[LINK] It's Queensland - (sorry to Qlders)

[Jan Whitaker]

This is crazy. The original reporting was bad. The Police 
announcement was bad. The "arrest" was 'bad'. Anything else?

Facebook 'break-ins': police say receiving photos like taking stolen TVs

  Asher Moses
  May 18, 2011 - 12:35PM

Receiving a photograph obtained from a Facebook account without the 
user's permission is the same as receiving a stolen TV, Queensland 
Police have said after the arrest of a Fairfax journalist.

The head of the Queensland police fraud squad, Brian Hay, admitted 
this morning that police were "still cutting our teeth" in the 
rapidly evolving online environment and named cyber crime as the 
biggest law-enforcement challenge.

He said some aspects of yesterday's arrest of journalist Ben Grubb 
could become a test case, adding: "I expect complaints of this nature 
to continue."
[Was he arrested or wasn't he? Which is it?]

His comments came in a press conference in which he was asked to 
clarify details about the arrest of Grubb, the deputy technology 
editor of Fairfax's news websites.

Officers from the fraud squad arrested Grubb, who was at a Gold Coast 
online security conference, and said they were considering charging 
him with receiving "tainted material", specifically, Facebook photos 
that were taken from the site by a security researcher to demonstrate 
flaws in Facebook's privacy settings.

The case has raised concerns about internet privacy and how 
legislation created years ago applies to current technology.

This incident comes after Queensland Police in 2008 charged a 
61-year-old man with serious child abuse offences over uploading to 
the internet a foreign video of a Russian circus family that showed a 
man swinging a baby by its arms.

The charges carried a maximum 20-year jail term but all charges were 
dropped after Fairfax revealed the offending clip had been classified 
by federal government censors as MA15+.

Detective Superintendent Hay used an analogy to describe why Grubb 
was targeted.

"Someone breaks into your house and they steal a TV and they give 
that TV to you and you know that TV is stolen," he said.

"The reality is the online environment is now an extension of our 
real community and if we go into that environment we have 
responsibilities to behave in a certain way."

He said: "I think the cyber environment represents the greatest 
challenge to law enforcement in the history of policing."

He also confirmed that the police media unit misrepresented the 
situation on its official Twitter feed last night. After Grubb had 
tweeted about his arrest, the media unit tweeted that he had not been 
officially arrested, but it was forced to retract that statement this morning.

"Our bad @bengrubb was arrested for questioning briefly Our tweet 
last night was based on information provided at the time Apologies," 
it said this morning.

Detective Superintendent Hay described it as a breakdown in 
communication but he said there was "no charge pending" against 
Grubb. Grubb was released after just over an hour of questioning.

Detective Superintendent Hay refused to discuss the specifics of the 
Grubb case other than to say police were acting on a complaint about 
"an alleged hacking incident that saw private material being obtained 
unlawfully".

However, Detective Superintendent Hay could not point to any previous 
examples of criminal charges being considered over Facebook photos.

He said "some aspects" of this matter "most certainly could be a test 
case" and said complaints about Facebook privacy being eroded were on 
the increase.

He acknowledged that there would be jurisdictional issues as 
Facebook's servers are located outside Australia.

In this case, the security researcher who originally obtained the 
Facebook photos, Christian Heinrich, has not been charged. He was on 
a flight back to Sydney before Grubb was arrested.

Facebook was asked early yesterday to respond to the privacy failings 
uncovered by the security researcher but has failed to provide any comment.

Detective Superintendent Hay said he had "no idea" about the last 
time Queensland Police arrested a journalist in connection with a 
news story. However, he said "no one is immune" from the law.

"It doesn't happen every week. The reality is journalists and the 
media are our greatest ally in terms of educating the public and 
raising awareness of threats that exist," he said.


This story was found at: 
http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/facebook-breakins-police-say-receiving-photos-like-taking-stolen-tvs-20110518-1esad.html


Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
jwhit at janwhitaker.com
blog: http://janwhitaker.com/jansblog/
business: http://www.janwhitaker.com

Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or 
sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.
~Madeline L'Engle, writer

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