Social media movements are again being discussed as possible pivotal evidence in a high-profile murder case, this time with a defense lawyer claiming Twitter updates prove his client’s self-defense claim.

18-year-old Shanterrica Madden stands accused of the murder of her 21-year-old college roommate, Tina Stewart. Madden’s lawyer Joe Brandon, Jr., believes that social media activity detailing the ongoing conflict will prove that it’s “undisputed” that the victim “started the fight and it’s just an unfortunate series of events that follows.” Said Brandon:

“It’s one of the first times as a defense lawyer that I have seen it come into play,” said attorney Joe Brandon. “I’m keen on it. This supports fully our defense of self-defense. It’s critical.”

Benjamin Holden is the director of the Reynolds National Center for Courts and Media as well as a professor of media law at the University of Nevada, Reno. Holden said the introduction of social media evidence is a massive complication as courts work to catch up to technology:

“It’s extremely complicating. It broadens the arena of evidentiary opportunity, evidentiary pieces, to an almost limitless scope… The legal team with the best geek squad wins — that may be the future of litigation.”

While a fortuitous status update or location-aware app could certainly work in an individual’s favor, evidence gleaned from sites like Facebook is not always useful in building a defense. Local District Attorney General Kim Helper admitted the prosecution often “scours” social networking sites to gather evidence against a defendant:

“Definitely in terms of evidentiary issues, we’re seeing a lot of it, and a lot of it is beneficial to the state,” Helper said. “I tell juveniles all the time, ‘If you don’t want someone to read it, don’t put it out there.’ The same thing goes across the board whether you’re a prosecutor, juror, witness, defendant.”

The issue does indeed span all aspects of a court’s reach. The integrity of a jury or juror has been called into question on more than one occasion, and the New York State Bar even published an opinion last year on the ethics of gathering evidence via social media. (It was basically decided that entirely public evidence should be admissible, but “friending” an individual to gain access to their semi-private information should not.) A New York teen was saved from jail when a status update proved his innocence. (The status? “Where’s my pancakes?”) Matrimonial lawyers have even gone so far as to call Facebook and its ilk an “evidentiary goldmine” in gathering evidence for divorce cases, and it has been claimed more than once that 20% of divorces now mention Facebook in filings.

The lasting implications for this are fascinating and scary- kind of like watching a big, real-life episode of Law and Order SVU. It could be the wind up that innocence is more often proven early rather than later in a case, with services like Foursquare providing alibis, or it could be that the future is an Orwellian nightmare in which not one iota of your life is private if you happen to rely on digital means of communication. Do you think the introduction of social media evidence stands to do more harm or good to the criminal justice system from an individual’s standpoint?

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Is evidence gathered from social media the “future of litigation?” is a post from: The Inquisitr

Although it’s kind of like blaming cars for transporting people to affairs more easily, Facebook has again been named as a factor in one out of five divorces in the United States.

We first posted about this particular (and interestingly, exactly proportionate) figure of Facebook supposedly being cited in 20% of divorces after it was reported by a law firm back in December of 2009. Prior to that, there was commentary from divorce lawyers about Facebook being an “evidentiary goldmine” in digging up information on adultery and otherwise unsavory behavior, and the New York State Bar even stepped in with an opinion on the ethics of gathering evidence via social networking. (Mainly that publicly available information was acceptable evidence, but “friending” to access information for the purpose of building a case against someone was not considered ethical.)

It seems the 20% figure could bear out on a larger scale, and two additional sources have cited the figure in recent stories on Facebook and divorce. The American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers is one, and researchers at Loyola University Medical Center reported similar findings. Steven Kimmons, PhD, a licensed clinical psychologist at Loyola, explained that while Facebook isn’t necessarily the reason these marriages implode, the service often provides kindling to the flames of an otherwise distressed relationship:

“We’re coming across it more and more… One spouse connects online with someone they knew from high school. The person is emotionally available and they start communicating through Facebook. Within a short amount of time, the sharing of personal stories can lead to a deepened sense of intimacy, which in turn can point the couple in the direction of physical contact. I don’t think these people typically set out to have affairs. A lot of it is curiosity. They see an old friend or someone they dated and decide to say ‘hello’ and catch up on where that person is and how they’re doing.”

