the Freedom of Information Act. No evidence of actionable threats to public safety was provided to CT Insider.
UConn declined to provide specifics on why it decided to discontinue the service.
"The university and its departments review all contracts as they approach renewal time, keeping cost considerations, alternative approaches, and other factors in mind," wrote spokesperson Stephanie Reitz in an email to CT Insider. "In some circumstances, including this one, the result is a decision against renewal."
Because pricing for the contract was just under the threshold for a "micro-purchase," Social Sentinel and its successor weren't required to formally bid on the project.
While active, UConn effectively paid a private contractor to scan millions of social media posts across Connecticut, the United States, and globally, for threats to the school. In a typical month, Social Sentinel would tag about 100,000 posts and 6,000 images as "related" to UConn, documents show, with an unknown number flagged as security alerts.
WHAT IS SOCIAL SENTINEL
Before the university contracted with Social Sentinel to expand its intelligence gathering on social media, UConn police surveilled online accounts informally with at least one officer using keyword search terms on a platform called Hootsuite to monitor Instagram and Twitter.
In a 2014 email about procuring the service, UConn Police Officer Thomas Hine, who serves on the Connecticut Regional Digital Investigation Squad, wrote the potential benefit of Social Sentinel is that an alert can be sent to patrol officers automatically. "I don't want someone to reach out for help before a suicide and we couldn't help because I was sleeping/on vacation or not looking at Hootsuite at the time," he added.
Social Sentinel is the brainchild of Gary Margolis, a former University of Vermont Police Chief and co-chair on the board of directors for Navigate 360. Navigate 360 has not replied to repeated requests for comment for this story.
In theory, people post publicly about shootings, mental health crisis and civil unrest prior to such acts occurring, Margolis said in a 2019 interview with Vermont-based podcast "Start Here," describing the technology as a "smoke alarm" that finds "leaks" on social media.
The Social Sentinel program works by combining keyword tracking with geofencing, trawling social media posts in general and on pages associated with a school or university for "threat indicators," and reports them to the institution. Keywords can include such terms as "kill" or "die" or "mental breakdown." The service is supposed to exclude posts associated with accounts located a significant distance from the school. It can also access private emails through university-managed G-Suite, though UConn denied using this feature.
HOW UCONN USED THE SERVICE
UConn provided a list to CT Insider of customized keywords associated with the university, including "Carriage House," "UCPD," or former school president "Dr. Tom Kasouleas," that it gave to Social Sentinel and Navigate 360 to monitor in social media forums.
On-duty police supervisors were responsible for reviewing all alerts sent by Social Sentinel while on shift. If an officer found the alert was not a threat, they were supposed to comment on the alert so that other officers could see it was an error.
If the alert required a follow up, police supervisors would assign a case number and dispatch officers to the scene. The alert was also supposed to be marked as being investigated.
In reality, the service frequently spammed officers with false alerts, police reports and emails reveal.
That's to be expected, explained Jason Kelly, activism director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and digital privacy. "It's literally just searching for keywords. It ends up being like a needle in a haystack ... only I don't think there's good evidence that the needle necessarily exists in the first place, so you end up searching the stack for anything that looks like a needle."
According to documents obtained by CT Insider, most of Social Sentinel alerts investigated by police were jokes, memes and song lyrics. One student's post was flagged for "dying" while power lifting. In some cases the program misidentified Yale University's Welch Hall as being part of UConn. In another case, police were repeatedly alerted to the same account posting about Taylor Swift tickets, forcing them to request tech support to block the account and stop the spam.
Police also investigated "threat alerts" posted from dubious sources, the documents showed. In a memorable case, the police spent hours attempting to track down the physical location of a phone on campus associated with an obvious joke account.
By 2022, at least one officer had developed a pet name for Social Sentinel — Lt. Mark Bouthillier referred to the service as "Social Useless" in an email about the program's technical issues that was obtained by CT Insider.
WELLNESS CHECKS
Some have also questioned the role of police in conducting mental health checks on students.
In 2019, Officer Lee Lurkin was assigned a mental health alert from Social Sentinel. The officer was able to track down the student from behind a pseudo-anonymous account and contacted them. Lurkin met the student in person and was told that the tweet was just venting.
There were several incidents like this in the UConn police reports, where officers would sometimes wait for students after class or arranged to meet in locations on campus, including dorm rooms.
These incidents highlight the complications of this kind of surveillance, where students who are making jokes online are confronted by a police officer in their on-campus home about their mental health.
A Washington Post investigation last year found that police officers frequently shot people they were called on to assist with mental wellness checks. And a study from the Treatment Advocacy Center found that 25 percent of all fatal police encounters resulted in the death of a person with a mental health condition.
Many cities, including New Haven, have moved away from police being the first line on mental health wellness checks, instead moving to social worker-driven programs.
"A handful of people in real crises or who had a history of them ... had police show up physically. That's incredibly, incredibly dangerous," UConn student journalist Nathan Henault wrote in an email to CT Insider. "People in mental health crises, at their most vulnerable, are far more likely to be severely injured or killed by the police during wellness checks. I imagine many of the people contacted by UCPD, whether because of a lyric or a joke or a genuine crisis, were scared — I know I would be."
©2023 The Hour (Norwalk, Conn.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
