Janet CollinsUndercover Facebook Friends
March 18th 2010 05:44
Relaying everything we are doing minute by minute of every day to all of our friends online has become quite a normal thing to do for the past five or so years. It seems a pretty harmless and meaningless ritual to which many of us have become accustomed but interest in these words, thoughts, photos and whatever else goes up there is growing.
I personally couldn’t think of anything more boring than reading about my trip to the local supermarket or catching the bus to work – not unless something really out of the usual happened on the way. Investigators from the FBI in America however can find some of this information incredibly useful.
An internal Justice Department document obtained recently by a San Francisco civil liberties group revealed that agents were already logging on to social networking sites to befriend people and to research friends, relatives and personal information of people in their sights.
Photos wearing or with expensive goods can also be of interest to these federal agents and tweets or messages about whereabouts can be checked against alibis extracted from suspects.
It is not only the federal agencies that are finding Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn to be pretty good resource for investigating people either. The sites are being infiltrated by state and local police as well who also co-ordinate their findings with federal agencies.
The practice by authorities may be condemned by civil liberties lawyers and groups and applauded by others who see it as a sure way to nail someone who is guilty but it must raise a lot of other issues too.
First of all, any statements made on a social networking site are not necessarily true so could anything put up on these sites really be used against anyone? I would imagine a lot of people on these sites would make up things to disguise where they have been to prevent their partners or spouses from knowing or even to make their lives seem a little more interesting.
Any real smart thief or drug dealer is hardly going to talk about their conquests online either. So chances of catching the real crims by infiltrating some of these sites are pretty slim. In fact, it would probably be pretty easy for someone to join under a false identity and feed the authorites information that could throw them way off course instead.
Nevertheless, everything on these sites is information and some information may be meaningless on its own but pieced together with information elsewhere such as the sites of friends and relatives can tell a very different story, even if a lot of people on there have so many “friends” that they either don’t know or barely know.
Social networking sites have long been of interest to anyone who wants to know what people are doing and thinking. Marketers, lawyers, journalists and internet companies are just some of them. Stories have regularly emerged about employers visiting the sites of their employees to check them out. Some workers have found themselves unemployed because of it.
So it cannot be too much of a surprise that authorities are also using the sites to gather information about people, no matter how mundane it appears on the surface.
I doubt that the practice is limited to the United States either. I would be really surprised if authorities in Australia and elsewhere weren’t doing exactly the same thing.
Sourced: smh.com.au
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Comment by Chris Champion
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Comment by Janet Collins
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You have now been downloaded onto an international register of commentors. Any suggestion that you have been anywhere else but home at the time of this comment will be denied in any court of law anywhere.. So don't make up any stories!
Comment by Wilson Pon
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To be honest, Janet. You're only mentioned the "smart thief or drug dealer". In this case, most of the ordinary peoples like us, who probably have over spoken, including complaining our boss on the facebook's chat (You know what I meant) and caught red-handed by our boss LOL
I personally not a big fan of Facebook, hardly login to this social network and chatting with friend. After all, once we're writing/chatting on Facebook, we've already being spied by others, either with intention or not...
Just my 2 cents opinion.