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big brother can eat my shit!

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Police now patrolling social Web sites
Oct. 3, 2007

MILWAUKEE — Members of the Milwaukee Police Department now have a new beat to find criminals: social Web sites like MySpace and Facebook.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported Tuesday that police officers have begun patrolling the Internet sites where guilty parties sometimes freely admit to committing various crimes without apparent fear of reprisal.

International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators President-elect Lisa Sprague said that by using such Internet sites, police can easily learn valuable information about potentially illegal activities.

“It really does behoove police departments to really be technically proficient on computers, and that includes social networking sites as well, because that’s a very popular way for youth to socialize or to transmit information about parties and protests,” Sprague said.

Research has found that individuals posting on such sites underestimate who will see their posted information and how it could be used against them.

The newspaper said that the social-networking sites have also become valuable tools for police on college campuses, along with becoming hot-spots for potential stalkers as well.

2 thoughts on “big brother can eat my shit!”

  1. and i stole an article from UPI and posted it elsewhere without crediting UPI, which is probably a lot more like what they’re looking for.

    this is one of the reasons why i quit livejournal: if cops are going to start snooping around in “social” web sites, then it’s time to make “social” mean something else. i’ve found that i get almost exactly the same amount of “social” activity from having an aggregator that picks up RSS or atom feeds, as i do from having a livejournal, except that an aggregator picks up feeds from all over the place, whereas livejournal just picks up other livejournal stuff. it’s a lot more difficult for cops to monitor hundreds of thousands of web sites than it is for cops to monitor a few sites like livejournal, myspace and facebook.

    then there’s this “joke” that a friend of mine sent me yesterday:

    WARNING: Do NOT calculate Pi in binary. It is conjectured that this number is normal, meaning that it contains ALL finite bit strings.

    If you compute it, you will be guilty of:

    • Copyright infringement (of all books, all short stories, all newspapers, all magazines, all web sites, all music, all movies, and all software, including the complete Windows source code)
    • Trademark infringement
    • Possession of child pornography
    • Espionage (unauthorized possession of top secret information)
    • Possession of DVD-cracking software
    • Possession of threats to the President
    • Possession of everyone’s SSN, everyone’s credit card numbers, everyone’s PIN numbers, everyone’s unlisted phone numbers, and everyone’s passwords
    • Defaming Islam. Not technically illegal, but you’ll have to go into hiding along with Salman Rushdie
    • Defaming Scientology. Which IS illegal–just ask Keith Henson.

    Also, your computer will contain all of the nastiest known computer viruses. In fact, all of the nastiest POSSIBLE computer viruses.

    Some of the files on my PC are intensely personal, and I for one don’t want you snooping through a copy of them.

    You might get away with computing just a few digits, but why risk it? There’s no telling how far into Pi you can go without finding the secret documents about the JFK assassination, a photograph of your neighbor’s six year old daughter doing the nasty with the family dog, or a complete copy of the not-yet-released Pearl Harbor movie. So just don’t do it.

    The same warning applies to e, the square root of 2, Euler’s constant, Phi, the cosine of any non-zero algebraic number, and the vast majority of all other real numbers.

    There’s a reason why these numbers are always computed and shown in decimal, after all.

    it’s enough to make me curious… 8)

  2. I’d love to know what they consider “potentially illegal activities.” Uh, I littered today.

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