Slashdot Mirror
FBI's Facebook Monitoring Leads To Arrest In England
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC reports that armed police were called to a UK school earlier today after being advised of a potential threat by the FBI. The school stated that the FBI 'raised the alarm after Internet scanning software picked up a suspicious combination of words,' strongly implying that they are carrying out routine, automated surveillance of social networking sites. While in this case it does appear that there may have been a genuine threat, the story nonetheless raises significant privacy concerns."
Does that stand for "Federal Bureau of Investigation" or "FaceBook Initiative"? Remember kids, the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover is watching everything you do ... and so is Mark Elliot Zuckerberg.
Sounds like the "special relationship" means that passing laws against excessive surveillance by our own police will never achieve anything - they can just have the FBI spy on us instead. I wonder if they conduct questionable surveillance of American citizens in return?
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
The school uses MS Comic Sans font on the sign to their entrance. They deserve all they get!
(Note to the FBI: This is just a humourous crack. I'm not threatening to blow the school up, okay?)
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Does someone out there thinks there is an expectation of privacy for data they post on the internet?
I thought that was exactly what you should NOT expect.
"Oh, you hate your job? There's a support group for that, it's called everyone, they meet at the bar."
When you publish something on the internet, it is not private. There may be a privacy concern here, but only if the FBI software is viewing profiles that are supposed to be private / they are not authorized to view. Although I am not even sure of that -- aren't there websites out there that index all of FaceBook's content for anyone to view?
The story nonetheless raises significant privacy concerns
Like "OMG my public postings can be read by others"?
Significant privacy concerns? You mean like, "Don't talk about private shit in public?"
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Seriously, how many times will we have these stories of 'Facebook found to have X issues with privacy'? Facebook is not PrivateBook, it never was nor was it ever intended to be. It was designed to be shared and be public. And when you put something in the public, guess what? People and organizations will look at it regardless of whether you want them to or not.
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
Shit. Piss. Fuck. Cunt. Cocksucker. Motherfucker. Tits.
C'mon. I'm waiting for you.
If I post something on Facebook, should I have an expectation that it is private?
You could argue that I broadcast only to people I declared to be my friend, but if I told a secret to 200+ "friends", would I reasonably expect that what I said would be kept private?
Every time some idiot goes and posts somewhere "I'm gonna kill people" and it isn't caught, the news is "They were posting it for all the world to see, why didn't somebody stop them!?"
Then some idiot is caught from his posting, and the new is "How dare the police read posts!?"
While I don't believe in prior restraint and so I worry about arresting people based on things they said they might do, Facebook is the new equivalent of painting signs on the water tower. If ever anything didn't qualify for 'expectation of privacy', a service where the express purpose is to tell other people what you're doing should be it. As long as some additional police work goes into verifying that the threat is real, I think this is a good thing.
Tomorrow - last day of school. I'm glad because I'm tired of being bullied by the assholes in this place. I will at last be leaving this world. TGI summer break.
This isn't a Facebook threat Mr. FBI.
This is just me circa 1986 typing into a BBS.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Is the story here that the FBI monitors open communication on the internet, or that they went through the right channels to have someone arrested in a foreign country?
I have the dictionary on one of my sites. I am so f*#$(Q@$&
I know there's a problem with teenage pregnancy in the UK, but damn, getting a call from the FBI just because some teen said on their facebook page "party", "no parents", "beer", "condoms" is a bit much.
Disclaimer: The scenario posted in this comment bares no resemblance to any actual event in this life or a past life...
Take Nobody's Word For It.
"the story nonetheless raises significant privacy concerns."
I know it's all the rage right now to automatically link Facebook with "Privacy Concerns," but in this case it's just asinine.
If you use facebook and post your personal information for all to see this is what you get.
Solution - Do not use facebook!
This is not a comment on whether Facebook makes too much information public. This is a comment on the whether public data can be scanned:
If the data was available on the public site then there is no privacy concern. If they 'hacked' facebook to get private data, then there is a privacy concern.
Public data is public data and anybody can 'scan' it if they like.
from the article: "It picked up a posting showing a picture of a gun being held above a scrawled note, which read "tomorrow - last day of school" and went on to mention bullies and "leaving this world". "
Which seems to imply that this was image recognition software that recognized the gun and parsed the hand writing of the note in the same picture. That is quite an impressive capability considering the sheer volume of pictures added to facebook every second.
...I wonder if they teach evolutionary algorithms?
Their monitoring has had one possibly correct hit. Therefore it was justified and it is a Good Thing (tm).