While it’s unlikely a relationship in perfect health would succumb to the temptation or distraction provided by Facebook or similar service, the sad part is that very few relationships are free from rough patches. While some couples could repair their marriages or otherwise weather bad spots, perhaps the ease with which a sympathetic and romantically-piqued ear could be found on sites like Facebook strongly diminishes the likelihood of that. Surely not the fault of Facebook, but worth mentioning nonetheless.

Have you seen the dynamic of a relationship change drastically due to the actions of one partner on social networks? Have you ended a relationship due to a significant other’s internet activities? Do you submit to a crushing fit of jealous rage when a person of the opposite sex comments on your spouse or boyfriend/girlfriend’s Facebook page?

Facebook again blamed in 20% of US divorces is a post from: The Inquisitr

If you’re sworn to uphold the law or hope to be, should you have to bend over and allow hiring directors to sift through your personal communications and base personnel decisions on that content?

If a recent piece in USA Today is correct, then yes, yes you should. It’s not the first time this hiring practice has been alleged, (the city in question rapidly backed away from the practice once word got out) but it is just as shocking and upsetting each time we hear about it. One factor the USA Today piece doesn’t seem to acknowledge is the very easily made distinction between publicly made statements- whether to a friends-only list on Facebook or Twitter- and privately made ones, such as a text message or Facebook private message. If the allegation that hiring departments are demanding applicants’ personal login information is accurate, it’s a troubling one.

Would you allow a recruiter to read your love letters? Listen in on a conversation with your spouse or significant other? How is requesting carte blanche to read private Facebook messages- a functionality available with your login, as you know- any different? But USA Today says that’s the case in certain jurisdictions:

In Massachusetts, Malden Police Chief Jim Holland, whose agency has requested electronic message logs, said a recruit’s text messages revealed past threats of suicide, resulting in disqualification.

In New Jersey, Middletown Police Chief Robert Oches said a candidate was disqualified for posting racy photographs of himself with scantily clad women.

At the Florida conference, Crawford narrated a video full of officers’ inappropriate Facebook postings, from sexually explicit photographs to racially charged commentary. All of it, he said, argues for better background checks for incoming recruits.

A recent opinion published by the New York State Bar Association seems to set a reasonable boundary for information gleaned via social networking. The organization’s ethics committee approved using the networks for mining data, but disapproved of rifling around in users’ locked data, as well as “friending” individuals for the sole purpose of gathering incriminating information about them.

USA Today didn’t cite any specific instances of the request of Facebook passwords as a barrier to employment, but it seems more and more people are having difficulty understanding that just because a message is transmitted electronically, it doesn’t mean you should only send it if you’d be comfortable “seeing it in the newspaper.” This smug and grossly offensive idea is bandied around every time this practice comes under scrutiny, and it demonstrates a profound lack of understanding of technology and modern communications. Should you never have sex because an unscrupulous partner could surreptitiously photograph or film it and distribute the footage? Should you never visit the doctor because someone could find out and tell people you might be sick? Privately shared private information is just that… private. With the number of couples who meet over the internet nowadays or, for that matter, have spouses or significant others deployed for long periods, is there not a reasonable expectation of privacy in your one on one Facebook message box, for starters?

Have you ever had an employer or potential employer invade your privacy in such a manner? Did you relent to the request? Should hiring agencies be forbidden from engaging in such practices?

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Law enforcement recruits asked to hand over Facebook passwords, text messages is a post from: The Inquisitr

It’s kind of interesting (albeit a little scary) to watch legal precedents develop around technology we’ve all already been using for years.

