If you’re wondering how law enforcement agencies may use social networks and the Internet to track down people and information on them, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has obtained information from the US Internal Revenue Service and US Department of Justice that may help you understand their policies and methods.

The IRS appears to be more constrained in its methods. It reminds its employees they cannot sign agreements on behalf of the IRS, including membership agreements for websites. It also tells them they cannot use fake identities. I’d doubt that this is being respected by all IRS agents, but it does appear to be their stated policy.

Employees of the US DOJ and other law enforcement agencies, on the other hand, are given more free reign to use fake identities, impersonate, spy, hack, and otherwise probe into data they can find. They can also use misinformation, deception, and “social engineering” to fool others to reveal information. Further, they are often able to gain the cooperation of social networks without due process to reveal information by claiming it is needed for “emergency purposes”.

The ability of government agents to gain access to private information varies widely in part because the policies of each service vary. Some such as Twitter require formal legal process and retain little data on users. Others such as Facebook will readily share information confidential information with law enforcement and retain such data for long periods of times, even if a user thinks he or she deleted the information.

One lesson to learn from this is that if you’re out to share information on government or corporate abuses, using a social network may be a poor way to do it. If government agents can get your private information, corporate hackers and security personnel can probably do it, too.

A safer approach for those of you who would like to be sharing incriminating data on corrupt governments, businesses, and organizations is to use specialized data sharing services such as Wikileaks that allow anonymous uploading and editing of data and do not store IP addresses. If you combine such services with secure encrypted network tunnels such as those available via free software such as TOR (The Onion Router), it becomes very difficult to show who is responsible for posting or accessing data that corrupt and abusive organizations might like to suppress and which might invite reprisals if they can identify who is behind exposing their misconduct.

Further Reading

FBI, Feds collect Facebook, social media data; Why are you surprised?

EFF Posts Documents Detailing Law Enforcement Collection of Data From Social Media Sites

US DOJ Training Program on Use of Social Networks for Criminal Investigations

IRS Training Course from 2009 on Using Internet Searches to Find Taxpayers and Income

Facebook Doesn’t Remove Deleted Pictures and Videos