IDEA 20090306 Social Media Crime Fighting

With the electronic on-line automation of so much of our lives, there comes some downsides with identity theft, surveillance, blackhat hackers, and rogue government agencies who snoop on our digital selves. It is time we take some level of crime fighting on ourselves by exposing those who might exploit our newfound connectivity. The goal of Social Media Crime Fighting is to utilize all web-based tools to spread news about break-ins, recorded footage of incidents, and to generally alert our neighbors about problems.

This comes on the heals of a personal incident that happened in San Francisco SoMA neighborhood where I currently live when an incident happened at 5:26 PM after a car left the building's garage. A plain looking white kid entered the closing garage, and found an unlocked car and stole some gym cards, an iPod and some other small items. He also stole a bike and took this all through the front door of the building!

The building security cameras luckily recorded all of this onto DVDs. On our building's group mailing list, we have been discussing what to do with this imagery. What are we allowed to do within the confines of the law? Are there privacy rights which we might violate in trying to effect some type of strategy against future theft? Can we print out an image of this thief and post it around the premises? Can we make our own wanted posters, as a type of scarecrow strategy to keep others out?

This is the type of Social Media Crime Fighting that we need now to address problems. We need a website or sites, as well as other tools which allow normal people to band together and fight crime locally and legally. As we can make recommendations and up other people's karma points, we should also be able to post up crimes to encourage collaborative problem solving and discovery of the perpetrators. The same with somem site like America's most wanted, or the FBI's most wanted list.

In the modern era of computers, the Internet and social networking, shouldn't we be able to help solve crimes? I personally find this quite interesting, but possibly dangerous.

Another incident comes from Greg Grossmeier's blog (http://blog.grossmeier.net/2009/03/07/the-wonders-of-the-cc-irc-channel) about the Creative Commons chat channel:

12:03 Irssi: Starting query in Freenode with oera 12:03 hello, i’m here for buy credit card number, can you help me? 12:03 < greg-g> email tips@fbi.gov they can help you 12:05 ok thank but are you try this email? 12:06 < greg-g> they can help you 12:13 they can help me for going to jails ? 12:13 < oera!i=oera@eta91-1-82-234-203-250.fbx.proxad.net ["Leaving"]

Thus, I've proposed one type of project which might help in this struggle:

Yes, totally! Lets create one! I'm totally interested in this! We can have some security pool onto a mailing list...what should we call it? Can have a slew of fwd'ing emails to a mailing list, where we can decide how to handle that type of thing...but, probably easier to automate it. I'm very interested in this new type of social media crime fighting. I just started a wiki page on it...