It saddens me that so many people I talk to have this exact thought process.
Insanity: voting in the same two parties over and over again and expecting different results
All these reports of privacy, social networking, etc. Am I missing something, or are all these people just choosing to let 'everyone' view their posts? Surely if they limit their narcissism to friends you wouldn't have random people reading your stuff?
As long as they were not viewing private comments (aka hacking facebook) what the "privacy concerns" are there?. The internet is public
The tool they are using is probably just some altered social media scaning tool that many companys are using these days to monitor discussions of their brands/products
...for all those that say -- "Na, na, you have no expectation to privacy on the net" -- lets get a few things straight. The first is, Facebook actually gives the impression that privacy will be shared only with those who you invite into your social circle. That means in fact that there IS an expectation of privacy, just a rather loose one (amongst your 238 friends). However the problem here is that there is a very strong suggestion that the FBI had access to Facebook accounts that they were not "invited to", and thus, under the definition and general understanding of the Facebook privacy model, were not "authorized to" view. The key concept here is the idea of "scanning software" that picked up a "combination of words". There is no mention of a person (officer, agent, etc). Had someone reported the person (say one of the friends in the guy's social network), and the FBI had pretended to be "someone" - a living person say - and then captured the tip off as part of an investigation, then I'm sure it would have been reported much differently. In this case it would seem that somehow the FBI has an automated system that has access to accounts it hasn't been invited to, and thus there are serious privacy concerns in fact.
Second thing is, how come the FBI is doing this on behalf of the UK? Isn't the FBI's juristiction only in the US? Aren't there certain laws that cover this sort of thing? Are the US and England playing a little game of bend the rules, by having the FBI spy on their citizens, so as to bypass local laws that prevent UK law enforcement from doing the same? And then the next logical step -- is England doing the same on behalf of the US -- spying on their citizens?
Finally, for all those really negative people that go on and on about the bleeding obvious -- that there is no expectation of privacy on the net -- stop it. REALLY. We can dream of a better world were we do have accountable law enforcement, strict privacy laws, and the universal expectation of free speach. Impossible you say? Well I'd counter that if you don't even bother imagining it, then for sure it definately IS impossible, because you'll never even lift a finger to try.
This could well be 'shopped but I was shown this 5 days before that BBC story.
http://www.photo-pimp.com/dgnr8/lost/drf.jpg
an arse-bandit having plans to blow and pound into the ground some hapless chap ?
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
If the FBI is making automated scans of Facebook looking for certain combinations of words, I imagine they're also automatically scanning purchase data aggregated by Choicepoint et al looking for certain combinations of products. Remember, pay in cash and don't use your discount card if you want to purchase a pistol and Catcher In The Rye. Also, hope that your medication never gets its components used by drug cookers. I pray they're not abusing the PATRIOT Act to have automated access to all libraries' databases.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Terrorists planning an attack on important facilities in Airstrip 1 were rounded up by Airstrip 1 National Security Forces earlier today.
non, it's not 'someone called the FBI', it's the part about 'scanning software' and 'routine, automated surveillance'. As we fall deeper into a surveillance society, with cameras pointed at your front door, auto-logging of your car plates everywhere you drive, and (this is completely true) police helicopters with inferred/heat sensors flying over your house that can see through walls there is a basic issue of potential abuse of power, and the loss of freedom. Most of the 'need a warrant/ probable cause' law is to protect people who are doing there own thing, to try to keep the police state at bay, from police who think they are just protecting yourself from yourself. It's been shown over and over, every single time, once you give the government that power, someone starts abusing it. Government is not friendly, it's abusive and scary, Jefferson stated as much. Individuals should not have to be in a nanny state.
http://xkcd.com/743/
Mostly I think the software is looking at the wrong combinations of words. They might try looking at these phrases instead:
"If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear"
"Don't worry, it will be voluntary"
"The House of Commons staff assured me that my second and third mortgages were claimable"
"We can handle an oil spill of up to two hundred and fifty thousand barrels a day. Trust us"
"I shouted 'Police!' before opening fire" (for what it's worth, all the police at Stockwell station when Menezes was killed, claimed they heard the warning shouted, while all 17 witnesses, who were a random sample of subway passengers, claimed that they did not)
"It wasn't for the money"
"As a consultant I can assure you that..."
They are a sure sign that the speaker is corrupt and about to break the law.
According to this image I saw 5 days before that BBC story.
http://www.photo-pimp.com/dgnr8/lost/drf.jpg
Odd.
In Soviet America, All you comments belong to us.
46137
You're on the internet - deal with it!