We’ve posted before about lawyers regarding Facebook as an “evidentiary goldmine” in divorce cases, and everyone has likely read a story (or knows someone personally) who has been fired from a job for information posted on a social networking site or their personal blog. We’ve even seen Facebook provided alibis keeping people out of jail, and jurors who were punished by a judge for bragging of Facebook about unethical conduct related to a case.

Until a recent decision by the New York State Bar Association, however, admissions in court based on Facebook postings or similar web-based emissions have always raised a bit of dander on the ethics of such evidence. Not much precedent had been officially set regarding how legal counsel should approach the issue of using these technologies to extend you the rope needed to hang your ass.

As stated in a press release, New York State Bar Association’s Committee on Professional Ethics made a determination that  “an attorney representing a party in pending litigation may access the public pages of another party’s social networking website for the purpose of obtaining information about that party.” Opinion 843, handed down by the Committee on Professional Ethics, lays some groundwork for the proper usage of the treasure trove of potentially incriminating information just floating around the internet on Facebook and Twitter.

An interesting caveat is that while the Committee ruled that openly shared information is fair game, friending a party for the sole purpose of gaining access to data that could land them in court, jail or other kinds of trouble should not occur. Also not ethical- using non-lawyers as a workaround at the direction of lawyers to obtain another party in litigation’s private data:

“A lawyer who represents a client in a pending litigation, and who has access to the Facebook or MySpace network used by another party in litigation, may access and review the public social network pages of that party to search for potential impeachment material.

“As long as the lawyer does not ‘friend’ the other party or direct a third person to do so, accessing the social network pages of the party will not violate Rule 8.4 of the New York Rules of Professional Conduct (prohibiting deceptive or misleading conduct), Rule 4.1 (prohibiting false statements of fact or law), or Rule 5.3(b)(1) (imposing responsibility on lawyers for unethical conduct by non-lawyers acting at their direction).”

The opinion is unique to New York for now, but it will be interesting to see how this affects or influences the handling of evidence obtained via social networking in other states, or indeed other nations. Consider, for instance, the couple locked in a bitter custody dispute where one parent posts pictures of extensive alcohol or drug consumption of a child-free weekend- would mutual friends of the former couple leak such information to opposing counsel, to cast doubt on the person’s character? If you are on disability but post pictures of yourself water-skiing or doing keg stands, will it nullify your claim or get you prosecuted?

Assuming that just not posting data to such sites will protect you is risky and chances are high that we will see cases emerge in coming years that defy any logical anticipation of prudent personal use of social networks- so don’t fall into the trap of thinking you’re safe because your Facebook privacy settings are high. What about other people’s Facebooks? Merely being out in public around people who know your name and can tag you in a photo could come back to haunt you in later years, and that’s not scratching the surface of data gathered by apps and games applications. (Will someone, somewhere be jailed for an ironic result on a “which murder weapon will you use to kill your cheating spouse?” quiz?)

Have you ever been involved in a legal action where Facebook or a similar service was namechecked in court? Do you worry about the amount or relevance of data you’ve leaked onto the internet over the years?

New York Bar approves evidence mining on social networks like Facebook, with some caveats is a post from: The Inquisitr

Facebook has Facebooked about yesterday’s massive internet-wide DNS error debacle, explaining how the site came to be unavailable for so many hours.

The explanation, quoted below, is lengthy and- spoiler alert- they had to turn off Facebook to fix the problem. So there you go: they can turn off Facebook:

The key flaw that caused this outage to be so severe was an unfortunate handling of an error condition. An automated system for verifying configuration values ended up causing much more damage than it fixed… Today we made a change to the persistent copy of a configuration value that was interpreted as invalid. This meant that every single client saw the invalid value and attempted to fix it. Because the fix involves making a query to a cluster of databases, that cluster was quickly overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands of queries a second.

