WASHINGTON // Facebook wants the US Drug Enforcement Administration to stop operating fake profile pages.
Facebook’s chief security officer, Joe Sullivan, said in a letter on Friday to DEA administrator Michele Leonhart that law enforcement agencies need to follow the same rules about being truthful on the social media site as civilian users. Those rules include a ban on lying about who you are.
Mr Sullivan’s letter was in response to a New York woman’s federal lawsuit claiming that a DEA agent created a fake online account using her name and photographs stored on her mobile phone.
In court filings, Sondra Arquiett said her pictures were retrieved from her seized mobile phone after she was arrested in July 2010 on drug charges. Ms Arquiett said the fake page was being used by DEA agent Timothy Sinnigen to interact with “dangerous individuals he was investigating”.
Ms Arquiett is asking for $250,000 (Dh918,000) in damages.
“Facebook has long made clear that law enforcement authorities are subject to these policies,” Mr Sullivan wrote. “We regard DEA’s conduct to be a knowing and serious breach of Facebook’s terms and policies.”
Facebook also wants the DEA to confirm that it has stopped using any other fake profile pages it may have created.
“The department has launched a review into the incident at issue in this case,” justice department spokesman Brian Fallon said. “To our knowledge, this is not a widespread practice among our federal law enforcement agencies.”
The justice department initially defended the practice, arguing in an August court filing that while Ms Arquiett did not directly authorise Mr Sinnigen to create the fake account, she “implicitly consented by granting access to the information stored in her cellphone and by consenting to the use of that information to aid in ... ongoing criminal investigations”.
Last week, the agency announced it would review whether the Facebook guise went too far.
The case was scheduled to go to trial this week, but court records show it has been sent to mediation.
* Associated Press