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EFF Wants To Know If the Feds Are Cyberstalking
rossendryv writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation and UC Berkeley's Samuelson Center filed suit in California's Northern District, asking the court to force a number of government agencies to hand over any documents they have concerning the use of social networking sites as part of investigative procedures."
I just poked Osama Bin Laden on his wall.
Everyone here does it to their high school girlfriends. Let me correct that - HS crushes who they never spoke to even once!
"The US Attorney for the Southern District of New York has announced a RICO case has been filed against all players of the game Mafia Wars. It is clear that these are hardened criminals who not only kill without remorse, but share their results on social networking sites. The US Attorney's Office thanks the social networking site Facebook for their cooperation in bringing these mobsters to justice."
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=26362499269&ref=search&sid=695178310.1678982780..1#/group.php?v=wall&ref=search&gid=26362499269 Osama Bin Laden: World Champion of Hide and Seek since 2001!
Why wouldn't the feds do this? It would be irresponsible of them to *NOT* look at social networking sites for illegal activities. I'm not saying that there's a treasure trove of information there, but come on, this isn't private data we're talking about here. If the FBI or CIA ir CSIS or NSA or ABC is looking for info on me, they should at the very least be putting "Beardo the Bearded" into Google and following the links.
If someone is putting things up in public for anyone to see then I can't see any problems with a government agency looking over these records. I'm all for privacy, but once you put it up in public, good luck, Mrs. Streisand.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
The summary is misleading. The suit is more about what the Feds are doing with that data and the policies surrounding it, not that the Feds are using social networking sites for investigations.
"Powers. I have them."
Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean the feds aren't following you on facebook/twitter...
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
If you read TFA, you'll notice that in general the EFF doesn't have a problem with these types of practices. It's just FOI requests are getting stalled/ignored.
It isn't as though the Feds will do anything with whatever they find.
Are the Feds watching Facebook and other social networking sites? Did the STASI keep tabs on East German citizens? I find it amusing to see people, especially those who are naïve about the way the world works, shocked that intelligence agencies might actually monitor information which they so graciously posted for all the world to see (gasp). Perhaps now they will receive a first hand lesson in why some of us consciously refuse to participate in social networking sites.
there was a story recently of police busting someone for underage drinking based on facebook pictures. the problem with arresting someone based not on catching them doing an illegal act, but by heresay or pictures... is that how can it be proven?! "that was apple juice" "i was being facetious" shouldn't those be the only needs of defense against such allegations, true or not? this is the inherant flaw i see in this policing method.
....my wife woke up and found weird crop circles in Farmville. She swears she didn't plant them that way.
One of the key features of social networking is that you display certain types of data to the world or to user-defined groups. You do this at your own risk and you are either expressly or implicitly consenting to the display of the data to your selected viewers. The article was fairly vague on what exactly the EFF is after. Smells too much like a fishing expedition unless there is something they know or strongly suspect that we don't.
What would be more interesting is if either: (a) the feds were circumventing security controls and monitoring communication through social networks (especially without warrants), or (b) feds had standing "agreements" with the social networking companies which gives them access to data that would otherwise be private.
Other than that, I find the possibility that the feds are reading my anonymous /. comments unremarkable.
So, if you have a friend on Facebook who had to get security clearance, you were investigated.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
"K, did you use that flashy-memory-thing on me?!"
"No."
"I'm serious, K! Did you ever use that flashy-memory-thing on me, man?!"
"No."
The issue isn't with, say, getting into facebook and checking out all your stupid farmville posts / drunken photos or etc, the issue is more on the privileged access side of things. Start thinking along the lines of your social graph and the back end of these sites and you have the gist of the real privacy issue here.
How many times you've viewed a certain profile, the times of day you access the system, the timeline of your creation and deletion of connections with other people, the correlation of your mood from content against these actions etc etc. Base level data mining activity. Volume, frequency, timing. Combine this with X number of social sites and other activity in the cloud and you can get a pretty concise picture of someone's life depending on their volume of online interactions. It doesn't matter what the _actual_ content is, it's the least important part of the picture.
Most of the responses to this topic online tend to drill down and go "I don't care if X can see my posted Y, I posted it assuming it was public domain". It really indicates that people are only aware of about a third of the real activities that are captured when you interact with social networking sites and the cloud as a whole.
