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UK Police To Get Facebook Lessons
jhernik writes "The police are to receive training on how to use Facebook and Twitter to catch people committing serious crimes. The National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) will overhaul its training modules to include sessions on the social networking sites for detectives. 'This programme is a vital part of the career pathway for detectives and the new training covers sensitive areas of policing where limited guidance existed previously,' said deputy chief constable Nick Gargan, acting head of the NPIA, in a statement to the Press Association. 'These improvements are exactly what detectives need to tackle the challenges and complexities of modern policing effectively,' he added. 'The changes underline the importance to having a national agency to provide guidance and train detectives to a single high standard so they can work on investigations in any part of the country and give their colleagues and the public the best quality service in fighting crime.'"
Perhaps people will stop posting incriminating evidence, but something tells me those photos of people plastered aren't going away.
Some dumb people have called radio shows and say they robed a bank. So you can want to be able to use that in court and not have the case drooped as the cop did not do things right in getting the evidence.
I think people are getting the wrong end of the stick. This isn't to catch people for petty offences, it'll be used to do things like check alibis, see who people are in contact with "I don't know the bloke!" "But you're a friend on Facebook, sir", etc.
People have been arrested here in the UK for showing guns in their Facebook profiles, stupid things like that. There's even the guy who famously escaped from prison (or while on bail or somesuch) and brazenly posted on Facebook for a good week or two.
Social engineering is a seriously powerful tool, anyone who has done a bit of Facebook stalking should know just how much you can get from someone just by flicking through their profile (even if much of it is stealthed). The only real protection is to have a non-searchable, friends-only profile page and limit what you put on it. That doesn't stop your friends (who have considerably laxer security on their pages) posting pictures of you at a party where someone got stabbed and you claimed to be nowhere near it.
Same with Twitter. People commonly post things like "train is late, as usual" - but the defendant says he was at home in his living room at that time?
So no, getting people for drinking underage (let's be honest, hard to prove given that ages can be faked on there) or smoking week (again, prove it's pot? pretty hard). This is for building up bigger pictures surrounding serious crimes.
Ok, ok. Let me amend my statement.
Funny but it seems that a good portion of those stupid people are either in charge of creating laws or enforcing them.
Ok, yeah, that still doesn't quite get it.
I don't think it's naivete or incompetence but definitely ignorance, greed, or maliciousness.
Consider this: It's naive to think DRM won't negatively affect legitimate purchasers and will stop piracy but it's incompetent to outlaw breaking DRM and malicious to shut down internet connections based on mere accusations of piracy.
And, I will say outright that malicious (or at least sociopathic greed) is at play in Arizona where private prison companies helped draft Senate Bill 1070. Link
Oh, and there's red light cameras, too. Those in charge of enforcing the law shortened the yellow lights which resulted in an increase of rear end accidents and they did just to make a buck.
The law feels (or at least appears) to be written in black&white terms but it's a colorful world. There should be room for discretion and leniency as well as shame and punishment. You might say that that's already a problem as people on the bottom of the financial totem pole get hammered by the law while people on top have their lawyers apologize and they go about their merry ways and I would agree with you. And, frankly, I don't really have a solution short of bringing back 1950's tax rates since those with wealth and power use that wealth and power to influence elections and lawmakers to gain ever more.
Talk about trying hard to keep people from doing any thinking on their own. They can just keep that in mind every time they need to decide how moral it is to bust a college kid for smoking pot and getting his federal aid revoked.