Police Facebook - Rise of the Police state?

Last year saw a new initiative from the local metropolitan police force in Kingston Upon Thames which centres around the popular social networking site "Facebook".

Charged with launching a facebook page, the station is to operate a new public group which then acts as an outreach project to the local community, in the different wards in the borough. Churches and church groups, Universities, students, schools, school teachers, children and parents are all being encouraged to join the group to enrich dialogue and reduce crime, particularly by identifying criminals and potential criminal suspects through their own social networks.

It's an innovative but predictable (some would say inevitable) approach to the idea of a Big Brother society, but it's the kind of activity that has the potential to get to the heart of troublemaking behaviour very quickly, and is proving to be effective for the force as a whole.

Data-mining, public records and intelligence on the ground has made huge leaps in the last few years but critics worry that the increasing amount of surveillance in the UK, which is already the most highly surveilled country in the world is getting 'out of hand' and could lead to the kind of 'Minority Report' thought-police who have the power to arrest and detain someone suspected of being 'about to commit a crime'.

With the advance of psychological profiling one might think that the police would be on the verge of identifying (for example) potential rapists, muggers and thieves through what they reveal about themselves online, and in fact a whole raft of policing initiatives already exist for this purpose, but confront the Kingston police directly about the potential abuse of privacy and they go very quiet, perhaps not surprisingly.

A new era of privacy of the individual has been ushered in under the European Convention on Human Rights, following the Max Mosley case in 2007.

tbc