Really.
Chances are, no one in government cares about you, or your drunken antics posted on facespace. If they did, well, you put it out in public, so quit complaining when they read it.
Take the tin foil off. You're not that interesting outside your little circle of friends.
Doesn't everyone stalk other people on Facebook? Come on, let me see a show of hands...
Come on, don't be shy...
*crickets*
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
What the heck is "cyberstalking?" Doesn't wholesale wiretapping of both voice and data include this cyberstalking notion? EFF already sued over the patriot act and Obama's administration has made it even worse than before. Not even Bush kept email lists of their political enemies (as far as we know), so the question is moot.
like what they did to indymedia?
"To stop the terrorists."
Is that when the government considers someone for security clearance they are NOT interested in most of your life. They really don't care about who you are, what you believe and so on... Except as it applies to your likelihood to divulge classified information. So they don't care if you are gay, really doesn't matter to them. They'd only care if you are gay, but in the closet, and deeply afraid of being outed. Then perhaps someone could use it to coerce you in to divulging classified information. Likewise they don't care what your politics are... Unless those politics are such that you are likely to betray the government to a foreign government that you think has the "right" politics.
That's really all they are after in their SSBI. They want to make sure you are who you say you are, and that you don't have any reason to hand over the information you'll have access to. So while the questions are very personal in nature, they are not as some assume trying to filter for the politically right kind of person. They are just trying to see if you can likely be trusted. That would be why they check your credit history. Might not seem relevant but money problems are a prime reason for committing treason so they want to see if you have money problems.
> no one in government cares about you, or your drunken antics posted on facespace
Unless you are considered a political enemy by someone in power. (as some allege happened with Eliot Spitzer) We should not empower government, and whichever political animals control it at a given time, with the ability to selectively enforce the law. That ability is stupendously magnified by the capacity to do a massive, exhaustive search of who commits "crime."
Thus, government would be more just if it arrests everyone who documents their stupid crimes online. This would eliminate the injustice of selective enforcement. And, the massive number of crimes that would be found -- and the ensuing backlog in criminal court -- would likely create pressure to reform what is considered "illegal."
Arrest *everyone* who documents illegal antics on "facespace." Or, restrict government's power, and don't have them in this business, in the first place.
Next question.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Look, the guy is holed up in a cave with a couple of goats in the middle of Nowhere, Pakistan (And still the US can't find him, but that's another lol). He has to send a runner with a cassette tape 500km to the Al Jazeera office every time he has a new fatwa to issue.
It's not like he's going to be updating his Facebook status very often.
Osama has updated his profile : Today I feel like crushing infidels.
Fahid commented on Osama's post : lol habibi.
Ahmed likes this.
Mohammad pokes Osama.
Osama has been busy in the kitchen and has cooked too many Kung Pao Chicken. Help him out on Cafe World.
Osama has been downgraded to level 1 in Habbo Hotel, because he keeps blowing up his buildings (sorry, it slipped out).
As for the rest of the world, the signal to noise ratio is just too great for the Feebs to glean anything useful. Christ, I only have family and a few close friends on my FB, but the amount of drivel they post is unreal.
I'm on the bus going to town. ...
I'm at town.
I saw blah blah in town.
Where ?
At the coffee shop.
I nearly said hello, but thought I'd tweet you instead.
and so on, and so on
Social Networking sites are the type of tool that the govt. agencies have wanted for years now. It helps them with their investigations into cells of criminal activity. Consider how say the mob works. Vinny the Boss, hires Joe Schmo to do his job but uses cash at a drop zone. Well Joe has to have had some way of knowing to take the job from Vinny. So a Social networking site like application help piece Vinny and Joe to the same coffee shop that they frequent. Now think of the limitless potential power of investigation that can be performed. All legal, the info is public, so no warrants are necessary, the cells of criminals are oblivious as to how they are nabbed.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
Of Osama Bin Laden getting bufu'ed by Liberace probably got me flagged. Ah well, it was worth it....
What would be worse is if they could some how associate your 4chan posts with you, despite their being artistic works of fiction and falsehood.
Never disclose your phone number on Facebook.
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga