We ran across two interesting developments this week showing increased adoption of Web 2.0 technologies by law enforcement.

First, Senator Joe Biden proposed that the Federal Government spend $1B to use custom software, dubbed Operation Fairplay, to monitor peer-to-peer networks for illegal activity, especially child pornography. Presumably hosted on the FBI's Regional Information Sharing Systems (RISS) network, the system was originally developed by an FBI Special Agent in Wyoming, who says it is being used by being used "by all of the regional Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) task forces nationwide and internationally." The system allows invesigators to log in to P2P sites and search for files that contain certain keywords. After downloading the files, the system then gives the investigator the IP address of the file's sender, which allows them to ultimately track down the suspect. The investigators can also use the information to monitor the suspect's file swapping activity over time.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, police investigators in Manchester, UK, are using Facebook to help investigate crimes. Currently, the program is the equivalent of the Post Office "Wanted" poster or the plea to the public for more information, but one can easily imagine investigators taking advantage of the information that people put on display to investigate crimes.

Civil libertarians will certainly have a lot to say as these programs and others move the Internet into a more mature social environment, and we expect to see much debate as to the rules for governing activity by law enforcement online. We welcome this debate, because the activities above -- while focused on specific crimes and activity -- are not dramatically different from monitoring Internet activity or e-mail in general.

Two things will certainly be true, however. First, law enforcement will continue to push into where the criminals -- and information about them -- reside and operate. Second, we imagine a continuing game of cat and mouse as the criminals defeat strategies used by systems such as Operation Fairplay (by changing a file name) and the law enforcement community again must adapt.