Police use social networking sites
“We don’t have to go door-knocking because people put their whole life online,” say investigating officers.
FRENCH police are using social networking websites to find information about people suspected of crimes.
“Why bother building up more and more police files when these days people just lay out their whole life on the internet, without thinking that this information becomes digitally indelible,” said one police intelligence officer.
Facebook, MySpace, Bebo or the French site Copains d’Avant (for finding old school, university or work friends) are among the sites the police are said to use.
“Before, we had to go and knock on neighbours’ doors to get information about the kind of people a suspect mixed with, now we know what they’re like just by clicking on a mouse,” one officer said.
The revelations in Le Figaro come after plans to create a police database listing details on sexual orientation, political affiliation and religious beliefs caused uproar among politicians and human rights campaigners.
The Edvige database was eventually put on hold. Opposition Socialist MPs are demanding more information about its successor.
To get information not made public, such as a user’s private profile or their IP address – which makes it possible to find out where they are – the police have to apply for a judicial order to the host of the site.
The STRJD, a special branch of the gendarmerie at Rosny-sous-Bois (to the east of Paris) makes regular use of the sites in such cases as disappearance of children, incitation to suicide or racial hatred, defamation, drug dealing and child abuse or child pornography.
The leader of the service, Colonel Emmanuel Bartier, said: “We are not logged on constantly – just according to our needs – we need a motive like a crime, a denunciation or a suspicion.”
However the STRJD say they are aware that information on the internet should not be taken at face value – due to false profiles and identity theft.
Fake profiles set up to discredit a person are not currently illegal at present because the internet was not taken into account when the relevant laws were passed.
It is planned this gap will be plugged with a new law.
