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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."
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."
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,
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
http://echelonspoofer.com/
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
"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.
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
...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
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.
According to this image I saw 5 days before that BBC story.
http://www.photo-pimp.com/dgnr8/lost/drf.jpg
Odd.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/05/31/what_are_those_words/
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
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?
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.
So it's wrong for the FBI, or anyone else for that matter, to look at all the crap you publicly and deliberately post for the whole world to see on a website that is very well known for not giving a crap about anyone's privacy?
The article isn't about the FBI listening in on phone calls. It's not about them peeping into your windows or installing cameras in your car. It's about them looking at the graffiti you spray painted on the outside of your house.
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!
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.
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.