Archive for the ‘Social Networks’ Category

School alumni directories verify place of attendance, but so much more. They can launch your search to find where someone works, for example. And you know that’s a challenge with a common name.

The alumni sites are designed for use by alumni, not snoops, so there are usually a few obstacles. Just think as if you are that person and you’ll get through many of these. Often the sites verify past attendance, year of graduation and field of study. The field of study may provide employment cues. In this case, our student’s area of emphasis was “Internet engineering” — so he’s likely working (or in this economy, may someday be working) in the Internet technology area.

Head over to Facebook to advance your resume building. Facebook participants sometimes have more than one profile — maybe a personal one and a work one. In this case, I found the subject’s personal Facebook profile first. He listed a company in the Facebook people search but not on the public portion of his profile page. His “friends” list was private.

Then I searched by name and workplace and discovered his work Facebook profile. He kindly provided a different photo of himself here.

He listed “friends” and interests on the work site. I reviewed his “friends” list and went to their profile pages. Once there, I searched the subject’s name and found that some were friends on his personal site, too.

Maybe those people are more significant than other Facebook friends.

All of these discoveries — friends, interests, education — build the profile and help you tailor your Google searches.

Last week, Terry Towery and I presented, “Using Technology in Investigation, including Social Networking Websites” at the Capital Case Defense Penalty Seminar. I spent a good amount of time talking about finding people on Facebook, even if they have a common name. However, in the discussion on Facebook settings, I cited this misleading statement from Facebook:

Certain categories of information such as your name, profile photo, list of friends and pages you are a fan of, gender, geographic region, and networks you belong to are considered publicly available to everyone, including Facebook-enhanced applications, and therefore do not have privacy settings.

“Publicly available to everyone” and “do not have privacy settings” suggest that you do not have the option to hide your “friends” list. Not true! Since just about everything Facebook is annoying, this setting detail is not out of character. You won’t find it in the complicated privacy settings section.

In the top right corner of your Facebook page you’ll find “Profile” squished between “Home” and “Account”. After selecting “Profile”, scroll to the “Friends” box in the left sidebar. Just above the phrase “See All” is a pencil. Clicking that will open up an edit box, demonstrated in this image.

Uncheck “Show Friend List to everyone”. Now your friends are visible to each other but not to the general public. If you wanted to inform the world that Dashiell Hammett is your friend, you could make an exception by entering his name in the “Always show these friends” box.

Should an investigator or attorney “friend” a prosecution witness in order to find impeachment evidence? Are there legal or ethical bars to surreptitiously gathering data from social network profiles? Should the intent of the user have any bearing on the formulation of law related to access? These and more questions were stirred up in the mix of case studies presented at the (first, annual?) symposium, Social Networks: Friends or Foes? Confronting Online Legal and Ethical Issues in the Age of Social Networking, sponsored by UC Berkeley School of Law. Yeah, a long title but, hey, these folks are academics. And the case studies constituted just the first panel (“Problems Unique to Social Networking and the Law”) of an extraordinary assemblage of academic, government, activist, policy and practicing lawyers rounding out the 5-panel day.

Much of the discussion concerned access to profile content, – the difference between civil and criminal (where there’s the familiar prosecution/defense imbalance) cases – whether certain information should be private even if it can be viewed by unintended parties. For example, should employers be able to view deleted personal information? No one mentioned the issue of whether schools have a legal right to compel students to turn over their user names/passwords (See: “Area School Wants Access To Students’ Social Networking”). There may be instances when a legal requirement for disclosure would apply. Lauren Gelman, Executive Director, Stanford Law, Center for Internet and Society, raised the question of whether evidence in the online sites could be used, say, in divorce cases, to support evidence gathered by other means. The Deputy General Counsel for Facebook took the position that user’s profile content is private, begging the audience to sue the company to settle issues of access. Yeah, the big brother of the moment IS laughing.

