As if disinfonauts really needed reminding, be careful who you “friend” on Facebook or other social media platforms: they might be cops looking to arrest you and your associates, reports the Atlantic:
In 2012, Brooklyn police officer Michael Rodrigues arrested a burglary gang, the Brower Boys, by adding gang members as friends on Facebook. The day of the arrest was like gathering the lowest-hanging fruit. “It’s break-in day on the avenue,” one gang member posted in his status message. Officer Rodrigues and colleagues tracked the gang members to the avenue in question. They photographed the young men committing the crime, and then arrested them.
For the past several years, police and prosecutors across the country have been quietly using social media to track criminal networks. Their methods have become more sophisticated: by combining social media APIs, databases, and network analysis tools, police can keep tabs on gang activity. In New York’s Harlem neighborhood, at-risk teens are identified as members of gangs based on their affiliations and are monitored on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
Teens are profiled using various criteria, including the number of followers. “The average teenager has about 300 friends or followers. These kids have thousands,” says Jeffrey Lane, an urban ethnographer at Rutgers and the author of the forthcoming book The Digital Street. Lane spent five years in Harlem hanging out on the corner with kids and with cops to discover how digital technology is woven into the fabric of community life in the inner city.
The police began using social media almost by accident, he says. One officer discovered over the course of ordinary social media use that he could see the status updates of neighborhood kids. Soon, cops and prosecutors were looking at photos to figure out who might be a witness in a particular case. Bystanders could be identified from the background of photos posted on social media sites. If a kid posted a time-stamped photo of himself standing in front of a door, and the cop recognized the doorway, it could be relevant in an investigation.
Today, police across the country regularly use social media data to keep tabs on citizens. 75 percent of them are self-taught, according to a 2014 Lexis-Nexis research report on social media use in law enforcement. “Facebook has helped me by identifying suspects that were friends or associates of other suspects in a crime and all brought in and interviewed and later convicted of theft and drug offenses,” said one respondent interviewed in the report. “My biggest use for social media has been to locate and identify criminals,” said another. “I have started to utilize it to piece together local drug networks.” Only 9 percent of respondents had received training on using social media in investigations from their agency.
Social media can produce evidence in some cases, but it also fails to capture the complexity of human relationships—and can sometimes distort them. For this reason, it is important to take care that social media data is not misused or misinterpreted in the pursuit of justice…
[continues at the Atlantic]
The post When Cops Check Facebook appeared first on disinformation.