01-06-2014, 02:01 PM
In the criminal law area, one of the first places visited by detectives are the Facebook pages of the individuals involved. It is astounding how foolish people are about publicly posting self-incriminating material, admissions, pictures of the crime, messages from other participants, etc. And most of this stuff is freely available. It is now quite routine for Facebook pages to be printed up by the police and forwarded to the prosecutor's office with the initial arrest report.
The only thing about this process that is troubling, from a law enforcement point of view, is that detectives and investigators don't disclose their affiliations to law enforcement, and occasionally get "friended" under names such as "Flygirl21" or "CoolDude420" (I just made those names up) and get access to "more private" areas of social media under false pretext, which normally would require a subpoena or warrant to access.
The only thing about this process that is troubling, from a law enforcement point of view, is that detectives and investigators don't disclose their affiliations to law enforcement, and occasionally get "friended" under names such as "Flygirl21" or "CoolDude420" (I just made those names up) and get access to "more private" areas of social media under false pretext, which normally would require a subpoena or warrant to access.