Facebook archival for investigations?

[CZroe]

My job involves getting people arrested. Frequently. Once I know their names I often find incriminating activity posted publicly on Facebook, which is great, as long as they leave it up.

The main problem is that I can only really search what was posted publicly on their wall. Even though I could stumble on other public posts of theirs in local Sale/Trade groups or in comments made to mutual friends, there is no good way to search and go through it systematically using Facebook like a normal user. I'm sure law enforcement has tools like this, but I am trying to find additional evidence for law enforcement in cases that aren't normally investigated that far.

The next problem is when they lawyer-up and take their Facebook page down. If it was ever made public and I obtained it while it was still public then it should be legally admissible, but having some neutral documentation of where it was retrieved from and when it was retrieved and when it was originally posted would be a tremendous benefit.

Are there any tools or guides for using Facebook like this? I understand that this kind of thread is likely to attract spammers so I'd prefer an established member's feedback.

 

[darkswordsman17]

For obvious reasons, no you can't access things like that. Frankly law enforcement shouldn't either without actual warrants (that aren't a total fucking joke and just signed off with effectively no actual oversight). Just think what you're asking and then imagine you ran a website, does it make any sense to offer some way around that without legal force?

You're just going to either have to deal with it, or get into social engineering although I'm not sure what the legal issues on that might be depending on how far you take it. Maybe you can bribe friends of theirs to setup a dummy account that'd get you access?

You can save the website (and if nothing else could do screen capture) and record the date and times. Short of paying a third party to catalog it for you (could you just pay someone else to access it and provide confirmation of details?), I'm not sure what neutral documentation you could get. Does Google crawl Facebook and have previous versions? Wouldn't your own documented proof be enough to get law enforcement to subpoena that information?

 

[Red Squirrel]

You could write some kind of bot script that will crawl the entire profile of someone but once you have the data offline not sure how useful it would be as nothing stops you from tampering with it. The feds probably have an advantage in that they can probably access the back end of Facebook. But not sure about local PDs, probably not.

 

[FallenHero]

<----Law Enforcement

All we use is public profile access, a fake account, and subpoena's. Search warrants really aren't needed for Facebook stuff.

If the feds have access to something better, they certainly arent sharing it with my PD.

 

[88keys]

sorta OT here but law enforcement shouldn't need a warrant to search things that people share on the internet.

The only way that you might be able to keep facebook posts made by users after they have taken there page down is to share the post. This would depend on with their privacy settings are and such and whether shared posts remain after the original was taken down. Don't really know enough about facebook to know whether that would work.



Aside from that any screen shot or saved/archive webpage is something that could be tampered with.

 

[CZroe]

For obvious reasons, no you can't access things like that. Frankly law enforcement shouldn't either without actual warrants (that aren't a total fucking joke and just signed off with effectively no actual oversight). Just think what you're asking and then imagine you ran a website, does it make any sense to offer some way around that without legal force?

You're just going to either have to deal with it, or get into social engineering although I'm not sure what the legal issues on that might be depending on how far you take it. Maybe you can bribe friends of theirs to setup a dummy account that'd get you access?

You can save the website (and if nothing else could do screen capture) and record the date and times. Short of paying a third party to catalog it for you (could you just pay someone else to access it and provide confirmation of details?), I'm not sure what neutral documentation you could get. Does Google crawl Facebook and have previous versions? Wouldn't your own documented proof be enough to get law enforcement to subpoena that information?

When they steal from me and I see my property being publicly offered for sale on Facebook the same day or the day after I have them on video stealing it from me, it isn't illegal for me to point that out to the cops when I discover it. The police always have them on a different incident and aren't going to investigate past incidents for me. Facebook makes it very difficult to search for public posts from a specific user outside of their page even if said post is available to me (public or posted to my friends or groups).

Learn to read. I was not looking for some way to see things that were not visible to me. I am not law enforcement trying to get information that requires a warrant. I am a victim who has found my property stolen and blatantly offered on facebook time and time again. Usually I can only look for it for past crimes after we catch them dead to rights for something else (repeat offenders), but facebook is very active and going back months or years is not easy. I can't even figure out how to search their activity outside of their own wall even where it is visible to me (scrolling back through groups, for example), so it's not even a matter of it being simply tedious or difficult. There's just no search option that I can see that searches for these posts.

For example, I can see any post on the Coweta Yard Sale group or the Newnan For Sale/ Trade or the Coweta/Fayette group because I am a member of all three groups (and many, many others). I can scroll back through thousands of posts from hundreds of other users looking for one from that person and I can see it when I go back far enough, but that's impossible to do systematically (browser can only handle so much) and I can't limit it by searching for only posts from that user (even though I can see posts from that user). Get it? When I finally get a name after an arrest I may need to go back over a year to match up old video of the perp's prior visits to old facebook posts. Why? In the absence of the actual property, the police need proof that the perps had it so I can stick those charges on the perps too. What better proof than their own public posts? I've done it the hard/lucky way many times. I just need a tool that can automate this and expand it to searching groups.

 

[CZroe]

<----Law Enforcement



All we use is public profile access, a fake account, and subpoena's. Search warrants really aren't needed for Facebook stuff.



If the feds have access to something better, they certainly arent sharing it with my PD.

My position can't have any contact with the perps or reveal myself (managers do that), so friending them with a fake account is out of the question. I just have to rely on their public or group posts, which is usually more than enough (they post all over trade groups). Even if they happened to be my next door neighbor, the only way they would ever know is if I get a subpoena to show up in court.

My problem is not one of access to the data. I have access. It's one of finding/processing/parsing through for the data.

 

[CZroe]

sorta OT here but law enforcement shouldn't need a warrant to search things that people share on the internet.

The only way that you might be able to keep facebook posts made by users after they have taken there page down is to share the post. This would depend on with their privacy settings are and such and whether shared posts remain after the original was taken down. Don't really know enough about facebook to know whether that would work.



Aside from that any screen shot or saved/archive webpage is something that could be tampered with.

Thanks, but sharing won't work for a different reason: They can't know who I am or who I work for. It's one of our rules. I direct others during the apprehensions so that they can't claim that it was a personal grudge.

There can be nothing but a coincidental association on facebook (I find that we often have mutual friends, for example). Sharing their post would lead them to my page and employer and alert them that someone is following their old posts right after an arrest. They'd probably delete their profile after the first share before the serious digging was finished.

 

[Red Squirrel]

It's actually amazing how stupid some thieves are, it happens in my city too, they steal stuff then sell it on FB! A couple people got arrested recently for B&Es and some of them were frequent posters in the buy/sell pages. At least make the effort to sell the stuff on another city's page! I have to give it to our local PD they've been busting a lot of crime like this lately which is nice.

There was even a woman in her 50's doing some of these B&E's, seriously, get a life! How immature at that age to do stuff like that.

 

[CZroe]

Just found out that I can search for "posts that Jane Doe uploaded in my groups" to get a nice list I can go through. It would have been nice to find some explanation of how search works, what terminology to use, and what it can do, because I've never been able to get it to work like that before. Heck, none of the guides I can find even mention it. This one just suggests "Sweat" as if tediously digging through results on her wall will somehow magically get results that weren't on her wall.

I still think I should find a way to retrieve, store, and archive my results before they are retracted.