Here's What Facebook Sends the Cops In Response To a Subpoena 153
An anonymous reader writes "Facebook already shares its Law Enforcement Guidelines publicly, but we've never actually seen the data Menlo Park sends over to the cops when it gets a formal subpoena for your profile information. Now we know. This appears to be the first time we get to see what a Facebook account report looks like. The document was released by the The Boston Phoenix as part of a lengthy feature titled 'Hunting the Craigslist Killer,' which describes how an online investigation helped officials track down Philip Markoff. The man committed suicide, which meant the police didn't care if the Facebook document was published elsewhere, after robbing two women and murdering a third."
Feel bad for his girlfriend (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Feel bad for his girlfriend (Score:5, Interesting)
Or really anyone he befriended on facebook.
The girlfriend might have been basically screwed on the deal no matter what, since as his girlfriend some of her information might have been out there anyway.
It does seem like the article in question is very perturbed by the way the police released the info though, and didn't sanitize everything, leaving reporters to do it, who may not have realized that people can be linked via their unique facebook id's in the URL string etc. I suppose that's a good argument for an addendum to the facebook legal document pile, that if you release this information, the following other information should be redacted so as to not endanger the privacy of people not covered by the existing request.
Re:Feel bad for his girlfriend (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Feel bad for his girlfriend (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Feel bad for his girlfriend (Score:5, Interesting)
Not if your friend essentially releases that information (by committing crimes, then committing suicide). You've got to chose your friends well - even your Facebook friends.
I've got a screenshot of Clayton Weatherston's Facebook main page. He's a narcissistic economics tutor who stabbed his girlfriend to death and her mother tried to get into the room - on his birthday.
The year afterwards, there were still people wishing him happy birthday, oblivious to the fact that this guy was in police custody awaiting trial for a very well publicised and terrible murder. That's what Facebook friends are like.
There were two med students I knew who still had him friended - they didn't even know how they knew him. They were clueless that their name was associated with one of the most hated people in NZ.
Re: (Score:2)
Look the guy up. I know many here have soft spots for criminals, but this guy is one of the most hated in the country. He admitted doing it, the trial was just about him arguing that he was provoked (which, as a narcissist, he probably believed he was).
Re: (Score:2)
Well, remember, this is the same police department that shut down a city because of Lite-Brites. [wikipedia.org] Like a neanderthal confronted with a wheel, don't expect too much out of them.
Re: (Score:2)
What was irresponsible about it? Neanderthals died out about 25,000 years ago, and no evidence suggests usage of wheels before 12,000 years ago. Presumably, they would be very perplexed.
The last thing they would care about (Score:2)
Re:The last thing they would care about (Score:4, Insightful)
Allegedly. Innocent until proven guilty.
Re: (Score:1)
Re:The last thing they would care about (Score:5, Insightful)
Allegedly. Innocent until proven guilty.
If you're not a lawyer, a judge, or a juror, you have no obligation to maintain an artificial neutrality with regards to someone's guilt or innocence.
Innocent in the eyes of the law != innocent.
Re:The last thing they would care about (Score:5, Insightful)
Very true. I wish people would stop believing that a court's decision is always correct. People escape conviction all the time.
Re:The last thing they would care about (Score:5, Insightful)
That is true, but popular opinion is unlikely to be more correct than the courts, since they don't even have all the information available to them.
If a man is found innocent in court but is treated as guilty by society, then what's the point of even having a trial?
Re:The last thing they would care about (Score:4, Informative)
Very true. I wish people would stop believing that a court's decision is always correct. People escape conviction all the time.
And vice versa unfortunately.
The poor are more likely to get convicted and serve jail time as they can't afford the expensive 'good' lawyers and must rely on the overworked, under-budgeted public defenders.
Re: (Score:2)
Depending on the color of your skin it could also be the opposite.
Re:The last thing they would care about (Score:4, Insightful)
The bigger problem is convicting the innocent. It is very rare for people who commit serious crimes to get off. It is much more common for the wrong person to be convicted.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
It is very rare for people who commit serious [emphasis mine] crimes to get off.
That's because they are rarely (if ever) charged.
Wish I had mod points (Score:2)
Perfectly said.
Re: (Score:3)
Presumption of Innocense == Reason (Score:2)
If you're not a lawyer, a judge, or a juror, you have no obligation to maintain an artificial neutrality with regards to someone's guilt or innocence.
If you believe in reason, then you have an obligation to not believe random things until being shown proof without holes. Doesn't matter if it's a journal article on nuclear chemistry or an accusation of a crime. Show us the proof, don't bullshit us if the data is inconclusive.
Re:The last thing they would care about (Score:5, Informative)
In normal circumstances, it is wise to proceed with caution before accusing somebody and generally the evidence isn't presented to be viewed by the general public.
