Is the FBI Your Friend on Facebook?
9:07 am | Attention Deficit Democracy | FBI | Surveillance | wool
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has released internal federal documents detailing how FBI agents are creating false or deceptive profiles online to gather more personal information on Americans.
From the Associated Press story:
U.S. law enforcement agents are following the rest of the Internet world into popular social-networking services, going undercover with false online profiles to communicate with suspects and gather private information, according to an internal Justice Department document that offers a tantalizing glimpse of issues related to privacy and crime-fighting.
… More details here
hat tip to Tom Blanton’s Project for a New American Revolution
TrackBack
http://jimbovard.com/blog/2010/03/17/is-the-fbi-your-friend-on-facebook/trackback/
Comments
RSS feed for comments on this post
Dirk W. Sabin
Comment on Wednesday 17th March 2010 @ 10:49 am
Inasmuch as I’ve refused to join “Facebook” until they have a variant entitled “Assbook”, if it ever does come to pass, we have a fail-safe identifier of the malign snoopers. Government Apparatchiks always reveal their identity in any arse photograph because their heads are impacted front and center.
Jim
Comment on Wednesday 17th March 2010 @ 11:11 am
“Assbook”? Hmmmm…. I suspect that that would prove very popular with some segments of the populace.
Tom Blanton
Comment on Wednesday 17th March 2010 @ 10:11 pm
I’ve also refused to join this Facebook thing myself. I’d be more tempted to join a Get-Out-Of-My-Face Book type of site.
Anyway, EFF has a page about this social network monitoring stuff and they say they will be posting more documents there if anyone wants to follow this issue.
http://www.eff.org/foia/social-network-monitoring
IT Policy | Audit | Investigate Cyber Crime
Trackback on Friday 19th March 2010 @ 10:43 am
Deception | Impersonation by Online Investigators…
Computer Crime | Admission of Evidence Law enforcement officials, including tax auditors and probation officers, are monitoring social networks like Twitter and Foursquare for information about criminals and deadbeats. AP , “For federal fugitive, Face…
Marc
Comment on Friday 19th March 2010 @ 10:09 pm
“None of the agencies had completed processing the requests in the applicable 20-day deadline.” Wouldn’t it be nice if we could treat the census and our tax returns in the same manner?
alpowolf
Comment on Saturday 20th March 2010 @ 5:28 pm
Christ on a crutch, can’t we have ANYTHING without these wankers getting their ass-scratchers into it? Can’t they leave me alone for five damn minutes?
Jim
Comment on Saturday 20th March 2010 @ 6:29 pm
Tom - thanks for the EFF link. They do great stuff.
Jim
Comment on Saturday 20th March 2010 @ 6:30 pm
Marc - the federal Freedom of Information Act is not really a law…. I have had many experiences with FOIA - a few agencies have acted honorably and diligently - but many others….
Jim
Comment on Saturday 20th March 2010 @ 6:31 pm
Alpowolf - the FBI has hired lots of new analysts, so they need to generate new arrests and reports on suspects to justify the staffing level.
I would be curious to know what the FBI agents on Facebook have already done to manufacture criminals…..
Leave a Comment
Basic HTML Tags are allowed. Comments are subject to moderation