From our “sure took them long enough” department: The New York Daily News is reporting that the NYPD has a new “social media unit” to keep watch for chatter of nefarious doings on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.
Using popular networking sites to bust ne’er-do-wells is not exactly new. If you type “Facebook underage drinking sting” into any search engine, you find a lot of results. However, this initiative is focused more on cases like that of Victor Burgos, a fugitive who taunted police via Facebook. This particularly genius malefactor brilliantly posted “catch me if you can. I’m in Brooklyn”, and the police did just that.
Not everything is that amusing, of course. There is talk of the current unrest in London being coordinated via Blackberry Messenger to the point that David Lammy, Member of Parliament for Tottenham, has requested it be shut down for the duration of the riots. Looters have even allegedly been posting pictures of their spoils to Facebook. In cases like that, a “social media unit” might work well.
It can get disquieting, I suppose. Techcitement’s own Matt Algren had this to say about police being proactive through Facebook investigation pertaining to a protest he was a part of against Americans For Truth bringing their Truth Academy to Columbus, Ohio:
When we did the protest in April, we didn’t have to call the police to coordinate anything. They found our facebook event page and called the leaders of the group. It was kind of weird.
The kinda creepy connotations of that one incident aside, please take an important lesson from this: if you don’t want someone to know about an illegal thing you have done or plan to do, you might want to not post it to the bloody internet in the first place.
Or, hypothetically, make a Google Circle called “co-conspirators”. I guess that could work.
Several police services – London Met, Nottingham etc – did manage to bust people for trying to organise riots on Facebook. (They busted four or five, which bewilders me because the last three or four would’ve had to HEAR about the first one and they STILL used their real name and location…)
No actual moves were taken to disable Blackberry Messenger, though the police are looking at the IMs, texts and locations-when-sent of people who they’ve arrested so they can prove intent.