'Constable iPlod' mistweets journalist in Facebook hacking debacle

A debacle is one way to describe how Queensland Police have responded to the relatively new world of cyber crime.

Police seriously over-reacted to the issue of hacked images from Internet Websites and exceeded Queensland police powers in arresting a journalist who wrote about the issue and seizing his Ipad.

The Ipad seizure rightly drew cries of outrage from the media with journalists fearing their electronic "notebooks" perhaps containing the names of confidential sources could now be vulnerable to police "fishing" expeditions.

Arrest powers in Queensland's Police Powers and Responsibilities Act are designed to detain people who might flee a crime scene or pose a danger to others in the community. Those powers were used against a journalist who wrote a news article about internet website vulnerability.

Fairfax Media technology journalist Ben Grubb, covering an IT security conference on the Gold Coast, wrote about a security expert's presentation which demonstrated accessing a rival's Facebook page without permission and downloading private photos.

Apparently there was no love lost between the IT rivals and the hacked one lodged a complaint with police.

Police promptly arrested the journalist because he used images sourced from the Facebook page for his article on Facebook security flaws.

Police alleged the journalist was "receiving unlawfully obtained property" which just shows that police are struggling to keep up with law enforcement issues in the IT world and especially when it relates to images effectively posted in the public domain.

Copyright or privacy laws might be in question but police were wrong to arrest Mr Grubb for receiving unlawfully obtained property.

Not only do police owe Ben Grubb a full apology, they need to give him and other journalists an assurance they did not go snooping through his Ipad while they had it looking for confidential notes or names of his contacts.

All journalists should be very worried at the police seizing their notebooks or electronic storage devices.

To date there doesn't seem to be any serious effort by police to detain the person who allegedly hacked into the Facebook page and obtained the photos, they just hammered the poor journalist who wrote about it.

Then to make it worse they used Twitter to claim he was not arrested, then they had to Tweet he was arrested. Constable Iplod tweeted this young journalist very poorly.

A thought here on the Queensland police use of Twitter. Why? If the Force is under such pressure with cries for more cops, whose job is it to issue Tweets? And to whom? And again, Why?

After a Tweet denying he had been arrested (when the journalist cleverly recorded the actual arrest) police then tweeted "our bad "as a form of apology. Someone needs to be asking some serious questions about whether police should be using this form of social network media.

Was it because Grubb used Twitter to alert everyone to his predicament?

Police claimed that receiving hacked images from the internet is the same as unlawfully receiving a stolen TV set. Really? It is not as clear cut as that. The court would have to consider complicated issues such as who owned the images and whether the pictures had in fact entered the public domain. The matter becomes even more complex when you take into account the fact that the images on the Ipad are arguably copies and not originals. It is doubtful that the originals ever left the "victim's" website.

The television set comparison ignores the complexity of the cyber-world.

It is like comparing an ancient treasure map to a global positioning system. Sure they've got things in common, but the differences are significant.

Police were seriously out of line arresting Mr Grubb. He was hardly likely to flee the country or pose a danger to anyone, so they exceeded the authority of the Police Powers and Responsibilities Act to arrest him and impound his Ipad.

At a press conference during the debacle, the head of the Queensland police fraud squad, Brian Hay, reportedly admitted that police were "still cutting our teeth" in the rapidly evolving online environment.

But the issue has at least shone a light on to the risks of posting your photos on social websites. Anyone uploading images to Facebook or similar social network sites does so at their own risk.

My advice is don't upload anything you wouldn't want the world at large to see. In the meantime, police need to come up to speed on how they deal with the online security issue.

Any arrests should start with a solid legal basis and in this case they acted hastily for the wrong reasons. The problem was made worse by the Twitter debacle which followed.

Unfortunately, this whole sorry episode has reflected badly on the Queensland Police Service because of the heavy handed treatment of the journalist.

It's also a wakeup call to journalists to be very careful of what sensitive information they put on their Ipads and electronic devices, in case police impound them.

Ben Grubb himself wrote: "I believed that, as a journalist, I had protections. But it seems not. And to lose a device that contains not only private but work-related information is also another seriously alarming development for a journalist".

In past years journalists would bluntly refuse to hand over their paper notebooks to police without a legal fight.

There is a tradition of shields in place to protect journalists'

sources, but given that police have signalled a move to confiscate devices such as Ipads, then today's journalists need to re-define those protections, and quickly.