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Criminals who can't resist bragging online are a boon to police and prosecutors across the country. In one 2008 case, Ronnie Tienda Jr. was convicted of a gang-related murder in Texas based largely on incriminating words and photos he had posted publicly on his MySpace pages.

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We leave small clues about our lives all over the Internet like fingerprints.

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Leveraging Facebook is just one of many ways law enforcement officials are gleaning evidence from social media to help them solve crimes.

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Police look at what information is public and sometimes create fake online identities to befriend suspects and view their private information. Authorities also can request private data directly
from social networks with subpoenas or warrants, or make an emergency request for user information if they think there's an imminent threat of danger.

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Gathering public data

One pioneer in this emerging area is the city of Cincinnati, where police dismantled a local street gang and arrested 71 people in 2008 following a large nine-month investigation that used social media to identify key members. Collaborating with the University of Cincinnati's Institute of Crime Science, the police created databases of information scraped from social networks, existing police records and phone records, then used software to analyze the data and establish links between suspects.

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Police arrested a New York man on murder charges after seeing incriminating Facebook posts.

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For police, however, keeping up with new technology will continue to be a challenge. According to Gerard, crime is still down in the Cincinnati neighborhood where his department dismantled a street gang four years ago, but police are seeing more gangs use social media and the Internet to expand their reach beyond traditional areas. "They're reaching out across the city and working in conjunction with other gangs. They working together much better than before," Gerard said. "We have to learn from their example."

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A typical example of social-media evidence in court has been a black-and-white photocopy of a printout of a screenshot taken of a profile page. Private companies such as X1 Discovery help law enforcement and prosecutors capture metadata and follow a  a chain of custody so their cases have a better chance of holding up in court.

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Catching up with modern technology
Despite the widespread adoption of social media, the courts and police are still playing a game of technological catch-up. Only 10% of the law enforcement officials surveyed by LexisNexis said they had received formal training on how to use social media for investigations.

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Debating the Fourth Amendment
In the case of Colon, the alleged gang member, his attorneys claimed his Facebook posts were protected under the Fourth Amendment, which shields people's homes and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures. But a federal judge disagreed, saying Colon forfeited any expectation of privacy when he shared online postings with friends. In other words, the online world is just like the offline world in many respects: Your friends can inform on you to police, and detectives can go undercover to catch you in the act. Users don't have Fourth Amendment protection rights when they store information with a third party, such as a website, legal experts said. But Fakhoury and civil-liberties groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation want to challenge the idea that people have no right to privacy for information stored online, especially when it comes to location data. (Even when a post or photo doesn't include public location information, the social network can track its location by seeing the IP address from which it was shared.) The Electronic Frontier Foundation also would like to see more social networks stand up for their users when law enforcement requests information. The foundation is trying to educate the public about how information can be viewed and obtained. "People post without realizing the consequences, and any change to preserve privacy has to start with greater awareness by users," Fakhoury said.

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In early August, an anonymous Twitter user posted a string of tweets threatening to open fire at a New York theater hosting former boxer Mike Tyson's one-man Broadway show. "I got 600 people on my hit list and that's gonna be a mass murder for real," read one tweet. Detectives submitted an official emergency request to Twitter to identify the user. But Twitter rejected the request, saying it did not fall under its parameters for "when it appears that a threat is present, specific and immediate."
The police then got a subpoena from the district attorney's office, forcing Twitter to comply with the request and turn over the information.

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While they are not legally required to comply with these requests, many companies, including Facebook and MySpace, have 24-hour hotlines to handle emergency issues. Facebook says its hotline is staffed by a team of paralegals and lawyers who screen every request. Law enforcement officers must fill out a form explaining the emergency and what information is needed. "It's a really high standard for an emergency situation like that. It can't be a situation where an hour or two doesn't matter," Facebook's Sullivan said. There are no publicly available statistics on how many emergency requests Facebook complies with or turns down.

