FBI Official Says Bad and Good Guys Make Wide Use of Social Networks
“Criminals, spies and terrorists” are taking advantage of information that users post on social networks, said the acting chief of staff to FBI Director Robert Mueller. Some of them work for “hostile foreign powers,” John Carlin said. Foreign governments probe for vulnerabilities in enemy countries’ IT networks using information from the networks, he told a conference run by law centers at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Gangs of hundreds of criminals with solid businesses sell information on network users in bulk, Carlin said. Sex offenders and traffickers use social networks to meet victims, he said. Mined data are used for attacks on business and school IT systems for “economic espionage,” to steal collected information on people for fraud and to make use of the facilities’ computing power, Carlin said. The FBI and Egyptian authorities worked together in an investigation that produced more than 100 arrests of people accused of taking part in a phishing scheme using social networks whose victims included about 5,000 Americans, Carlin said. And terrorists use social networks to recruit members, raise money and spread their views, he said.
Social networking has “overall been a good thing,” Carlin said. The bureau takes part openly on sharing sites, he said. “The FBI is on Twitter,” Carlin said. “It’s on YouTube.” The tools are used for everything from trying to find fugitives and missing children to putting out threat and scam warnings, he said. But bureau officials aren’t always on top of technology trends, said Jack Bennett, special supervisory agent in the San Francisco office. He recounted a conversation in which an official there asked, “'what’s a Twitter?’ -- that’s not so long ago.”
State and local authorities arrested 70 members of an especially violent gang in Cincinnati, having figured out their relationships through analysis of MySpace postings by members, he said. The arrests reduced violence 40 percent in the group’s neighborhood, Carlin said. He said fugitive Max Sopo was caught in Cancun, Mexico, with the help for a former Department of Justice employee there listed as one of his Facebook friends. Tax evaders claim poverty to the Internal Revenue Service but can be found on sharing sites “bragging about all their wealth and assets,” Carlin said.