Bill Gallagher, a criminal defense attorney, noted that a circumvention of the Facebook corporate roadblock would be to get witnesses to bring to court copies of their social network profiles. But it’s impossible to get a judge to compel a witness to do so. He added that defense attorneys have to get a cooperative prosecutor to issue a subpoena in order to get access to a social network profile. Life is very different for government attorneys and law enforcement…

But this was an environment in which those who might be adversaries outside the ivory walls engaged in friendly disagreements, more in the form of musings than hard-line positions. Perhaps this was, in part, due to the unsettled nature of the law and the do’s, don’ts and can’ts of social networking.

Paul Ohm was on the panel, “The Law and Ethics of Covert or Deceptive Data-Gathering”, proposing that some content — photos and status updates — should be sealed from view, treated differently than other types of documentary evidence because it’s transient, akin to a passing comment over the water-cooler. Lauren Gelman inquired whether user profile content was different in kind from other types of memorializing due to the privacy restrictions that the account holder sets. She added that the online content has a long searchable life, which also gives it a unique nature. And who decides what is private? As Paul Ohm rightly pointed out, commercial entities are the holders of that power.

Speakers on the panel, “Regulating Crime in the Cloud: Policing Unlawful Behavior on Social Networks”, discussed release of email, who should interpret the meaning of an online comment or image, weighting the probative value vs. the harm caused. A passing observation by Judge Kurt Kumli, Santa Clara County California Superior Court, caught my attention. (Correct me if I’m wrong!) In a domestic violence matter, a defendant can “follow” the victim on her Facebook site without violating a protective order.

In the spirit of academic engagement (unlike government, that must be dragged, kicking and screaming), all of the conference presentations were recorded and will be available on the website.

In the meantime, take a look at this guide to social networking research that was prepared by the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic in response to a request from the Santa Clara Public Defender: Handbook on Conducting Research on Social-Networking Websites in California.

Cases, news reports, books, law journal articles and opinions are noted in the resources section of the website and the Case Studies are also posted. The mp3 files of all the panels, the audience comments and questions and the Keynote Address (by John Carlin, Chief of Staff and Senior Counsel to the Director of the F.B.I.) should be available this week.

UPDATE (10/30/09): The mp3 audio files are at the conference site.

Read Donna Seyle’s conference review, The Legal Dilemmas of Social Networking, Part 1

A review from the non-profit sector is here.

Social networking sites continue to refine their people finder tools — and some unintended ones are being exploited by savvy investigators. Linkedin, MySpace, Facebook all have internal search engines to find their member webpages. Linkedin and MySpace have multiple search engines, returning different results. (I demonstrate this in my presentation, Social Networking Sites: Investigating People On the Internet). Conducting the same search from a major search engine will block some sites set by the user to “private” but will return links to private profiles on public sites. The Internet has not been tamed.

Okay, on to Plaxo and their fairly recently introduced “Advanced People Search”. Here’s where an Internet researcher can gather intelligence on people within and outside of their contacts. Again, people review your privacy settings, the memory of which tends to fade over time!

At the advanced people search screen select “People” and enter a name. A list of users tells you whether you are connected to them. Select a name to see their profile, the public portion of their page and the connections they’ve established with other site users. You can also search people by school, company or job title and forward results to your email. Try your own name for a surprise.

I’m writing a longer version of this post for the FMS Research newsletter.

Facebook profiles — “info” and “wall” pages — are often viewable to others in the same network, providing historical and real-time intelligence for your investigations. All this can be done passively without a special request to “friend” them. I have a link (named, Adversary’s Social Network Profile – Admissible in Court) on my social bookmarking site to an article that discusses the admissibility in court of webpages and content from social network profiles.

Admissibility also concerns public records, publicly available personal information and violations of privacy. There are legal and ethical issues that arise in methods of information gathering. Some techniques may be acceptable in an investigation to gather background or investigate fraud that should not be used in litigation. That said, there are ways to passively view content that takes advantage of technical glitches in applications and of a users privacy settings. One of the people I follow on Twitter (see my sites at twitter.com/PIbuzz and twitter.com/ThompsonPI) is twitter.com/BrettTrout. He provides a Google query to obtain private notes that Facebook participants have added to their sites. I have a link to this at my Twitter pages. If you want to search for notes on a particular user’s profile, just insert her name in the search bar as part of your query.