twomp
05-13-2014, 01:15 PM
When news broke that the mayor of Peoria, Illinois, had called upon his town's police force to shut down a fake Twitter account opened in his name; that local police had responded with search warrants against Twitter, Comcast, and Google; that they had at last raided a local home and seized four iPhones, four computers, two Xbox game consoles, an iPad, and a "large gold gift bag with five sandwich bags containing a green leafy substance;" that the homeowner hadn't created the account but was ultimately suspended from his job as a result of that "green leafy substance;" that Peoria's next city council meeting descended into outright acrimony over the heavy-handedness of the entire episode; and that the entire episode turned out to be a colossal waste of time and resources in which no one but the pot owner was ever charged with a crime—well, that's the moment at which a curious reporter files a public records act request to get a glimpse of how such a trainwreck got underway.
So I filed one—and the backstory I found was fascinating.
Could your town's mayor spark a police investigation into your activities that ends with town cops rifling through your mobile phone, your laptop, and the full contents of your Gmail account—all over an alleged misdemeanor based on something you wrote on social media? Not in America, you say? But you'd be wrong. Here, based on e-mail records provided by the City of Peoria to Ars Technica, is what that sort of investigation looks like.
The name on the @peoriamayor account read simply "Jim Ardis"—the actual name of Peoria's mayor—and it featured Ardis' official city headshot. Its content was less than mayoral, however, most of it devoted to not particularly clever ways of suggesting that Ardis liked booze, drugs, and prostitutes and that he "woke up with pussy on my breath and blood shot eyes."
@peoriamayor was never popular; when it first came to the attention of city staffers, the foul-mouthed account was tweeting out bile like "I'm bout to climb the civic center and do some lines on the roof who's in?" to just 33 people and had been active for just two days. But it was public enough for someone to alert Patrick Urich, Peoria's city manager, who runs the city's day-to-day affairs and oversees its $169 million budget and 700 employees.
On March 11, 2014, Urich was working early. "Someone is using the Mayor's likeness in a twitter account," he wrote to Peoria's Chief Information Officer Sam Rivera at 6:06am. "It's not him. @Peoriamayor. Can you work to get it shut down today?"
Read the rest here:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/how-a-mayors-quest-to-unmask-a-foul-mouthed-twitter-user-blew-up-in-his-face/
So I filed one—and the backstory I found was fascinating.
Could your town's mayor spark a police investigation into your activities that ends with town cops rifling through your mobile phone, your laptop, and the full contents of your Gmail account—all over an alleged misdemeanor based on something you wrote on social media? Not in America, you say? But you'd be wrong. Here, based on e-mail records provided by the City of Peoria to Ars Technica, is what that sort of investigation looks like.
The name on the @peoriamayor account read simply "Jim Ardis"—the actual name of Peoria's mayor—and it featured Ardis' official city headshot. Its content was less than mayoral, however, most of it devoted to not particularly clever ways of suggesting that Ardis liked booze, drugs, and prostitutes and that he "woke up with pussy on my breath and blood shot eyes."
@peoriamayor was never popular; when it first came to the attention of city staffers, the foul-mouthed account was tweeting out bile like "I'm bout to climb the civic center and do some lines on the roof who's in?" to just 33 people and had been active for just two days. But it was public enough for someone to alert Patrick Urich, Peoria's city manager, who runs the city's day-to-day affairs and oversees its $169 million budget and 700 employees.
On March 11, 2014, Urich was working early. "Someone is using the Mayor's likeness in a twitter account," he wrote to Peoria's Chief Information Officer Sam Rivera at 6:06am. "It's not him. @Peoriamayor. Can you work to get it shut down today?"
Read the rest here:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/how-a-mayors-quest-to-unmask-a-foul-mouthed-twitter-user-blew-up-in-his-face/