Via MithrandirAgain on Flickr
U.S. law enforcement agencies have since 2008 been obtaining warrants to comb through Facebook accounts without users’ knowledge.
According to a report from Reuters, published after the news agency reviewed the Westlaw legal database, federal judges have granted warrants to search at least two dozen accounts since 2008. The warrants, served for probes ranging from rape, to arson, to terrorism, have demanded and received access to detailed personal data, including “private messages, status updates, links to videos and photographs, calendars of future and past events, Wall Postings and rejected Friend requests,” according to Reuters.
Law enforcement agencies requesting the information include FBI, DEA, and ICE. They typically ask for a subscriber’s “Neoprint” and “Photoprint”–Facebook jargon for packages of information that the social network has compiled on individuals, data that is not even available to users themselves. This data amounts to a file in which detailed profile and photo information are kept.
The Reuters article also describes law enforcement manuals that instruct agencies on how to obtain data from Facebook. The terms Neoprint and Photoprint appeared in these manuals, which have been posted on various public-advocacy websites. According to Reuters, the manuals appear to have been prepared by Facebook, but a spokesman for the company declined to say whether they were authentic.
Since 2011, Facebook has granted access at least 11 times to law enforcement agencies. This is twice as many times as 2010.
Facebook’s Chief Security Officer, Joe Sullivan, wouldn’t tell Reuters how many warrants had been served, but said Facebook tried to abstain from giving law enforcement private information.
In addition, Reuters found that none of the warrants had been challenged to see whether they violated privacy law on the grounds of unlawful search and seizure. This, according to constitutional privacy experts, was likely because users–not to mention their friends on the social network–weren’t alerted when their data was accessed.
By law, the social network is not obliged to alert users when their data is requested. But other sites, like Twitter, have adopted policies of warning users when data is requested. Twitter also successfully fought a gag order through which a judge had demanded data on people implicated in Julian Assange’s Wikileaks trial.
Facebook, on the other hand, did not inform account-holders on several occasions when data was requested. Reuters detailed one 2010 case where four Satanists were arrested and imprisoned for burning down a church. An FBI agent executed a warrant and obtained information from Facebook. It’s unknown whether that information was used in the conviction, but the defendants’ attorneys were unaware that a warrant had been served until Reuters contacted them for the story.
Facebook isn’t the only social network that has relinquished individuals’ private information at the government’s behest. Google issues an annual transparency report that details information requests. In 2010, for example, Google granted access to data on 90 percent of 4,501 government requests.