The world is a connected place - what you gonna do - unplug everything and sit in the dark?
I must be missing it, but TFA doesn't say anything about the kid (19-yo-man? that's still a kid by many standards) being armed?
So if I write "kill", "murder" or anything like that, I can be arrested because it's "suspicious words"? Even if I am talking about a game or something?
Thankfully he didn't mention killing the Queen or he'd find himself with 007 up his rear end.
I'd like to see a comedy sketch where ED-209 is employed in a loan collections agency, and goes haywire writing progressively less polite dunning letters to some customer who has, if fact, paid off their loan.
I, for one, am looking forward to the inevitable
Are they working on a RoboPope?
I don't think so...remember this is the Catholic Church. They would be more along the lines of "resistance is futile."
The fact that anyone could push all their personal information out to a social networking site and then be outraged, OUTRAGED, that anyone would ever read it! Gimme a break.
Ok, so if a member of someone's social network reports his threats to the FBI, should the FBI report the name of the whistleblower to the raving loon, or just say they found the threats while "scanning the internet"?
Echelon -- one of theories regarding that back in late 90s (?) was that it was used by signatories to circumvent local privacy laws.
Though, of course, I could also be just a conspiracy theory... ;-)
Paul B.
Privacy is about the embarassment of things you'd like private being made public. Our instinct for privacy isn't the crazy "between me and my gods" kind of thing - it's a mechanism that works on reputation.
Provided that law enforcement doesn't publicise your private life when you're doing things that are pretty innocent, no foul. You have a legitimate concern about advertisers knowing too much about you, because that stuff can make a difference. As for legal agencies that are sorting through heaps of personal data to look for dangerous patterns (they lack the manpower to do anything else to any but a very small part of the population), it's benign.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
FTFA: Some parents have criticised police over why their children were allowed into classes while officers were investigating a possible armed threat.
Um, I dunno, maybe because they were still investigating and didn't want to jump to any conclusions?
But really the larger problem is, why aren't these parents concerned that:
* The school has a sufficient problem with bullies that a kid may have wanted to kill people over it, yet the administration did nothing about it (apparently).
* A foreign law enforcement agency is scanning their kids' Facebook pages with no jurisdiction and no warrants.
Seems these parents really need to reevaluate their priorities in life. And I say this as a parent of two children in college and two more in middle school.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Like this, you mean:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2008/11/the-boycott-eff.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/05/31/what_are_those_words/
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
What a shame that those are the only possible choices. If only there was some way they could tell the truth and say that it was a tip from an anonymous citizen!
Yes with ideas like http://wikileaks.org/wiki/EU_social_network_spy_system_brief,_INDECT_Work_Package_4,_2009 [wikileaks.org]
and http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Mind_Your_Tweets:_The_CIA_Social_Networking_Surveillance_System [wikileaks.org]
getting to the state and federal task forces expect to see more.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Looks like the guys running Echelon (hit) are doing a bit of searching on their own: maybe just shopping: Armani (hit), or maybe they are just bored Playboy (hit), Pornstars (hit), Porno (hit), sex(hit), etc. I am not sure I want to know what "Bubba the Love Sponge" is in reference to :(
If that list on the register is legitimate, then there are some very sensible looking and some very odd looking trigger words involved. I wonder how many words you have to match on to get a result they pay attention to?
Not that anyone on /. would want to tempt fate or anything :)
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
It's looking at data which is explicitly published by people such that the general public can view it.
Or is the summary writer claiming they are snooping the data elsewhere?
Quack, quack.
Face Book Incorporated
The whole problem I have with sites like Facebook isn't that they exist, but that people treat them as if a conversation on FB is no different than one in person. There are a lot of differences:
I probably post more than I should on FB, but not nearly as much as some of my colleagues. The real problem with something like FB is that it gives any prosecuting attorney a mountain of evidence on which to have you tried should you ever become *problematic* to those in power. It's a website for the unwashed, insignificant masses ruled by the upper classes. For those fighting injustice and oppression, who have the guts to speak up for what is right, it's just another liability.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
> Does someone out there thinks there is an expectation of privacy for data they post on the internet?
> I thought that was exactly what you should NOT expect.
No, and no. There is no expectation of privacy, but there is an expectation that your information isn't worth someone's time, usually.
But the thing slashdotters care about is whether there should be an expectation of privacy, and whether people should respect it. We tend to think the answer is yes, because we were all slightly unusual growing up, and we all had issues of one sort or another with some of the dumber authority figure in our lives, so we don't trust people in authority when they interfere with what we consider our sphere of liberal autonomy.
