Tracking Sopo through his public “friends” list, the prosecutor found his address and had Mexican authorities arrest him. Instead of sipping pina coladas, Sopo is awaiting extradition to the U.S.Sopo learned the hard way of Dell C1295 battery : The Feds are on Facebook. And MySpace , LinkedIn and Twitter, too.
Law enforcement agents are following the rest of the Internet world into popular social-networking services, even going undercover with false online profiles to communicate with suspects and gather private information of Apple A1175 battery , according to an internal Justice Department document that surfaced in a lawsuit.
The document shows that U.S. agents are logging on surreptitiously to exchange messages with suspects, identify a target’s friends or relatives and browse private information such as postings, personal photographs and video clips.The Electronic Frontier Foundation , a San Francisco-based civil liberties group , obtained the 33-page document when it sued the Justice Department and five other agencies in federal court.
A decade ago, agents kept watch over AOL and MSN chat rooms to nab sexual predators. But those text-only chat services are old-school compared with today’s social media , which contain a potential treasure trove of evidence for Apple A1008 battery .”If agents violate terms of service, is that ‘otherwise illegal activity’?” the document asks. It doesn’t provide an answer.
The document, part of a presentation given in August by cybercrime officials, describes the value of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn and other services to investigators. It does not describe in detail the boundaries for using them.Sopo’s case didn’t require undercover work; his carelessness provided the clues.
But covert investigations on social-networking services are legal and governed by internal rules, according to Justice officials. They would not, however, say what those rules are Apple A1012 battery .The document addresses a social-media bullying case in which U.S. prosecutors charged a Missouri woman with computer fraud for creating a fake MySpace account ¡ª effectively the same activity that undercover agents are doing, although for different purposes.
The woman, Lori Drew, posed as a teen boy and flirted with a 13-year-old neighborhood girl. The girl hanged herself in October 2006, in a St. Louis suburb, after she received a message saying the world would be better without her. Drew was convicted of three misdemeanors for violating MySpace’s rules against creating fake accounts. But last year a judge overturned the verdicts, citing the vagueness of the law.
Facebook’s rules, for example, specify that users “will not provide any false personal information on Facebook, or create an account for anyone other than yourself without permission of Apple A1060 battery , .” Twitter’s rules prohibit users from sending deceptive or false information. MySpace requires that information for accounts be “truthful and accurate.”