Do Law Enforcement officers scan Twitter and Facebook accounts that are set on "private"?

[Michael Walker]

I was reading about the British couple who were deported from the USA because of a so called "joke" about destroying America. (they said they really meant that they were going to party hard in America).

I was wondering if law enforcement was only able to see their twitter account because it was not set on private. I know if they suspected something was suspicious they have thr riht to get twitter to show them anything. But in their normal surveillance can they see accounts set on private?

What about chat in chatrooms such as on Omegle? Are these chats monitored as you chat or are they saved or do they disappear when you log off?

[Scaramanga]

I think it was about 3 years ago that the law on ISP records was passed through parliament here in the UK that requires all UK ISP's to hold internet records for all they're customers for 7 years. The act/Law went through in whats known as the "parliamentary wash up proceedure" or something like that. While i'm not sure if it was ratified or not the fact is that was several years ago.

I am doing a degree atm in computer science and the first semester/module is on "digital life" - I've only been doing it for 3 months and already i've collected an entire folder full of stories regarding politicians sacked for things they said on twitter, people arrested, deported, fined, jailed for things they said/put on facebook etc.

So to answer your question YES they can, they can even come to your house at night now, when your asleep and put you in the back of a black transit van if they deem you to be a "security risk" or some such thing.

welcome to the future that droves of young people helped create through facebook.

My response to this is simple - don't use facebook, or twitter, or BBM or all/any such other messaging services and if you do - ALWAYS assume that you are being monitored, whether at work or at home.

oh and no, nothing "disappears" on the net. Ever hear of the term "in the cloud"? - "In the cloud" actually just translates to "on a server", or put another way " in someone else's computer" - where it gets saved scanned, processed, filtered, sorted and archived. Then put into a database for marketing, law enforcement, sales, etc. I have seen such databases in operation.