The book 1984, George Orwell's dystopia tale of Big Brother, has in recent years become a reference for the growing level of surveillance and loss of privacy to fight crime. The internet is being used as a data mining tool by law enforcement to gather intelligence and prosecute people with information obtained without warrants or court orders. The data gathered could be innocuous ramblings of a teen, or manufactured in order to lay blame upon someone else. Individuals could be charged falsely with crimes without any physical data, merely ones and zeros in cyberspace.
By Harold Gray
JustGetThere | Google news UK has announced an application for social networking site Facebook, that allows users to submit intelligence about crimes as well as keeping them up to date with news stories that are crime related. The application GMP Updates, also known as “The Greater Manchester Police Updates,” gives you a feed of crime updates and links to a form for reporting crimes. Assistant Chief Constable Rob Taylor said: "Greater Manchester Police is proud to be the first force in the country to use this new technology and it demonstrates our commitment to exploring all avenues available to us to help fight and detect crime." This seemingly sublime tool to catch criminals will allow law enforcement to have even more access to personal user data without consent. It will also foster a new level of digital snitching and sabotage, that can be used to implicate someone fraudulently.
Pre-Crime and the Evolution of Law Enforcement.
Over the past few years there have been several cases of law enforcement using Facebook and Myspace, to prosecute criminal cases. In these instances it seems that police would browse profiles as users, to gather information after a crime was reported. Cops would usual initiate profile searches based on tips, or the circumstances of the case. Being a developer will enable expanded access to user profiles by default, due to the terms and conditions these social networks subscribe to. In essence, the application will enable the cops to view whatever the user can, public or private. It also gives them the ability to see anything the users friends or other networking members are doing. This means that users who install this application will unknowingly allow law enforcement to view their friends information, even if they have not installed GMP Updates. Typically, in order to gather information on an suspect who has allegedly committed a crime, you need probable cause, specify the item to be retrieved and location to be searched. Once this has been sufficiently achieved, a warrant would be granted from a judge in accordance to the 4th Amendment. The police would then be able to gather intelligence legally. With this new emergence of social networking applications, even past content posted could be gathered by third-party providers and used without the consent or knowledge of the user.
Facebook allows application providers access to just about all profile information, as described in the “Platform Application Terms of Use“: “Platform Application Terms of Use“:
In order to allow you to use and participate in Platform Applications created by Developers (”Developer Applications”), Facebook may from time to time provide Developers access to the following information (collectively, the “Facebook Site Information”):
(i) any information provided by you and visible to you on the Facebook Site, excluding any of your Contact Information, and
(ii) the user ID associated with your Facebook Site profile.
Facebook provides some examples of what this means. Like:
The Facebook Site Information may include, without limitation, the following information, to the extent visible on the Facebook Site: your name, your profile picture, your gender, your birthday, your hometown location (city/state/country), your current location (city/state/country), your political view, your activities, your interests, your musical preferences, television shows in which you are interested, movies in which you are interested, books in which you are interested, your favorite quotes, the text of your “About Me” section, your relationship status, your dating interests, your relationship interests, your summer plans, your Facebook user network affiliations, your education history, your work history, your course information, copies of photos in your Facebook Site photo albums, metadata associated with your Facebook Site photo albums (e.g., time of upload, album name, comments on your photos, etc.), the total number of messages sent and/or received by you, the total number of unread messages in your Facebook in-box, the total number of “pokes” you have sent and/or received, the total number of wall posts on your Wall™, a list of user IDs mapped to your Facebook friends, your social timeline, and events associated with your Facebook profile.
These terms allow the application access to your data, even if you’ve marked it as not viewable by the police in your regional network or school. The viewing power of third party providers, even trumps users efforts to restrict their photos only to their "friends list". A snapshot of the defaults of these applications is below.
Sabotage, Snitching and Surveillance
It is a known fact that the practice of COINTELPRO against peaceful activists is still happening today. Black-ops agents are being contracted privately to infiltrate peaceful activist groups in order to gather intelligence or to sabotage well meaning activists in order to discredit the movement. An agent could create a bogus profile that's connected to a particular group, and use it to tie the group to his manufactured criminal actions. The saboteur could also take over a users profile and create false entries that would lead authorities astray as well. Without physical evidence or probable cause to complement the digital data, criminals could take advantage of the system by overzealous cops. There are several websites that have codes for tracking visitor IP's on Myspace accounts. Using this hack, users would be informed who was viewing their profile and the geographic location of the IP. With this knowledge, a true criminal could plant false information at opportune times to confuse whoever is tracking them. Having this foreknowledge, saboteurs could plan intentional actions that could be meant to fool or provoke law enforcement. In these cases, law enforcement unknowingly would be helping perpetuate a fraud against someone else.
This new emergence of anonymously providing police tips at a click of a mouse is another example of a snitch culture being created by government. The ultimate power in a surveillance society is for people to police each other. This theme permeates all levels of our society from adolescence to adults, and leads to a state of mass paranoia. Snitching and surveillance in the 21's century could turn into another form of entertainment for a society that has been raised on "Americas Most Wanted", "Jerry Springer" and "Big Brother." The consequences are far more severe than any passing humiliation or thrill from reporting someone to authorities for kicks. Our most personal information is now being fed directly into a massive system of interlocking computer databases maintained by government agencies, law enforcement officials, for-profit businesses and private intelligence networks. Our medical, psychiatric, banking, credit, school, employment, housing, automobile, TV viewing, computer use and gun ownership records are all stored in several networks by people we have never met.
The future Semantic Web, will add even more ease to classify, correlate and combine data from multiple sources into a single compatible format. The cats out the bag and the technological advancements in cyberspace is unstoppable. This means the public needs to be aware of these privacy concerns and take steps accordingly to minimize the level of info divulged within the public realm. Choosing to use these huge corporate run social networks like Myspace and Facebook, could lead to violations in personal privacy. This will lead to new independent social networks that will value the privacy of the users within the community. People will begin to choose websites who eliminate and condone data mining practices and cooperation with the efforts of pre-crime without warrants or court orders. A more beneficial use of this technology would be for citizens to monitor government officials connections through lobbyists, campaign contributers and financial investments in defense contractors for example. Why can't we sign up for alerts when government is spending our hard earned tax money on a $7 hammer that ballooned to a price of $436, due to poor accounting practices. Total surveillance of our government and officials, could be a beneficial use of this technology. The Constitution affirms that our government is formed by the people and for the people, therefore we should have more visibility in the actions of our representatives in DC instead of our neighbor down the street.
