Department of Justice Sued For Social Network Surveillance

Law enforcement is watching you

In the same week that Facebook sets up a Safety Advisory Board and streamlines privacy settings, privacy watchdogs, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a lawsuit against the Department of Justice, the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, Central Intelligence Agency, Department of Treasury and Office of the Director of National Intelligence for cloaking their use of social networking sites, notably Twitter and Facebook for investigating citizens for civil and criminal matters. After more than a dozen requests by EFF under the Freedom of Information Act (asking the agencies what methods they were using and what data they were accessing and collecting on people) were ignored, they finally filed suit.

The EFF wants to know the protocol for surveillance, especially legal rules for creating false identities to trick social network users into friending them to give them access to their private profile information (such as happened to UW students when cops set up a profile as a hot chick, friended students then when they found pictures of underage drinking, gave students citations).

My personal belief (and you may differ) is that in the Administration (that is in place in part because of their promise to be “transparent”) should disclose as closely as telephone monitoring the methods used to comb social networks should be . Despite the good that comes out of sleuthing (learning about gang activities, following breadcrumbs of fraud at a large company or even reading a murder suspect’s private messages on Twitter), the methodology should be no secret.

Here are some examples of what the government has been up to:

Here is the good and bad based on EFF’s research…

• Law enforcement requested GPS location information from Sprint Nextel over 8 million times from 09/2008 to 10/2009.
• The FBI researched Aaron Swartz, computer programmer and activist’s Facebook and LinkedIn profiles (via Wired Magazine, October 5th).
• The FBI searched the Elliot Madison’s house because of Twitter messages he sent during the G-20 summit notifying protesters of poliec movements (via New York Times, October 5th).
• New York City law enforcement uses Twitter to monitor the city’s gang activity (via New York Daily News, November 29th).

We’re all users of social networks, so what’s the real issue here– that Big Brother is watching or that Big Brother is hiding that they’re watching? Is social networking the same as telephone communications and should it or should it not be protected the same way. With issues of privacy coming to a head, do we use social networking with the understanding that everything is public and is it the case that law enforcement should use it to protect us or is their secret surveillance over the line?