Lindsey Kroskob
Wyoming Tribune-Eagle
CHEYENNE, Wyo. — The Internet era has made sharing information across the world as simple as sending an email message.
Classmates from 20 years can connect and talk via social networking sites of every variety.
But with easy access to personal information, criminals also come out in droves.
Cheyenne Police officer John Gay knows all about the darker side of Internet communication. So he decided to step up, start his own business, and use his Internet savvy to help combat the problem.
Gay uses various fake profiles on every social networking site available to track and catch criminals.
“I’ll use my unofficial profiles to try and search for these people and where they’re at. You can almost track down their movements,” he said. “You can track them based on what they may be saying to their friends or family members.”
He said many times the lack of security settings being used to protect people’s information is astounding.
Gay has countless examples of questionable photos and things people posted on their personal profiles that showed illegal activity.
“268 million people use the Internet in North America,” he said. “We can find anything, and what you do is out there forever.”
But even for those people who attempt to lock up their profiles, Gay said there are ways to get around it.
“You may not have a lot of access to their account. But you can see that they’ve posted on another person’s wall,” he said. “So you can start to get the conversation.”
Plus, even when profiles are unavailable, it’s easy to go through the profiles of a person’s 200 or so friends and see who’s talking about what. He says every friend you have on a social networking site is a hole into your profile.
“It’s good for us,” Gay said. “There are lots of people who you would say, ‘Are you serious? Thank you so much for putting this all up.’”
Gay has been doing Internet investigations since 2005, when Facebook started to hit Wyoming.
“MySpace used to be the big thing, and that’s what it started with,” he said. “There was no easier way to get people’s information. It was extremely easy to get around security settings.”
Those settings have since become more stringent, but the information is still always out there for someone to find.
“I’m not an expert on this because there is so much to it,” Gay said. “There is so much more than just Facebook.”
In addition to information on the Internet, law enforcement officials can use various resources to gather information from cell phones.
Most phones, and smartphones in particular, are equipped with GPS locators. While it isn’t always the easiest process to track down moving cell phones, it’s not impossible.
“Triangulating and GPS is not as foolproof as most people would like to think it is,” Cheyenne Police Department spokesman Sgt. Rob Dafoe said. “But we do have avenues specific to law enforcement that will allow us to a little more information than average Joe Citizen.”
However, it’s not an instantaneous process.
Dafoe said often it’s more useful to get search warrants for cell phones, to see who and what people are texting and taking photos of.
“That is not instantaneous, either. If we are working a homicide, we can get that pretty quick, but we probably use that more routinely as a cop than you would as a locator,” Dafoe said. “It’s kind of like the whole Facebook thing. It’s amazing how stupid some people are and how much information they keep in their phones.
“It’s not the catch-all, end-all tool, but it definitely plays a role that we didn’t have available to us 10 to 15 years ago.”
Copyright 2011 Cheyenne Newspapers, Inc.