Tag Archives: Twitter

Twitter, Facebook and other forms of social media are transforming how cops and prosecutors do their jobs – and should make you think twice about your digital movements if you ever get in trouble with the law. Four out of five law enforcement officials said they use social media to help solve crimes, according to a new survey by information provider LexisNexis Risk Solutions (a Lawyers.com sister company). The survey found that federal, state and local-level agencies in both small …

Drama, chatter and gossiping between kids at school doesn’t stop when they leave the schoolyard, and it never has. In the Mesozoic era before the Internet, the conversation continued on party lines and during sleepovers. As technology developed, instant message and texting became the media of choice to keep the off-campus conversation going. But that was aimed at a targeted audience and rarely involved, for example, yelling about something for all to hear. Social media has changed everything, moving that …

NEWS UPDATE: See the story and video at Twitter Caves and Hands Over Protester’s Tweets to Avoid Fines. In what’s being called a case of first impression, a judge in Manhattan ruled on July 2 that Twitter must turn over some of the deleted Tweets of a user who was arrested in October 2011 during an Occupy Wall Street demonstration. Prosecutors believe that Malcolm Harris was tweeting about an issue he is trying to use in his defense and that his …

Your parents probably told you never to talk to strangers. Fourteen Brooklyn gang members learned that lesson the hard way—and now they’re facing hard time in prison. New York City Police Officer Michael Rodrigues got a tip that the Brower Boys gang members might be responsible for a year-long rash of burglaries in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood. As the saying goes, you have to think like a criminal to catch a criminal. These criminals included a bunch of 18-year-old boys, …

How private are your posts on Facebook and your tweets on Twitter? If you think the answer depends only on how you configure your privacy or security settings for your accounts, you might be in for a rude awakening – at least if you’re ever involved in a court case. Two recent cases illustrate that if you step into a courthouse – whether intentionally, as a plaintiff in a civil suit, or not so intentionally as a defendant or even …