Social Media and Law Enforcement: Who Gets What Data and When?

Jan 30

As the U.S. Government Subpoenaed Foreign Leader’s Twitter History as Part of their WikiLeaks Investigation this article at EFF.org seems very insightful and relevant.

This month, we were reminded how important it is that social media companies do what they can to protect the sensitive data they hold from the prying eyes of the government. As many news outlets have reported, the US Department of Justice recently obtained a court order for records from Twitter on several of its users related to the WikiLeaks disclosures. Instead of just turning over this information, Twitter “beta-tested a spine” and notified its users of the court order, thus giving them the opportunity to challenge it in court.

We have been investigating how the government seeks information from social networking sites such as Twitter and how the sites respond to these requests in our ongoing social networking Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, filed with the help of UC Berkeley’s Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic. As part of our request to the Department of Justice and other federal agencies, we asked for copies of the guides the sites themselves send out to law enforcement explaining how agents can obtain information about a site’s users and what kinds of information are available. The information we got back enabled us to make an unprecedented comparison of these critical documents, as most of the information was not available publicly before now.

We received copies of guides from 13 companies, including Facebook, MySpace, AOL, eBay, Ning, Tagged, Craigslist and others, and for some of the companies we received several versions of the guide. We have combed through the data in these guides and, with the Samuelson Clinic’s help, organized it into a comprehensive spreadsheet (in .xls and .pdf) that compares how the companies handle requests for user information such as contact information, photos, IP logs, friend networks, buying history, and private messages. And although we didn’t receive a copy of Twitter’s law enforcement guide, Twitter publishes some relevant information on its site, so we have included that in our spreadsheet for comparison.

The guides we received, which were dated between 2005 and 2010, show that social networking sites have struggled to develop consistent, straightforward policies to govern how and when they will provide private user information to law enforcement agencies. The guides also show how those policies (and how the companies present their policies to law enforcement) have evolved over time.

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