Police Uses Social Media: Is Facebook Working with the Police?
A partnership between police departments and social media could allow law enforcement to stop people from organizing protests
A partnership between police departments and social
media sites discussed at a convention in Philadelphia this week could
allow law enforcement to keep anything deemed criminal off the
Internet—and even stop people from organizing protests.
A high-ranking official from the Chicago Police
Department told attendees at a law enforcement conference on Monday that
his agency has been working with a security chief at Facebook to block
certain users from the site “if it is determined they have posted what
is deemed criminal content,” reports Kenneth Lipp, an independent journalist who attended the lecture.
Lipp reported throughout
the week from the International Association of Chiefs of Police
conference, and now says that a speaker during one of the presentations
suggested that a relationship exists between law enforcement and social
media that that could be considered a form of censorship.
According to Lipp, the unnamed CPD officer said
specifically that his agency was working with Facebook to block users’
by their individual account, IP address or device, such as a cell phone
or computer.
Elsewhere at the conference, Lipp said law enforcement
agencies discussed new social media tools that could be implemented to
aid in crime-fighting, but at the price of potentially costing citizens
their freedom.
“Increasingly in discussion
in workshops held by and for top police executives from throughout the
world (mostly US, Canada and the United Kingdom, with others like
Nigeria among a total of 13,000 representatives of the law enforcement
community in town for the event), and widely available from vendors,
were technologies and department policies that allow agencies to block
content, users and even devices – for example, ‘Geofencing’ software
that allows departments to block service to a specified device when the
device leaves an established virtual geographic perimeter,” Lipp wrote.
“The capability is a basic function of advanced mobile technologies like
smartphones, ‘OnStar’ type features that link drivers through GIS to
central assistance centers, and automated infrastructure and other
hardware including unmanned aerial systems that must ‘sense and
respond.’”
Apple, the maker of the highly popular iPhone, applied
for a patent last year which allows a third-party to compromise a
wireless device and change its functionality, “such as upon the
occurrence of a certain event.”
Bloggers at the website PrivacySOS.org acknowledged
that former federal prosecutor-turned-Facebook security chief Joe
Sullivan was scheduled to speak during the conference at a panel
entitled “Helping Law Enforcement Respond to Mass Gatherings Spurred by
Social Media,” and suggested that agencies could be partnering with tech
companies to keep users of certain services for communicating and
planning protests and other types of demonstrations. A 2011 Bloomberg
report revealed that Creativity Software, a UK based company with
international clients, had sold geofencing programs to law enforcement
in Iran which was then used to track political dissidents. US Senator
Mark Kirk (R-Illinois) told Bloomberg that those companies should be
condemned for being complicit in human rights abuses. And while this
week’s convention in Philadelphia was for law enforcement agencies
around the globe, it wouldn’t be too surprising to see American
companies adopt similar systems.
“Is Facebook really working with the police to create a kill switch to stop activists from using the website to mobilize support for political demonstrations?” the PrivacySOS blog asked. “How would such a switch function? Would Facebook, which reportedly hands over our data to government agencies at no cost, block users from posting on its website simply because the police ask them to? The company has been criticized before for blocking environmentalist and anti-GMO activists from posting, but Facebook said those were mistakes. Let’s hope this is a misunderstanding, too.”
Lipp has since pointed to a recent article
in Governing magazine in which it was reported that the Chicago Police
Department is using “network analysis” tools to identify persons of
interest on social media.
“95.9 percent of law enforcement agencies use social
media, 86.1 percent for investigative purposes,” Lipp quoted from the
head of the social media group for the International Association of
Chiefs of Police.
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