Cops Walking the MySpace Beat

theodp writes "Meet the point-and-click police. Newsweek reports that a growing number of ordinary officers are working a new beat, turning to MySpace to collect clues and crack offline cases. Most of the nabbed wrongdoers have been victims of their own hubris, like the two boys who uploaded video of themselves firebombing an abandoned airplane hangar earlier this month."

This is common...

[spangineer]

This has been going on for awhile, but primarily on Facebook to my knowledge. According to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], Facebook has been used in numerous investigations, including one last year at my university to catch students who rushed the field. Students had set up groups saying that they had rushed the field, and the police matched pictures from security cameras to student pictures. At least several of them were kicked out of school. Needless to say, this caused quite a scene on campus, but really, what do you expect when you put the information online yourself?

Re:Disappointment..

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure this is the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5i3AFt9qEb8&search= firebomb [youtube.com]

dumb crooks are online too

[wadiwood]

http://dumbcrooks.com/ [dumbcrooks.com]

You don't have to fork out for the book if you don't want to.

And I got the ref from
http://www.darwinawards.com/ [darwinawards.com]

But people who get a darwin award are unlikely to blog about it.

Re:YRO?

[Agent Green]

It's easy why this is in YRO:

"You have the RIGHT to remain silent."

The best part is that you don't even need to be under arrest. You just need to learn when to shut up.

Re:You get back what you put out.

[Anonymous Coward]

take your fat sig and put it in the signature field, so people who dont want to see your spam dont have to.

asshole. Welcome to my foe list.

Re:Forget Future Employers

[patternjuggler]

1)Don't do anything wrong

But there's no way to know what will be considered 'wrong' in the future, which was one of the main points of the parent post. Some future American cultural revolution may decide that some perfectly acceptable activity right now is actually everything that's wrong with the country, so let's go detain/summarily-execute everyone we have logs of doing it...

Re:Disappointment..

[TheCarp]

heh just because it isn't modded funny, doesn't mean it wasn't a joke.

Shit, I think I have been modded up to +5 informative on a joke before.

If slashdot has taught me anything, its that all you have to do to impress people is sit down and write bullshit. It doesn't just fool high school english teachers anymore.

(what? I passed the essay quiz? I didn't even read the book!)

but yah, it was a joke son, yer supposed to laugh.

-Steve