However in this case i am confident that the identification by one of the women robbed, the dead girls blood on his clothing the shell casings left at the murder scene that matched the gun found in his apartment along with the disposable phones he used for contacting the women ...
The evidence is solid enough to be sure that he did in fact commit the crimes he was accused of. Plus there is no chance of being sued for deformation what with the guy having committed suicide while awaiting trial.
There were a few interesting points made, while he used disposable phones to contact the women he also had his regular phone with him which tied him to the same cells used by the disposable phones at the same times which was useful in identifying him as a suspect. He also made the email account he used to contact the girl he murdered from his home ip address.
The police nearly made a mess of things when they brought him in as after interviewing him there wasn't enough evidence to charge him, but luckily while he was in custody being questioned one of the women who was robbed identified him with absolute certainty which enabled the police to search his apartment and find the physical evidence. Without her identification of him they almost certainly would have had to let him go and give him the opportunity of disposing of the physical evidence.
The facebook stuff is interesting in that it shows what information facebook holds about someone even after that information has been "deleted". However in this case nothing facebook released gave any evidence towards the criminal case.
The guy was a medical student so it is reasonable to assume he was highly intelligent, he also seems to have had a gambling problem.
His choice of who to rob was probably made on the basis he thought that the services these women offered was likely to mean they would have money from earlier clients and less likely to report a robbery. The article also mentioned he had a collection of women's underwear under his mattress so maybe it was more than just getting money to pay his debts.
Did he rob other women who didn't report the crime?
Re: (Score:3)
>>Plus there is no chance of being sued for deformation
Oh, thank goodness!
Re: (Score:2)
What history book did you get that statement from?
Re: (Score:3)
The idea of the "lesser of two evils" is kinda odd considering that the big two are essentially on the same payrolls. It's like buying a crappy product from one salesperson rather than the other one from the same company selling the same product and thinking it somehow improves the quality of the product.
Duverger's Law (Score:3)
Parent is AC troll.
For those who think he might have a point, look up Duverger's law. We have a two party system due to the math of our election system, not because we fail to exercise free will. It's math, not principle that is at issue.
Re: (Score:2)
Direct link (Score:5, Informative)
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/105727/fb-subpoena-db/index.html
Unclear antecedents are dangerous! (Score:5, Funny)
"The man committed suicide, which meant the police didn't care if the Facebook document was published elsewhere, after robbing two women and murdering a third."
Indeed, if the cops are going around robbing and murdering, why should any of us worry about a Facebook profile?
Re:Unclear antecedents are dangerous! (Score:5, Funny)
No, clearly it was the Facebook document that robbed two women and murdered a third.
Re: (Score:3)
Oh God, I didn't think of that angle. That's even more terrifying. WHO WILL STOP THE KILLER FACEBOOK PAGES?!?
Re: (Score:2)
WHO WILL STOP THE KILLER FACEBOOK PAGES?!?
Nancy Grace to the rescue once again!
-------- SNIP --------
Please note: the following text is inserted to defeat the "lameness filter," which apparently got triggered even though I'm simply verbatim quoting the text from the parent post.
Capicola ball tip shankle boudin. Salami short ribs ground round shankle leberkas frankfurter. Fatback ball tip pig pork chop. Boudin flank t-bone, pork loin biltong leberkas chuck ham frankfurter. Cow bresaola spare ribs prosciutto. Leberkas drumstick sirloin, chuck turkey
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Indeed, if the cops are going around robbing and murdering, why should any of us worry about a Facebook profile?
Let's hope they aren't tagged in hundreds of photos; that would mean hundreds of pages in the report. Captain Planet and the Planeteers would not be happy.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1, Funny)
Posting anon as to not erase the moderation done here.
Comma's are used to set off parenthetical elements.
Wherea's apostrophe's are used to warn reader's of an impending 's' at the end of the word.
Re: (Score:2)
There's a reason that English isn't used as a programming language.
And what is that reason? IANANES, but it seems to me that GP's interpretation of the sentence is the only correct one.
What does slashdot provide... (Score:5, Interesting)
to a formal subpoena?
Re: (Score:3)
Slashdot has very little to provide beyond public comments that the account holder wrote. There is probably only the email address that isn't public, and preferences (which don't have much value.)
The IP address may be logged, but I doubt that all the millions of HTTP requests per day are logged for more than a day, even if that. Slashdot has no duty to keep logs, and it costs money to do so, and it creates a legal obligation to make those logs available. Why to have them then?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
A cop with a stick up his ass?
Re: (Score:2)
I suddenly noticed we need a lot more goatse-links.
(btw, I find it highly disturbing that my spell checker doesn't mark "goatse")
Re: (Score:2)
maybe you added it to your user dictionary.
Re: (Score:2)
Makes you wonder what you'd be in for if the cops asked you to look at a photo lineup.
"So, do you recognize the Anonymous Coward that made off with your karma points in any of this pictures?"
