cybercrime

The Internet and the criminal behaviour it transforms (cybercrime) pose considerable challenges for order maintenance and law enforcement because Internet-related offending takes place within a global context while crime tends to be nationally defined. Policing cyber-crime is made all the more complex by the very nature of policing and security being networked and nodal and also because within this framework the public police play only a small part in the policing of the Internet.

Over the last few years, consumers, corporations and governments have rushed to move their data to “the cloud,” adopting web-based applications and storage solutions provided by companies that include Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. Cloud computing services provide consumers with vast amounts of cheap, redundant storage and allow them to instantly access their data from a web-connected computer anywhere in the world. Unfortunately the shift to cloud computing needlessly exposes users to privacy invasion and fraud by hackers.

This Article seeks to bring attention to the problem of Facebook privacy and rectify it. It examines Facebook‘s architecture, reveals the ways in which government agencies have investigated crimes on social networking sites, and analyzes how courts have interpreted the Fourth Amendment and the ECPA.