FBI Monitoring Social Networking Sites to Fight Crime

This might make intuitive sense. After all, criminals are often the most reliable early adopters of new technology. Terrorists, drug dealers, gun runners, and other ne’er-do-wells are constantly looking for new ways to communicate without the government listening in, so it makes sense that social networks might be useful as a tool to this end. There’s only one problem: the FBI is monitoring Facebook to deal with rowdy teenagers.

Apparently, authorities in Philadelphia are concerned with a recent spate of incidents involving “flash mobs” of bored teenagers. Flash mobs, for the unaware, are spontaneous meetups organized on the Internet, designed to create public spectacle. At their best, flash mobs are creative, harmless, and entertaining. This one is a classic (hundreds of people in a subway station breaking out in a choreographed song and dance routine during the morning commute, to everybody’s apparent delight). This is another great one (a bunch of people suddenly freezing in place in Grand Central Station).

Leave it to bored teenagers to take something fun, harmless, and benevolent, and turn it into something pointless, nihilistic, and destructive. Apparently, teenagers in Philadelphia, after seeing some of these videos on the internet (and completely missing the point), decided it would be fun to organize flash mobs of their own. The result? Hundreds of kids meeting in a pre-determined location, with nobody having decided what they were supposed to do there. So they ended up fighting amongst themselves, assaulting pedestrians, and vandalizing property. Basically, their version of a flash mob is more like a riot.

City authorities in Philadelphia have had enough. They’ve decided to start monitoring sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter to see what those “no-good kids” are up to, and have sought, and secured, the help of the FBI in doing so.

Now, to be perfectly clear, I think that what these teenagers are doing is inexcusable. The utter pointlessness of this violence is particularly disturbing, and perhaps reveals something very unpleasant about the current state of society. Of course, every generation has been saying this about the generation that came before it, so maybe I’m just getting old. Still, government authorities have the right and duty to take every lawful effort to prevent violence against their citizens.

However, this seems like a job much better-suited to local authorities, rather than the FBI. Given that this appears to be a matter of purely local concern, and the FBI (being a federal agency, and all) primarily deals with crimes that transcend state and national borders, there seems to be little reason why the FBI needs to involve itself in this matter.

Furthermore, this raises at least some concerns about government snooping and privacy. Given some recent court rulings concerning online privacy and the government’s right to search emails, I think these concerns are legitimate.

Now, social networking sites are inherently different from email. First of all, they aren’t nearly as essential for communications as email has become, so it could reasonably be argued that a person can simply choose not to use a social networking site if they don’t want to (FarmVille addiction notwithstanding). Furthermore, people who post information and communications on social networking sites are voluntarily making available to a large number of viewers (though not necessarily the general public), meaning that they have much less of a reasonable expectation of privacy.

Still, most social networking sites now give users the ability to control exactly who sees their information (limiting access to friends and family, for example). This seems to create a reasonable expectation that nobody other than the people you have approved will see your information. If the FBI, or any other law enforcement entity circumvents these privacy protections to see what you’re up to, it’s at least arguable that your reasonable expectation of privacy has been breached.

To say the least, the authorities will have to tread lightly on this one. We all want to see this type of destructive behavior curtailed, and maybe this can be accomplished with a few high-profile convictions. After all, most teenagers like to put up a tough façade, but are scared little children on the inside. It would be a shame for charges against some of these kids or their parents to get thrown out on a technicality involving an improper search.

By: Rusty Shackleford