Social Media and Law Enforcement
Just me, e. ELyssaD™: Social Media and Law Enforcement: Who Gets What Data and When? | Electronic Frontier FoundationWe have been investigating how the government seeks information from social networking sites such as Twitter and how the sites respond to these requests in our ongoing social networking Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, filed with the help of UC Berkeley's Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic. As part of our request to the Department of Justice and other federal agencies, we asked for copies of the guides the sites themselves send out to law enforcement explaining how agents can obtain information about a site's users and what kinds of information are available. The information we got back enabled us to make an unprecedented comparison of these critical documents, as most of the information was not available publicly before now.
We received copies of guides from 13 companies, including Facebook, MySpace, AOL, eBay, Ning, Tagged, Craigslist and others, and for some of the companies we received several versions of the guide. We have combed through the data in these guides and, with the Samuelson Clinic's help, organized it into a comprehensive spreadsheet (in .xls and .pdf) that compares how the companies handle requests for user information such as contact information, photos, IP logs, friend networks, buying history, and private messages. And although we didn't receive a copy of Twitter's law enforcement guide, Twitter publishes some relevant information on its site, so we have included that in our spreadsheet for comparison.
Elyssa D. D. Durant
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