To make matters worse, every time a client got an error attempting to query one of the databases it interpreted it as an invalid value, and deleted the corresponding cache key. This meant that even after the original problem had been fixed, the stream of queries continued. As long as the databases failed to service some of the requests, they were causing even more requests to themselves. We had entered a feedback loop that didn’t allow the databases to recover.

The way to stop the feedback cycle was quite painful – we had to stop all traffic to this database cluster, which meant turning off the site.

Facebook engineers say they’re working on configurations that deal with feedback loops more “gracefully,” and that other systems in operation for Facebook might assist in that. They also apologized for the OMG epic Facebook meltdown, and say they take Facebook’s reliability and performance “very seriously.”

Facebook apologizes for ‘worst outage in over four years’ is a post from: The Inquisitr

And not a single song was passive-aggressively quoted that day.

[via TDW]

Facebook DNS error, the aftermath is a post from: The Inquisitr

Remember last week when Facebook had that problem where an undetermined number of users received messages in their Facebook inboxes that belonged to complete strangers and they said it was no big deal?

We told you about the love, loss and sex chat many users had unwittingly delivered to the inboxes of random other users. Several journalists found themselves on the receiving end of the errant emails, and many people felt that the disclosure of information was inappropriate given the fact that people had no idea their private transmissions (albeit without ill intention on the side of the recipients) were being intercepted and read. If that original disclosurepalooza upset you, you probably won’t like this development.

CAN I LICK YOUR FACE: An evening with total strangers’ Facebook messages is the name of an event being held later this week at a New York bar. The truly voyeuristic (and local) folk who felt left out can go to a bar called Heathers (gossip irony!) in Alphabet City to “relive that magical evening” when the channels of email privacy were stripped away and everybody got all up in everybody else’s business.

What do you think? Going too far? Would you go because, hey, it’s not me it happened to? Obviously nothing can be done to stop it, but is the public performance of a bunch of emails received in error totally wrong and unethical, or do people on Facebook really have no reasonable expectation of privacy?

[Gawker]

Misdirected Facebook messages to be read at NYC bar is a post from: The Inquisitr

It was like PostSecret.

Except it wasn’t random postcards, it was whole emails. And instead of people knowingly sending their darkest secrets and innermost feelings anonymously to a guy who vets them and posts them, their Facebook messages flooded the inboxes of others, revealing all manner of sexual impulse, romantic heartache and tractor accident to an undisclosed number of users. One of those affected users happens to write for the Wall Street Journal, and instead of being stingy with the juice, Zachary Seward shares with the class. Thank you, Zachary.

Calling the “errant messages” he received “totally fascinating,” Seward teased us with a new choice niblets from his gossip buffet:

Kelly has applied for a job at Starbucks. Michelle’s brother sliced his head open in a harrowing tractor accident. A Milwaukee native is “sooo mad at annabelle.” Middle schoolers in Georgia have a quiz today on Newton’s Laws. And in Kentucky, weekend plans are solidifying: “we need to go to that place and get alcohol. ALSO GET TOGETHER AT MY HOUSE FRIDAY NIGHT. COME.”

I learned that people still use o_O to indicate they’re confused and that “no stalk” means you’re not stalking someone — as in, “no stalk but your formspring stuff has been coming up on my feed.”Much of the chatter referred to Facebook itself, like the teenager who wrote, “look at [so-and-so's] wall and the convo she has on her statuses with TIM!”

Seward reports that far and away, the bulk of messages received in error by him that night dealt with love, loving and lovers. Apparently, Facebook is an important tool in many modern relationships. Lucky Zach was even on the receiving end of a steamy chat session, which may have been a porn goldmine had he been a woman.

But alas, some commenters did not take the subsequent dish session in the spirit in which it was intended. Which is sad, because if we have proven one thing as people-on-the-internet, we excel at stopping and staring. It is our achilles heel and our greatest uniting interest. We like watching stars shagging, whales eating people, the bodies of pop culture icons being carried off, texts from last night, nip slips and sports reporters getting dressed. We are good at one thing collectively: bearing witness. Who among us would have resisted such an opportunity, besides Zach Seward’s morally bragging readers?