A lot of other people, even pro-government-monitoring people, feel the same way about privacy from third-parties. (e.g. the people who think GOV should have more wiretapping authority to find terrorists.) But there are fewer of those on slashdot.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Facebook is not secure. Facebook has servers in the US. The FBI can watch cleartext entering or leaving the country, pursuant to the border search doctrine. Unless someone comes up with a very good argument why that's unreasonable, and that someone takes the case to the Supreme Court. But it would have to be very good, because the First Congress approved border searches AND wrote the Bill of Right--so we know that they considered them "reasonable," and it's only unreasonable searches that are forbidden.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
The problems being when friends and family members, who blog about every little moment in life, begin including references to you in said blogs
Hey. Try actually, you know, talking to them. Tell them you don't want them to do that.
There are four outcomes:
1) The listen to you and don't post about you. No further data is posted.
2) They ignore you, in which case you have no desire to hang out with someone who doesn't listen to your wishes and you cut off contact. No further data is posted.
3) They listen to you but think the request is so weird they break off contact with you.
But basically, people have talked about other people through history. An attempt to curtail this is madness, and the only solution to avoid this is complete and total isolation from humanity. Some might wish that, but the rest of us really only interfere with your "privacy" as much as you let them. Something you don't want public you should not share with anyone, period.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
.. by the same analogy, automatically indexing the internet/facebook is the equivelant of having cameras/microphones being monitored 24/7 in public places.
Having anything I say in PUBLIC recorded is pretty much what I expect! Or at least, what I expect to be possible. When I scream something in public I EXPECT people to hear it.
Dont want it read, don't post it, nor tell anyone else who might post it. It's a pretty simple rule. And it's been the same rule ever since humans developed writing.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Shut up, already. Don't give the infant skynet any more ideas, K?
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
You don't read signatures much do you... yet you have one so I doubt you turned them off.
Looks like a false alarm. Later report: "A 19-year-old man who was arrested by armed police at a Merseyside school has been released on bail. ". "Merseyside Police said that their inquiries were continuing into the man, who had imitation firearms and a computer seized from his home. The alert had been raised after a threat with a picture of a gun was posted on a social networking website."
I had something like this happen a few years back. I have a domain in ".com" which is the same as the "co.uk" domain of a boarding school in England. Occasionally I'd get misaddressed mail. (This was back when you could use a catchall address for a domain without being overwhelmed by spam.) Once I got a message with the subject "I am going to kill you tonight". After checking the headers, it was clear that it was from someone at the school, not a death threat aimed at me. (Sent from .co.uk, addressed to same second level domain in .com.) Called up the school in England and reached someone in authority. 8 hour time difference; middle of the night there, someone had to be awakened. Turned out it was a 12-year old kid sending a dumb email to one of the other kids. He was disciplined by the school.
Today, they'd send in a SWAT team.
when someone can set up a system to see *everything* you do in a public place, then there are legitimate privacy concerns.
No there are not. There is nothing legitimate whatsoever in any way, thinking that anything public should or COULD automatically be made private. Because it's (once more) PUBLIC. Because anyone could have been there to see you, it's simply the case that potentially MORE people may see/hear what you did - but that makes NO DIFFERENCE because they could have done so without the camera/microphone.
I can't believe that even a physicist cannot understand the separation between the private and the public, which until this age has been well understood by every man, woman, and child on earth even though they had a lot more accidental privacy because of physical separation.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I don't like lists, they say too much about the people who write them
For instance: "quiche", "Furby", "sardine", "snuffle", "jaws", "Halibut" ;)
Why are the TLAs worried about quiche? Or is it "fissionable quiche"? (That part of the list on theregister seems to be missing some commas) Maybe the NSA/GCHQ are worried they'll employ a quiche-eating programmer.
I bet someone read the post on facebook. Reported it to the FBI. The FBI had a look, decided it was a potential threat and informed Merseyside police.
The BBC's understanding of the schools understanding of Merseyside Police's understanding of FBI procedures could easily have been based on speculation somewhere along that line of communication.
A scanner for suspicious word combinations would throw up so many false positives as to be useless. Security services only go for expensive useless ideas when they're on public display.
I may be trolling here, but how is this a privacy concern? You mean, someone actually reads my Facebook?
So it's OK to listen in on you? It isn't private. Is it OK if I follow you around all day on the street? It's not private. Is it OK if I look through your trash? It's not private.
Funny how if we were to follow MPs and police and tape their public conversations and watch them in public places, we'd get arrested for harassment.
