SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Facebook Warns Memphis Police: No More Fake "Bob Smith" Accounts:
Facebook has a problem: an infestation of undercover cops. Despite the social platform's explicit rules that the use of fake profiles by anyone—police included—is a violation of terms of service, the issue proliferates. While the scope is difficult to measure, EFF has identified scores of agencies who maintain policies that explicitly flout these rules.
Hopefully—and perhaps this is overly optimistic—this is about to change, with a new warning Facebook has sent to the Memphis Police Department. The company has also updated its law enforcement guidelines to highlight the prohibition on fake accounts.
This summer, the criminal justice news outlet The Appeal reported on an alarming detail revealed in a civil rights lawsuit filed by the ACLU of Tennessee against the Memphis Police Department. The lawsuit uncovered evidence that the police used what they referred to as a "Bob Smith" account to befriend and gather intelligence on activists. Following the report, EFF contacted Facebook, which deactivated that account. Facebook has since identified and deactivated six other fake accounts managed by Memphis police that were previously unknown.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Friday September 28 2018, @02:34PM
I'm not real sure about that. Remember those Muslims in Syracuse? Pretty much everyone who knew them agreed that the bunch of them didn't have the brains to build a bomb, lacked the savvy to come up with any kind of meaningful target, and probably couldn't even find their way to a target if they had one. I watched the documentary, with a healthy skepticism, but really, those guys weren't smart enough to pour piss out of their boots, if the instructions were written on the bottom. But, the FBI made headlines with their big terrorist bust.
What you're calling a honeypot should be deemed entrapment. If the cop has the drugs, and he's apparently selling them, he has broken a number of laws, including solicitation. But, cops never get charged for all the illegal crap they do.
Honeypot or entrapment, either way, it's a tool of a police state. I don't have much liking for police states.