The New York Times has a big story today on online privacy -- or lack thereof. But that's not really the
privacy story of the week that interests me. Yesterday, the AP ran a story detailing how the Feds use Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter
to nab suspects -- sometimes by breaking the terms of service of these sites by pretending to be someone else. The IRS even uses Google Street View to investigate taxpayers, as it turns out.
Better think twice before you claim poverty while actually in the process of putting a huge, new addition on your house.
Turns out this kind of surveillance is huge in Italy, too. The New
York Post has a story today about how Italian authorities nabbed one Pasquale
Manfredi, a proud member of his country's 100 Most Wanted List, by monitoring his Facebook account, where he'd log in using the name "Georgie." The story explained:
"Officers said they believed he received coded orders via the site and also kept in touch with mobsters.
Manfredi had more than 200 friends on his Facebook site and police are going
through them systematically to see if any others are involved in Mafia activity or are wanted."
Jeez, makes you want to think twice about that friend request from the person you're
not sure you know.
None of this is exactly surprising, but it does bring up privacy issues in a different way than the usual debate about whether it's OK to target someone with a baldness
remedy when it's obvious from their profile picture that they are follically challenged. The information about social networking policy within the government was obtained via the Freedom of
Information Act by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has begun to post the documents it has received. (I haven't heard back yet from the EFF on whether they have an official position on
what the documents reveal.)
So far, this includes two presentations, both of which are worth taking a look at: one from the DOJ called "Obtaining and Using Evidence from Social Networking Sites" and another from the IRS of a 2009 training course. Ironically, the DOJ admits to withholding some documents from the EFF, "the
disclosure of which would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy."
If you read through the documents, you'll discover that there is no standard, for any of the
parties concerned, about how far a federal authority can go in using social nets. IRS employees are cautioned against impersonating anyone in their quest to nab people who aren't paying their
taxes; DOJ officials do, on occasion, though there is clear concern about violating a site's terms of service, a worry that was heightened by U.S. v. Drew, the horrible 2008 case in which a woman
named Lori Drew allegedly pretended to be a boy on MySpace, an impersonation that led to the suicide of a young girl who had befriended "him" -- only to be spurned. That case ended with a judge granting an acquittal, and overturning the jury's guilty
verdict. Drew had been charged with a misdemeanor violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The central question: in the name of nabbing the bad guys, should law enforcement be able to create
false accounts on social networks?
Meanwhile, over at the social networks, it's not too clear how to deal with the Feds either. Facebook, according to the DOJ document, "often
cooperates with emergency requests"; MySpace asks for a search warrant for private communication that is more than 181 days old; Twitter has a "stated policy of producing data only in
response to legal process." (LinkedIn's "use for criminal communications appears limited.")
Of course, much information is available without federal authorities ever having
to consider breaking a site's terms of service. Frankly, if you're dumb enough to post pictures of the fur coat you just bought using someone else's credit card, then you are probably also
dumb enough not to give a care to privacy settings; you get what you deserve.
Still, these documents are a window into the privacy issues social networking is increasingly going to confront as
it continues to take over the Internet. Unfortunately, right now, the view inside is way too blurry.