Facebook: The FBI is Your Friend?
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Just because someone on Facebook is friends with 23 of your friends doesn’t mean any single one of those 23 people has meet that person in real life. Should you add them if they ask to be your friend? Well, if you post updates about your drug dealing, child prawning, gun smuggling, car jacking, identity-frauding tewwowist activities, maybe not. But then again, if you’re that busy you may not have time for Facebook.
According to documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Federation, US Law enforcement have been using social networking sites to gather crime fighting info. Or at least that what’s agents tell their bosses as they cruise the intert00bs for strange.
PC World reports
The following information is listed as being useful evidence that can be gathered from social networking sites:
- Reveal personal communications
- Establish motives and personal relationships
- Provide location information
- Prove and disprove alibis
- Establish crime or criminal enterprise
While Twitter won’t “preserve data without legal process,” Facebook will comply with emergency requests. And there’s nothing stopping agents from giving themselves an identity and beginning to collect friends in order to move towards accessing their target. Agents can’t impersonate you or some other “real” person, but they can become a plausible looking goofball with similar interests and start clicking away, linking to people.
I actually don’t have a huge problem with that because undercover work is part of investigations and if anyone is dumb enough to talk about their crimes on a semi-public forum, well um…gosh. Yeah.
And hopefully agents aren’t just spending time on FB and Twitter looking for trouble, but rather using the social networking sites to further ongoing investigations.
Facebook has privacy settings–use them. And don’t add everyone who asks–especially if you plan on posting a status update about how easy it was to rob that bank in Oxnard.
Hmmm. Interesting. My FB account is recent, and the majority are people from my school days, most of whom I haven’t seen in years. Still, they are recognizable, and although it’s clear out politics, in many cases, differ, I’m not too worried since I avoid controversial postings there (save ‘em for FDL!); I put it up partly because I was being contacted by some old friends, and I’m still looking for new work. So, for that reason, I’m careful what I put up.
I have a Twitter account,which has to be one of the most boring out there; again, I’m careful not to post “controversial” opinions because of the prospective employer possibility. And I have actually gotten a lead on a job thru a Twitter account I follow.
But recently I’ve been notified of two or three people I’ve never heard of suddenly “following” me. In both cases, they have a huge number of people they follow, so they can’t be paying much attention to me. I assume they are looking for commercial uses, too. But your post gives me pause; perhaps I should block some folks who pop up from nowhere like that?