nytimes.com — The government is increasingly monitoring Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites for tax delinquents, copyright infringers and political protesters. A public interest group has filed a lawsuit to learn more about this monitoring, in the hope of starting a national discussion and modifying privacy laws as necessary for the online era.
Dec 13, 2009 View in Crawl 4
Closed AccountDec 14, 2009
<a class="user" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Awareness_Office" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Awareness ...</a>
ageofmasteryDec 14, 2009
I'm not sure what all the fuss is. Don't want the cops knowing that you're selling crack, don't brag about it on Facebook. Same with posting pictures of your brand new boat when you owe a few thousand in taxes.By posting them and not making sure you set your s**t to private or friends only you're basically making a public statement and its not unethical for the police to read it. The same goes for political protesters. If you put it up there for the world to see then then the government reading it is no infringement of your rights.
Closed AccountDec 14, 2009
Well that's why this is a free market society, if Facebook is suspected of doing immoral transactions, then you a) develop a service that would not do such a thing, or b) join a service that hasn't been accused of such. c) don't use these kind of services at all.I personally do c.
blankmanDec 14, 2009
suspicious of what? It's not illegal to protest. I don't know the details of the raid in the article, but that guy has crazy grounds to sue unless there's more to the story.But if the law's gonna just slop around the internet on witch hunts, at least don't make it easy for them
rmxzDec 14, 2009
Who puts real information into facebook anyway? Even apart from the big-brother angle, the main thing it does is encourages facebook to sell your data to advertisers/spammers.
derangedpenguinDec 14, 2009
This is completed expected of the Democrats while they are in power. Yes Bush authorized the surveillance of phone conversations originating from terrorist states. But under the Clinton Administration we had the government program of monitoring corporate E-mails to look for signs that someone might be leaking trade secrets, I suspect in all actuality they were looking for corporate tax cheats. With the spending / borrowing rate of the current administration breaking all records, they know they need to siphon off every last penny from tax payers just to keep things somewhat solvent.
tinybirdDec 15, 2009
this was inevitable. why would big brutha bother trying to make personal files on almost every citizen, when we will happily do it ourselves. everything from extremely mundane status updates, to who knows who, and pics of it all to boot. the most intricate and complex database of people ever. it should always be assumed that EVERYTHING YOU EVER DO on the internet IS stored on some huge database. everything. always.