Slashdot Mirror
Federal Agents Quietly Using Social Media
SpuriousLogic passes along this excerpt from the ChiTrib: "The Feds are on Facebook. And MySpace, LinkedIn, and Twitter, too. US law enforcement agents are following the rest of the Internet world into popular social-networking services, going undercover with false online profiles to communicate with suspects and gather private information, according to an internal Justice Department document that offers a tantalizing glimpse of issues related to privacy and crime-fighting. ... The document... makes clear that US agents are already logging on surreptitiously to exchange messages with suspects, identify a target's friends or relatives and browse private information such as postings, personal photographs, and video clips. Among other purposes: Investigators can check suspects' alibis by comparing stories told to police with tweets sent at the same time about their whereabouts. Online photos from a suspicious spending spree... can link suspects or their friends to robberies or burglaries." The FoIA lawsuit was filed by the EFF, which has posted two documents obtained from the action, from the DoJ and Internal Revenue (more will be coming later). The rights group praises the IRS for spelling out limitations and prohibitions on deceptive use of social media by its agents — unlike the DoJ. The US Marshalls and the BATFE could not find any documents related to the FoIA request, so presumably they have no guidelines or prohibitions in this area.
If you need a leaked document to know that spies are spying, you fail at life. Obviously information-gathering agencies will deploy personnel wherever there are large amounts of potentially useful information to be gathered.
Nothing lasts forever but the certainty of change.
If you are making your information publicly available, wouldn't you expect your government to take advantage of it?
Hint: Don't accept friend requests from someone named, Uncle Sam, Uncle Sammy, or that super model that wants to know where you live and were Saturday night between 10pm and 2 am.
Oh and don't tweet if you're gonna lie about it later to police.
~Mekkah
Where the men are men, the women are men, and the little girls are FBI agents.
So if they want to use my tweets to break alibis, does this mean I can make tweets to reinforce them? '8:00 in bed and going to sleep' '9:00 woke up to the sound of a gun shot in the distance, I hope Bob the snitch is okay' '9:15 Going downtown with Officers for a cup of coffee, they are so nice' '9:30 after officers read my tweets, they apologized for wasting my time and drove me home'
Hint: Don't friend random strangers on Facebook et al.
$ make available