PS Another thought: all that content out there in public (books, movies, etc), how come when we take copies of that, it's criminal theft?
Policing has gone international. Datasharing means 1. Everything you do or say can be logged and put into an internationally accessible database. 2. Local police can, through back channels, get other countries to provide information on you by means that would otherwise be unconstitutional, passing the info through the international databases.
The FBI scanning the public traffic of an American website is in no way is comparable to monitoring you
Not so fast there. I think these things are not only comparable, I think they are identical. Tracking EVERYTHING you do that happened in public IS tracking you.
If I chat to my friend, I don't expect the FBI to be listening, even if it happens on the street in front of my house. Just because "chatting" now happens on a machine that the FBI can access, suddenly every public place is now spied on by the FBI?
Me no likey. And I especially don't like that if they CAN do something creepy, all of us citizens must accept that they WILL and ARE doing it. And I will never accept the idea that we must lay down for this because it is technically possible.
Oh, and for all you fucking spys: "Kill the principal, blow up the white house, bomb on the flight."
With the Federal government running a $1.6 trillion annual deficit, we need to scrutinize every possible expenditure.
I propose that we cut the portion of budget for the Ministry of Justice that is expended on development, maintenance and use of software that scans the public portions of facebook and other social media sites and terminate the employment of all personnel involved in said operations. Legal or illegal, I don't want my tax dollars being used for this.
Bush Cheney Unocal British Petroleum Afghanistan Iraq Iran Turkmenistan 21 trillion cubic meters
36 trillion cubic meters.
Have a day.
Yours In Tashkent,
K. Trout
Note to the FBI: This is just a humourous crack.
Now not only are you in trouble with the FBI, the DEA will watching you too!
Free Martian Whores!
OK, I'm a security and privacy 'kinda guy' - have been ever since I read The Cuckoo's Egg, before my career ever got me into computers.
I don't like the government snoops, and I don't like Facebook's random security policy changes. HOWEVER, we've been saying this for decades:
If it's on the internet, it's visible.
If it's on a computer, it's accessible.
The various governments are almost certainly monitoring much of the internet traffic, and have been doing so for quite a while. It still amazes me that most people don't know about Echelon, which has been going on since the 1960s, and growing all the time.
Don't want people to find out about stuff? DON'T POST IT ON FREAKING FACEBOOK!!! Don't post it _anywhere_. Don't put it on a computer. (and if you're truly paranoid, don't write it down).
Cryptography (and steganography) are the intermediate answers here, but they have one weakness: We don't know what we don't know. Safer to keep your secrets secret.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
STOP written declaration 29 NOW! This declaration wants every search engine query in the EU to be tracked and watched!
That's almost what it was for in the first place, wasn't it? Actually, I think it was so you could find a photo of the girl whose number you were too drunk to write down legibly at the party the night before.
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
that means the public can use it. Including the FBI.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I suppose that you never ever exceed the speed limit, never use your cell phone in an illegal manner, never pick your nose or scratch your arse or did anything accidental that might have been momentarily embarrassing. If you think about it, someone could take a bunch of recordings of things you do in public, use excerpts out of context, and create a rather embarrassing and damaging portrait of you.
I do all those things. So What?? It doesn't matter. If I do that in public I know someone MIGHT be able to see. It doesn't matter if someone records it or not, it was my choice and my risk to do something in public. Oh no, a mildly embarrassing video of me is possible! Well who cares, no-one would ever watch it even if you took the trouble to make it. Even if I became a high-profile figure it wouldn't matter because there are so many videos like that already, people pretty well gloss over them unless you are doing something truly shocking, instead of something every other single person on the planet does. In the end, it's foolish to be embarrassed simple because you are human.
The reality is you can't monitor everything so you can always find privacy if you TRULY want it. The other reality is there are very few moments in people's lives when they truly desire privacy, and they know how to find it if they want to.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It reported there had been an internet image showing a gun-toting man with a hand-written message reading: "Tomorrow last day of school. We gonna fuck up the bullies and leave this world 11/06/2010."
Another message said: "Tested it at firing range, we have two shotguns as well, it's locked in but tomorrow I have a key. St Aelred's Catholic Technology College, England, watch BBC."
If anything like that is posted publicly I would hope more than just the FBI would report it to the authorities.
While in this case it does appear that there may have been a genuine threat, the story nonetheless raises significant privacy concerns.
Concerns like "OMG! The FBI is browsing the web!"?
http://dilbert.com/2010-12-13
If you say something in public, how do you have any privacy to protect it?
--
make install -not war