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In case of an emergency
If there's an emergency such as a credible threat of violence, authorities can try to gain immediate access to someone's social-network data by filing an emergency request.

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"Twitter users own their Tweets. They have a right to fight invalid government requests, and we continue to stand with them in that fight," Twitter's litigation lead, Benjamin Lee, tweeted Monday.

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Some "public" information takes a bit of maneuvering to find. Someone can have their Facebook settings as private as possible, but their friends or relatives might not be as savvy, allowing police to collect information by looking at what a suspect posts on their friends' public pages. Drug dealers have been known to post innocuous public updtes that include location information so clients -- and unwittingly, law enaforcement -- know where to find them, police said.

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As with most police departments, Cincinnati's social-media efforts began small, with a few officers checking online profiles on their downtime. Then police teamed up with the university and received training from social-media experts.

"A 22-year-old girl, who knew more about Facebook than Mark Zuckerberg did, taught us how to mine Facebook for info," said Capt. Daniel Gerard, who works at the department. As they soon discovered, criminals were using social networks to blab about the crimes they were plotting, set up drug deals, brag about wrongdoings and even upload incriminating videos.

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Twitter has been the most resistant to turn over user information. The company made headlines this year when it refused to turn over a suspected Occupy Wall Street protester's tweets and location information to the Manhattan district attorney when subpoenaed. The legal battle is still ongoing.

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Some social-media companies attempt to notify users when their information has been requested, while other companies might fight requests in court.

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When police suspected a Minnesota man, Darrin Anderson, of using a fake Facebook page to talk to underage girls in 2006, detectives had to obtain a search warrant for the profile. Facebook turned over 2½ years of data associated with the then 31-year-old's profile, including more than 800 chat conversations, primarily with girls under 18. The Facebook profile was used as evidence in court, and Anderson pleaded guilty to traveling with the intent to engage in illicit sexual conduct and was sentenced last year to 12 years in prison.

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Each social network has established a policy for how it turns over data when requested. Most require a subpoena or a warrant, depending on the type of details being requested and how long it has been hosted on the site.

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The LexisNexis survey found most law enforcement officials have no qualms about creating fake profiles for investigations, with 83% saying they thought it was ethical.

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"It just undermines the integrity of our whole service if we allow people to use false accounts," said Joe Sullivan, Facebook's chief security officer, in an interview with CNN last month. Creating a fake profile is against Facebook's terms of service, even for law enforcement. Sullivan said there is no context in which Facebook allows fake identities, and that it has a "large commitment" to finding and disabling false accounts.

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While these fake accounts may violate a social network's rules, they are not illegal. And evidence collected in this way can still hold up in court. "In other, nondigital circumstances, these types of practices have been upheld," said Hanni Fakhoury, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet civil-liberties organization, in an email. "For example, the police oftentimes pose as young girls to capture people for soliciting a minor to engage in sexual activities. Or they pose as a potential drug buyer in order to arrest individuals on drug crimes."

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Going undercover on Facebook

A more controversial approach to getting information from social networks is going undercover online -- creating fake profiles to befriend suspects. "We do have some covert accounts for targeted enforcements," said Cincinnati's Gerard. Facebook, where almost 9% of accounts are believed to be fakes or duplicates, frowns on this practice, however.

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Police even have been using Facebook as a way to help victims identify suspects.

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threats to communities. More and more police departments, in their commitment to protect and serve, are finding that social media can be an invaluable tool in their investigations.

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Social media use has transformed the world, changing both personal lives and professional lives. For law enforcement, Facebook in particular is revealing threats to communities. More and more police departments, in their commitment to protect and serve, are finding that social media can be an invaluable tool in their investigations.

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Social media use has transformed the world, changing both personal lives and professional lives. For law enforcement, Facebook in particular is revealing threats to communities. More and more police departments, in their commitment to protect and serve, are finding that social media can be an invaluable tool in their investigations.