Social Media a Threat To Undercover Cops

angry tapir writes "Facebook has proven to be one of the biggest dangers in keeping undercover police officers safe, due to applications such as facial recognition and photo tagging, according to an adjunct professor at ANU and Charles Sturt University. Mick Keelty, a former Australian Federal Police commissioner, told the audience at Security 2011 in Sydney that because of the convergence of a number of technologies undercover policing may be 'impossible' in the future."

Comments

Here's an idea.

[ryanmcdonough]

Don't have a public profile and don't go out with friends and have them publicly tag your photos. Just an idea.

Re:Here's an idea.

[Captain Hook]

It's not just about face recognition. If I was in a group which was likely to attracted undercover police attention without the organisation being outright illegal, such as the various environmental groups that the police have been targetting here in the UK.

I would be asking to see the facebook profile of anyone trying to get into the group and if they don't have one or their profile only goes back a few months I would be extremely suspicious.

The police don't just need the ability to stop facial recognition, they need to be allowed to craft entire profiles, with back dated statuses, relationships which can withstand superficial checking etc.

You break the cover of spy by catching the little lies, and facebook gives you a lot of small pieces of information which must all tie to together to avoid suspicion.

Re:Here's an idea.

[Serious Callers Only]

I would be asking to see the facebook profile of anyone trying to get into the group and if they don't have one or their profile only goes back a few months I would be extremely suspicious.

So you'd only recruit idiots who have a Facebook profile - smart move for a clandestine organisation!

Re:Here's an idea.

[delinear]

The point is you don't need to have an account for people to have added your photo, and soon anyone who wants to find out who you are will just be able to create an account, upload your photo and ask it to look for tagged matches and they'll instantly see the photos from the policeman's christmas ball or whatever. Your idea of not matching certain faces is unworkable for one simple reason: I create an account, I upload some guy's face to my wall and tag it, I create another account and upload the same photo as the owner's face. Facebook returns a "no matches found" message. Since I know the photo is there and is identical there's only one reason they'd return that message - you've just created a more reliable method of identifying undercover police that doesn't rely on tagging or matching blurry photos. The law against facial recognition is a nice idea that will never happen for one simple reason, it's potentially more useful to the authorities than the problems it creates.

Re:Take that copper

[drinkypoo]

Most cops are corrupt. Here in Lake County, California we finally got a Sheriff who actually wants to change things. Here is an article on him being cleared of certain wrongdoings. Because our police force is so very corrupt (with ties to meth production and such) he did not inform them of a bust the sheriff's department was conducting. The cops found out anyway and showed up to point guns at them just to fuck up the whole operation, because the bust was against one of their cronies.

Why do I say most cops are corrupt? Because if you're a cop and you cover for a bad cop, you are precisely as bad as he is. You are precisely as responsible for his actions, because it is your job to attempt to prevent and to help bring people to justice for these actions. You are instead a traitor to the American people, and I hope you die of ball cancer.

Mis-Tag, False ID

[retroworks]

You create a fake Facebook profile and mistag-yourself everywhere. You have a police department staff scan photos and mistag you. With a little more effort, Facebook could become the best thing that ever happened for people setting up false identities. But Facebook has to let you mis-tag yourself. I started a Facebook Group "Data Camouflage Anonymous" for the purpose of mis-tagging and mis-identifying photos (to water down the facial recognition database) and within a day found my "tagging" ability turned off by Facebook. http://www.facebook.com/groups/151915044879668/ Facebook should be no more reliable at facial data than they are at birthday records (which are a joke).

Re:Here's a better idea.

[Vintermann]

If you have the apparatus to infiltrate criminal organizations, you have the apparatus to infiltrate political organizations too.

You CAN do a lot to criminal organizations without infiltration. Infiltration has a high cost, in the form of increased paranoia, tribality and possibly brutality in the infiltrated groups. This worsens crime, and lessens defection.

Also, infiltration has a cost in the other direction - what it does to police departments and infiltrators themselves. When the police get used to betraying people's trust as part of their job, they start doing that in other ways, too. Adopting such means really is a slippery slope.