Social monitoring prevented more rioting, say police

DESPITE APPARENTLY not having monitored Blackberry Messenger traffic and social networking web sites during the recent riots, London's Metropolitan Police has claimed that it prevented more attacks by watching the networks.

According to the BBC the assistant Met Police commissioner told a bunch of MPs that by checking out private communications the Police were able to sniff out potential trouble at the Olympics venue and on the London shopping avenue Oxford Street.

Lynne Owens told a committee of MPs that signs of potential trouble had been spotted by spooks amongst the general chitter-chatter, perhaps in an attempt to add more weight to the argument that monitoring communications is a worthy and correct thing for the authorities to be doing.

Reportedly Blackberry Messenger is popular with the yoof market because it is private and secure, which suggests that the youth of today are rather ill-informed about modern communications and civil liberties.

"Through Twitter and BBM there was intelligence that the Olympic site, that both Westfields [shopping centres] and Oxford Street were indeed going to be targeted," said Owens. "We were able to secure all those places and indeed there was no damage at any of them."

Acting commissioner - and we hope he does not get too comfy in the job - Tim Godwin said that he had considered asking for a social networking shutdown during the troubles, and added that he thought that any information discovered through it could be misleading.

He said that a lot of traffic was "obviously wrong and rather silly", prompting us to welcome him to the internet and social networking.

"We did contemplate, I contemplated, asking the authorities to switch it off. The legality of that is very questionable and additionally, it is also a very useful intelligence asset," he said.

"So, as a result of that, we did not request that that was turned off, but it is something that we are pursuing as part of our investigative strategy."

Godwin resisted the temptation to comment on how Blackberry has offerred to help in police investigations, suggesting that he thought it would not be useful.

"I would rather not answer that question as it is an investigative strategy," he said. µ