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Cops Walking the MySpace Beat

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the hard-to-walk-that-particular-neighborhood dept.

theodp writes "Meet the point-and-click police. Newsweek reports that a growing number of ordinary officers are working a new beat, turning to MySpace to collect clues and crack offline cases. Most of the nabbed wrongdoers have been victims of their own hubris, like the two boys who uploaded video of themselves firebombing an abandoned airplane hangar earlier this month."

7 of 278 comments (clear)

  1. Why I post AC by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I behave as though anything I do on the internet will be recorded and saved forever. I'd rather not have to explain something I posted today to a potential employer twenty years from now. Ditto for some nutcase prosecuter with a creative theory about how I caused the war in Viet Nam (I'm exagerating for emphasis).

  2. Plain and Simple by PoitNarf · · Score: 4, Interesting

    By now everyone should be wise enough not to post every single piece of information about them anywhere online, let alone in one place. Parents should be more diligent not with monitoring every single thing their kids do on the computer, but educating them what's ok and not ok to do on the Internet. Am I the only one getting tired of all this MySpace business? On the bright side I was amused reading TFA and seeing how these people were done in by their own sheer stupidity.

    --

    "0101100101? It's just jibberish. *looks in mirror, gasps* 1010011010@!? AHHHHHH!!"
    1. Re:Plain and Simple by TubeSteak · · Score: 4, Interesting

      People who normally, would have boasted about their mayhem/stupidity to their friends, now post it online.

      It never fails to amuse me when people post pictures of their weed, bongs and/or them hitting the bong.

      The only difference between then and now, is that like your friends, the police (or your school, boss, parents) can also go online to see your pictures and videos.

      --
      [Fuck Beta]
      o0t!
  3. Re:This is common... by mpathetiq · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I work for a small municipality. The code enforcement officer uses Facebook and MySpace to determine if college kids are breaking various residency laws. It's amazing how many people put up actual information on these sites.

    --
    Post-rock/Ambient/Drone and other noise.
  4. LA Times Article by ScottCooperDotNet · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Here's an LA Times article from a paranoid MySpace Mom who spies on her daughter for fear of those pedophiles the idiot box keeps talking about. Best parts are the Mom doesn't understand private profiles, and asks her friends about the site before looking at it herself. And then she bans her daughter from the one form of Internet activity she can easily track. Now her daughter is banned from MySpace but we're all sure she won't be using IM and web-mail, right?

  5. and someone's watching where the cops.. by ehrichweiss · · Score: 3, Interesting
    are walking... Some of the cops in my town got busted for posting inappropriate material, like discussing a high profile case. The link isn't the original story as they charge $2.95 to view anything older than 7 days(lame, I know) but it does have some interesting facts.

    So Barney Fife and Roscoe P. Coltrain if you're listening...some of us are watching.

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    0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
  6. Re:Forget Future Employers by Ohreally_factor · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You're then assuming that the proxy server isn't operated by a CIA front company.

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    It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.