OH Noes! The Feds are on Facebook!

Privacy wonks are in a tither because of a powerpoint presentation floating around showing Department of Justice agents how to mine information from peoples’ Facebook, Twitter and MySpace pages. Peoples’ buddies lists are private, so are their photos and videos they cry! Stupid liberal, if you post it on Facebook, it is no longer private if the public can see it. The Feds are allowed to use public information too!

From the AP here:

Maxi Sopo was having so much fun “living in paradise” in Mexico that he posted about it on Facebook so all his friends could follow his adventures. Others were watching, too: A federal prosecutor in Seattle, where Sopo was wanted on bank fraud charges.

Tracking Sopo through his public “friends” list, the prosecutor found his address and had Mexican authorities arrest him. Instead of sipping pina coladas, Sopo is awaiting extradition to the U.S.

Sopo learned the hard way: The Feds are on Facebook. And MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter, too.

Law enforcement agents are following the rest of the Internet world into popular social-networking services, even going undercover with false online profiles to communicate with suspects and gather private information, according to an internal Justice Department document that surfaced in a lawsuit.

The document shows that U.S. agents are logging on surreptitiously to exchange messages with suspects, identify a target’s friends or relatives and browse private information such as postings, personal photographs and video clips.

If you post stuff on the Internet in a public forum, that data is no longer private. And if the data resides on a server which you don’t own, it is no longer your data either. You want to keep your data private? Keep it on your own home PC in an encrypted format.