If we’ve not embraced the idea that our biggest secrets may or may not have already hit the interwebs at large, perhaps we should. An informal poll at the bottom of Seward’s piece suggests that nearly ten percent of the almost 1200 people who voted were in receipt of errant inbox messages. We’re all a hair’s breadth away from becoming the next FailBlog entry or Digg front page sensation, and the only protection is to remain really, really boring.

[Image] [via snopes]

How big was Facebook’s recent privacy glitch? is a post from: The Inquisitr

A limited study of 5,436 divorce cases by a law firm found that around 20% of the filings cited the popular social networking site Facebook.

Out of all the cases, the most commonly pinpointed reason was sexually inappropriate chats with someone other than a spouse- divorce-online’s Mark Keenan told press:

‘I heard from my staff there were a lot of people saying they had found out things about their partners on Facebook and I decided to see how prevalent it was.

‘I was really surprised to see 20 per cent of all the petitions containing references to Facebook. The most common reason seemed to be people having inappropriate sexual chats with people they were not supposed to.’

Although Facebook probably causes divorces as often as text messages lead to teenagers having sex (i.e., a convenient vehicle for the inevitable), the website has been a boon to one party divorce-wise. Lawyers say the site is an “evidentiary goldmine,” with words posted in a moment of passion or anger henceforth belonging to the ether of the internet and irretractable.

A statistic I’d really be interested in seeing? The profit increase of divorce lawyers due to Facebook.

Law firm claims as many as 20% of modern divorces cite Facebook in filings is a post from: The Inquisitr

If you’re a Facebook user, you’re probably used to it.

The awkward status update. The information that not too long ago, you’d discover via word of mouth, perhaps whispered between friends while another was retrieving around of drinks or in the bathroom- a social courtesy to those wronged in order to bring everyone in your social circle up to speed and avoid future mutual discomfort. (“No, Jane moved out!” “Tim’s dad ran off with his secretary!” “The garbage truck ran over their dog.”) Now, thanks to the prevalence of social networking, what would once be whispered and relayed in person is now delivered via a clinical status message. Not everyone has, thankfully, adapted to this tell-all way of handling personal affairs described in a recent Salon article as requiring “a peculiar mix of anger, candidness and exhibitionism, maybe even a tinge of desperation.”

As old social mores fall away, though, that’s where the tricky part comes in. If you’ve been divorced, or experienced any kind of grown-up trauma, the compulsion to express the abject horror you may feel at your life coming apart at the seams is difficult not to vent to friends. (Alas, teenagers and college students are even more prone to those feelings, although arguably have less to lose.) But until not too long ago, words said in anger to your friends were understood, in context, taken with a grain of salt. Now, a split second judgment, a night of drinking and/or building frustration can be screencapped and spread virally before the hangover wears off. And friends means all your friends, even by loosest definition. People you met on a messageboard. Anyone you ever ate lunch with in high school. College roommates. Your dog groomer, your co-workers from eight years ago, and of course, your mom.

The Salon article tells a user’s story, an acquaintance liveblogging her own worst-moment-so-far:

Her former classmate “posted on Friday at 9 or 10 p.m., ‘He’s decided that he can’t stand me, he wants a divorce, we’ve only been married 5 months, I’m pregnant, he’s on the phone with his ex-wife right now, asking her to take him back.’” She continued, “This thing is happening to you, right, and you get on fricking Facebook? I would call my best friend crying, I would leave the house — I don’t know what I would do — but writing on Facebook would be the last thing on my mind.”

Even reading that, third or fourth-hand, is painful. But having been in a similar situation, I’m glad Facebook wasn’t around then. I can’t see personally expressing something so raw there, but such a story is almost divisive in the reaction it elicits- as if you can only really understand that impulse if you’ve been in that awful place. (Indeed, I can relate to a degree. My own husband, with whom I have two children, casually defriended me after eight years of marriage when he moved in with a waitress ten years his junior and, I believe, realized the shared last name outed the reality of his situation to her friends and family. It was not particularly hurtful at that juncture, but felt incredibly disrespectful.)