Re:What does slashdot provide... (Score:4, Funny)
What does slashdot provide...
1x Bag of Hot-Grits
1x stained 1979 signed photo of Natalie Portman
2x pairs of Cmdr Tacos underpants (slightly soiled but usable)
2x bags of Pickled Onion Chips (crushed)
1x Copy of Linux for n00bz (2nd edition)
1x Pony (pink natch)
1x ????
1x PROFIT !!
Re: (Score:2)
Now that would really be something.
It looks like this: (Score:1)
. ,
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe just the stains?
And no, I think you do not want to know what the stains are. For God's love, don't hand it to the CSI, you just do not want to know.
Re: (Score:2)
In criminal cases, it has no choice - they're not issued by lawyers anyway, they're issued by district judges.
And frankly, if they're investigating a murder or other such criminal behaviour I would expect even Slashdot to assist law enforcement with properly formed discovery requests.
Anti-establishment nutbag.
Re: (Score:2)
If signed by a lawyer and thus made official and subject to due process, I'd be highly surprised, or even a bit disturbed, if they didn't.
If they just get some kind of toilet paper from a shyster, then yes.
Private Messages (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:1)
They were requested. I'd expect some kind of response from Facebook even in the very unlikely event that he didn't have any. My guess is the reporters omitted them or never received them from the police.
Re:Private Messages (Score:5, Interesting)
Is this the same data people get when the request a DVD (under EU laws)? Because if it is, then I'm having a hard time imagining what the problem is... It's basically everything the user has posted on the site + their IP address/last login.
Were people really surprised that the stuff they stored on Facebook was stored on Facebook?
Re: (Score:3)
It doesn't include everything about the user, so it would be an incomplete record under EU law.
Which is in itself interesting :)
Re: (Score:2)
Is it incomplete? It has their entire profile... so what do you think is missing?
Re: (Score:2)
It lacks configuration settings, at the very minimum. That tlels me it's not complete, without necessarily knowing what else is missing.
Re: (Score:2)
Is it incomplete? It has their entire profile... so what do you think is missing?
the entire profile is just the entire information the person has entered. under eu data laws you should be able to get all the data they're keeping on you - that means data they have generated from your behavior too, the data they use to decide which ads to show you etc.
account (Score:2)
Re:account (Score:5, Informative)
If you read the Boston Phoenix article, it was actually the IP address he used to sign up for his throwaway hotmail account, followed by the street address associated with that from Comcast that identified him. Then they did further field work to establish that it was him, and not a neighbour or passer-by who had hacked into his wifi network. The Facebook profile in this case didn't produce any useful information.
Re: (Score:2)
This really seems useless to me, and a waste of resources. The only thing this may be useful for is people who have their profiles set to be viewed by friends only. I guess it could be useful if you are trying to track someone who is on the run by monitoring IP addresses, and for the really dumb criminal, their check-ins, but a savory criminal would just need to use some VPN service or something else to mask their IP address. I mean, seriously, that seems to be the only bit of useful information in here at
Re: (Score:2)
Well IP addresses aren't always useful. If you connect to the Internet using a cellphone, the cellphone is allocated an IP address typically in the 10/8 range and connects to the internet via a NAT connection. There are more cellphones in the world than routeable IP addresses. Then all the IP address logged by the website would tell you is which network they used and approximately which county they were in, or for a larger city, which district or group of districts.
Facebook profiles do sometimes produce u
Re: (Score:2)
Except my cell phone includes the model of the phone and the android version in it's User Agent string. There are probably other identifying things that it sends.
Re: (Score:2)
God save them if they ever get mine. I use facebook to host almost all my photos. Including ones I scanned in of family from back through the '50s. I'd say I have 10k+ photos distributed among various albums
Re: (Score:2)
Same here. I want to know how they are going to "print" my videos! I probably have 5k - 10k photos myself, and over 100 videos, and I have been on FB since 2004. I just downloaded my profile a couple of months ago, and it was about 4 gig
He worked for facebook? (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Makes you wonder (Score:1)
Re:Makes you wonder (Score:4, Insightful)
Same info but without the redactions.
Re: (Score:2)
They don't. Facebook works as a "black box" for advertisers. The advertisers specify what kind of profile they want their ad to appear in. Facebook then puts the ad on said profiles, without giving any information back to to the advertiser.
Interesting... (Score:1)
Based on the documents, it looks like Facebook even was able to provide deleted wall posts and friends.
Facebook Logging a good thing? (Score:2)
So do you think our old-media friends will ever point out when a Facebook or other tracking/logging program proves someone wasn't committing a crime because he was at home at the time of the incident?
Re: (Score:2)
Are you saying this guy was framed?
Why can't people on this site realise that there are burglars, muggers, rapists and murderers in this world - they're not all framed by the cops and courts. Nearly all of them did the crime.
