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."
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,
Unfortunately(or fortunately) once a person writes out a threat (even if its in a riddle within a haiku) that constitutes a crime because you are stating your intentions to harm someone. Now in this case it was a little ambiguous but let this be warning. You cannot go around making fake threats against peoples lives on the Internet and just go along with your life like nothing happened. If you do it, you will be arrested.
The article suggests in no way the facebook gave FBI special access to privileged data (and why would they?), and FBI use Internet scanning software, so it's almost certainly public.
...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.
You forgot the part where you posted a picture of a firearm to go with your rant about bullies. Nice job of cherry picking the parts of story that fit your rant while ignoring the obvious threat. Last I checked it was next to impossible to get a firearm in the UK, so the fact that a kid who was having problems with bullies posted a picture of him with a firearm and POTENTIALLY menancing words warranted a closer investigation.
Put the shoe on the other foot. What if some kid had gone on a rampage and it later came out that the FBI thought he might have been a threat but decided not to share the information? Rather than worrying about someone's rights being trampled (and I'd argue that they weren't given that he posted in a PUBLIC forum visible to the world), we'd be condemning the FBI for not doing more to save the children.
Fuck your red herring, FBI ass-kisser!
That’s not the point!
The point is that a FBI monitoring led to a UK ARREST just because of a “dangerous combination of words”.
So in other words: Add the following string to anything, and he goes to jail, WITHOUT HAVING DONE ANY CRIME AT ALL! :
bomb school hate bastard kill all never again bought explosives
If that is enough for someone to go to jail, then it’s way more than is needed for me, to throw you in jail, just because I did not like your comment!
Now how cool do you think that would be? Hm? Not very much, am I right?
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
"What if some kid had gone on a rampage"
Nobody went on a rampage. From TFA, it was not even clear to me that a real threat had been issued, as opposed to some kid who vented in an unusual way. I also noticed that the type of gun is not mentioned -- maybe it was a handgun, maybe it was an old smoothbore quail hunting gun. All that we can see in TFA is 8 words from the note and some kind of vague mention of bullies.
Maybe the kid was really a threat, but from what I am reading here, it is pretty hard to say. All I see is that the FBI was monitoring Facebook for certain combinations of words that are assumed to be a threat, and that because such a combination happened to be found along with a photo of a gun, a teenager was arrested. Maybe I have seen to many cases where American police officers exaggerate threats and demonize teenagers, and maybe such things do not happen in the UK, but I am skeptical.
Palm trees and 8
"the story nonetheless raises significant privacy concerns."
Or, some troll cracked his FB account, posted some shit up and then called the police.
If I was to follow you around everywhere you went in public, saw every item you looked at in a shop, logged everyone you talked to and had someone following them and all their contacts, and so on, I would be able to build up a fairly good profile of who your friends were, your political, religious, and sexual orientation, whether you were cheating on your wife if you have one, and a lot of other personal information which most people would prefer wasn't stored in some government database for whatever purpose they decide this week. If I were working for a private entity, they would be able to guess most of the information a government already has (but which private entities probably don't), such as whether you had children and roughly how much money you have. All that information can be gathered without you saying anything, if you or your friends speak, their tails can gather even more data.
You then get problems because this data never goes away, so if, in one's student days, one were friends with someone who sold drugs or untaxed booze, or had a now-embarrassing political affiliation, that wouldn't go away, and worse than that, if too many one's current friends had slightly questionable pasts which they were keeping quiet about now, that would potentially tar one with the same brush. (And if you think that's purely hypothetical because you are careful about who your friends are and never did anything embarrassing, think of those from smaller cities: in two degrees of separation (a friend of a friend), I can get to both some of the most respectable names in my country's social and political life, and to people who are almost certainly active members of criminal gangs, and that is perfectly normal in this city.)
This isn't practical in the real world yet, but with technology like the Australian centre for Visual Technology's surveillance system which is currently undergoing medium-scale testing which would, with a suitable database to store the gathered data, enable nearly complete tracking of everybody who is within the area of camera coverage, it would be relatively easy to implement.
There is also the problem of missing, garbled, and incomplete data, which will almost certainly lead to false positives, leading to even more perfectly innocent people getting added to no-fly-lists and the like. This isn't just me being paranoid: if they have data, the media will crucify them for not using it every time there is a shooting or terrorist attack.
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.
They could have heard me, but, without cameras and microphones, I know they didn't because I can see there is no-one watching.
100 years ago, if I simply checked there was no person hanging around (fairly easy to do), I would know no-one was listening. Even now, in the real world, if the nearest person is 100m away, he probably can't hear you, and he is very unlikely to be able to, say, lip-read you, so you can talk with a reasonable expectation of privacy. However, if there are hidden microphones scattered all over the place, then it means one cannot speak freely not anywhere except in a private house where you trust the owner, because there is no way you can tell if anyone is listening. Surely you have had conversations in public places where you have checked that no-one is listening: well, with microphones everywhere, this would be effectively impossible (remember, it was originally an analogy, in which the microphones are invisible). In such a scenario, it would also be easy for third parties to claim that, since you have no expectation of privacy, they can record your conversations too.
Last I checked it was next to impossible to get a firearm in the UK,
Really? Admittedly, I haven't tried for a few years - I got a bit bored of shooting - but when I was at school I had the alarm code to the armoury, so I could easily lay my hands on a dozen .22 target rifles, 40 L-98 (cadet assault rifles - SA-80s crippled to need manual cocking) and a pair of LSWs (fully automatic version of the L98 - still only magazine fed, so you needed to change magazine every 30 shots). And that's ignoring the shotguns that most of the farmers near me kept, and the black-powder revolvers (only six shots each, but easy to conceal) that one of my neighbours liked to fire.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News