Which leads me to the interesting legal conundrum this very personal social networking status update issue presents. There’s no filter on Twitter, Facebook or messageboards. The very minute you hit “update,” your words cease to be yours. We’ve all seen high profile people try to retract words said in haste (like Perez Hilton’s harsh words before the death of Michael Jackson was confirmed) only to have their retraction lend credence to later criticism. Lawyers now fear and love Facebook for that very reason. A client can tank a case with “is in a relationship with,” and formerly he-said, she-said issues (like adultery) can be proven through seemingly innocuous acts like the tagging of a photo.

Maintaining a private profile is no measure of safety either- there’s no reasonable expectation of privacy on Facebook, and crafty investigators can dig up deleted data to use against you in civil or criminal matters. As pointed out in the Salon post, abstinence may be the best policy for ultra-personal matters:

Many lawyers, in fact, advise clients not to get on Facebook, MySpace or Twitter at all during a divorce, and some firms require that clients suspend their accounts. “Those bunny ears at Halloween may have been harmless, but they can be used to paint a fairly nasty picture in court,” writes Jones, the Memphis divorce lawyer.

Facebook, like the weather, is impossible to control. ”It’s not like bitching about your ex-wife to your neighbor over the fence,” said Laura Merritt, “you just told 600 people, who might tell 600 people …” Find yourself a neighbor and a fence. After all, during a divorce, people need to vent — non-disparagement clauses exist for a reason — it’s only now, post-Facebook, that there exists a permanent digital footprint of that venting. As a law student wrote in “Social Media Law Student,” an online blog about the topic: “People will express themselves, albeit to their own detriment, through numerous mediums, whether by electronic communication, acts of aggression, verbal comments, physical actions, written letters, and more. Social media networks are not to blame for sheer stupidity … stupidity is now just easier to prove.”

[Source: Salon, Image: Lamebook]

In modern divorce, Facebook is an “evidentiary goldmine” is a post from: The Inquisitr

The man set to take the helm of MI6 in the UK in November is doing some rapid damage control after it was discovered that his wife had posted practically every detail of their lives for all to see on Facebook.

Lady Shelley Sawers, wife of Sir John Sawers, made available copious details of their liveshaunts and habits including the location of one of their homes, favorite vacation spots, and information about friends and family- including the whereabouts of their parents and children. Her privacy controls were set so loosely that anyone in the London network could freely access her page. On the day her husband’s new position was announced, she is said to have posted scores of pictures of the family on vacation holiday.

Charmingly, friends and family congratulated Lady Sawers and her husband on the appointment, referring to Sawers as “Uncle C”- his MI6 codename. Although the Daily Mail says all traces of her Facebook fail have since been removed from the internet, the internet has a pretty long memory. And understandably, officials have commented indicating that the breach “verges on the reckless.”

Edward Davy, the Liberal Democrat Foreign Affairs spokesman is quoted in the Daily Mail as saying:

‘The Prime Minister should immediately commission an internal inquiry as to whether this has breached the security of the incoming head of MI6 too seriously to allow him to take up the post.’

A MP is quoted in the article regarding the possible consequences of the security breach:

‘Sir John Sawers is in a very sensitive position and by revealing this sort of material his family have left him open to criticism and blackmail.

‘As a long-serving diplomat and ambassador, his whole family have been involved in his line of business for decades. I would have hoped they would have been much more sensitive to potential security compromises like this.’

Uh, perhaps… most of my friends have their profiles locked down tight because they don’t want to get blackmailed, too. They’re schoolteachers.

[Image: Daily Mail]

Whoops- Incoming MI6 chief’s wife spills details on Facebook is a post from: The Inquisitr