Re: (Score:2)
Are you saying this guy was framed?
No, he wasn't. Why would you jump to that conclusion?
Re: (Score:2)
Are you that AC? How do you know what he was saying?
Re: (Score:2)
It's that "nearly" that bothers me a bit.
less verbose than I thought (Score:4, Interesting)
Nothing in TFA should surprise anyone that has any experience in enterprise IT
Re: (Score:2)
The last few pages appear to be a log of every FB page he viewed. The search history you can grab for yourself from those logs. Requests for /search.php are searches (e.g. on 2009-02-17 19:31:10 shows a search for an individual named tom, and then a minute later for someone named kainlin, both followed by viewing of those individuals' profiles).
Evil (Score:1)
This is a gross violation of privacy. The material was clearly only disclosed in connection with a criminal investigation and at least on Facebook's part, clearly marked confidential and not for release. Then a public agency releases it! Dead or not, the entire family has been smeared by this release, apparently including dead ones. This is a violation of something and if it is not in itself criminal, it should be. However I think it is.
JJ
From the Wall: (Score:3)
Friends/family:
"How's Boston going for you? How's Bean Town?"
Phil M:
"Well, I've got a rheumatology exam, and I pulled a black 9mm Luger pistol, not far inside the door. Began to bind her hands with white plastic flexcuffs, but before I could complete this, she fought back. In our subsequent struggle I hit her in the skull with my gun, causing injuries I'd describe as serious but not fatal. I then shot her three times. One bullet lodged in her hip, while two bullets went straight through her, piercing her heart and lung. It's also quite cold here at the moment."
Friends/family:
"Really? I heard that it sometimes rains in Boston? I got an oncology exam coming up myself."
Phil M:
"Lol, sometimes. About 55 here I think."
Re: (Score:2)
No password? (Score:2)
Or maybe they actually hash the passwords like they should.
Re: (Score:2)
Following the large number of very public password disclosures in the past couple of years, failure to hash passwords (salted by username, user ID and/or random nonce) should be considered gross negligence.
Are there any proposals to standardize a password column type for SQL databases? If the column is write-only but comparable for equality against a varchar/string then the implementation details of hash algo and salting are hidden. The sad thing is that proper password storage could be made a lot more i
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Or maybe they actually hash the passwords like they should.
You're suggesting Facebook did something to protect user privacy?
Re: (Score:2)
I'm damn sure they do. Think about it, if any Joe Random Hacker could get that info, what would they have left to sell?
In a nutshell, I'm sure they want to make sure their assets are protected.
Facebook should allow me to use the site this way! (Score:3, Funny)
The one thing that struck me is how much easier it is to navigate that profile in their subpoena response than it would if I was looking at it when using Facebook through a browser. They should really consider adding a "Subpoena view" view on their website, kind of like a "Print view", but even better yet!
Are they certain? (Score:3)
The man committed suicide, which meant the police didn't care if the Facebook document was published elsewhere, after robbing two women and murdering a third.
I don't know about this case. But there have been those who were falsely accused. And now the real perp. gets a look at what the cops know (and don't know). So he's got a chance to move the other bodies.
Re:Buttholes! Buttholes! Buttholes! Levodopa! (Score:5, Funny)
This is the best argument for browsing at -1 that I have ever seen. Even though it looks like it's machine-generated nonsense, it's still one of the best comments ever made on Slashdot.
Re:Buttholes! Buttholes! Buttholes! Levodopa! (Score:5, Funny)
This is the best argument for browsing at -1 that I have ever seen. Even though it looks like it's machine-generated nonsense, it's still one of the best comments ever made on Slashdot.
I wholly agree. It reminds me of Vogon poetry. Butthole is used throughout, quite successfully, as a lubricant for the deep prose sprinkled about. Without it, I believe it would make much less sense. While the statement that "God is a dog's anus farting loudly" was quite provocative as a commentary on the meaning of life, it derailed rather quickly with the nonsequiter introduction of a catfish arriving at noon of all times....
Not the work of a true Vogon master, but I sense much potential.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Buttholes! Buttholes! Buttholes! Levodopa! (Score:5, Funny)
Redundant? (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Hmmm, interesting to puzzle out the references:
Samarkand [unesco.org] is a city in Uzbekistan.
Levodopa [wikipedia.org] is a psychiatric drug
Corinth [wikipedia.org] city in Greece.
His previous postings [slashdot.org] are not quite as good, and this gem [slashdot.org] sheds some light on his... condition...
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
50 years from now, we're gonna find that Chinese and Russian agents have secretly been passing messages in seemingly nonsense posts on Slashdot.
Taking bets. My guess is this one is about a Russian sub off the coast of Beijing.
[Decrypted] (Score:2)
Yes. Ivan reports a malfunctioning urinal and is requesting repair parts.