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FROM THE BLOG: As many people have pointed out, my comic about tweets outrunning seismic waves seems to have been widely verified in yesterday's earthquake: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/earthquake-twitter-users-learned-tremors-226481 It's always nice to see real-life confirmation of your calculations! The quake started in Virginia at 13:51:04 EST, where most of my family lives.

We have been investigating how the government seeks information from social networking sites such as Twitter and how the sites respond to these requests in our ongoing social networking Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, filed with the help of UC Berkeley's Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic. As part of our request to the Department of Justice and other federal agencies, we asked for copies of the guides the sites themselves send out to law enforcement explaining how agents can obtain information about a site's users and what kinds of information are available. The information we got back enabled us to make an unprecedented comparison of these critical documents, as most of the information was not available publicly before now.

Class Website of 91.113.207 Exploring the Internet, Spring 2011, by Beibei Yang

There is as much misinformation as information, and social websites are the perfect supporting tools

The US Department of Justice this week released slides from a presentation deck titled Obtaining and Using Evidence from Social Networking Sites. The document was released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The DoJ presentation describes Facebook as much more co-operative with law enforcement requests for user information than Twitter and MySpace are. Update: Facebook's Barry Schnitt contests this interpretation of the document, says the company is resistant to illegitimate government requests for user information and offers one example of that resistance in a comment posted below. The document also explains to officers what the advantages of going undercover on social networking sites are. The EFF posted IRS training documents for using various internet tools as well, including Google Street View, but those were much tamer than the Justice file.