The Surveillance Dimensions of the Use of Article Social Media by UK Police Forces Elena M. Egawhary Columbia University, USA
[email protected] Abstract This paper explores the various surveillance practices involved in the use of social media for communication and investigation purposes by UK police forces. In doing so, it analyses internal policy documents and official guidance obtained through freedom of information (FOI) requests sent to 46 police forces in the United Kingdom. This analysis finds that UK police forces advise their staff to simultaneously engage in both surveillance and counter-surveillance strategies in their use of social media as a policing tool. Introduction The use of social media by UK police forces falls into two broad categories: communication (or engagement) and investigation (or operational use). UK police forces began registering corporate accounts on Twitter and Facebook for communication purposes for the first time in 2008. However, UK police forces’ use of the internet for investigative purposes dates back to April 2001 with the creation of the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU) to “investigate attacks on the Critical National Infrastructure; major internet based offences of paedophilia, fraud or extortion; information from seized electronic media and gather intelligence on cybercrime and cybercriminals” (Corbitt 2001: 29). Prior to 2001, most of the responsibility for using social networking sites to investigate crime fell to a small number of digital evidence recovery officers who were “swamped and learning on the job” (Thomas 2005) resulting in a reportedly “huge workload” (Goodwin 2005). This suggests that the use of social media in UK policing began in an unstructured way and “on the basis of initiatives by individual officers and subsequently with varying degrees of official support” (Crump 2011: 1).