In 2009 police officers created a fake Facebook profile under the name of Jenny Anderson, an “attractive young lady,” to investigate underage drinking at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. The catfish account drew enough curiosity to receive several friend request confirmations, granting access to student profiles and those of their extended friend circles.¹ The subsequent discovery of incriminating posts led to eight student citations for underage drinking in what was perhaps the first sting operation carried out entirely from the comfort of a police officer’s desktop computer.

Social media platforms enable infiltration of networks once entirely opaque to traditional undercover investigation. By assuming false online personas, an officer’s location and identity are no longer of concern, while the financial cost and risk of physical confrontation are reduced to near-zero. Consequently, undercover digital policing is quickly becoming an attractive option for efficient, low-liability law enforcement. But as the growing presence of bulk data collection and digital warfare begin to erode privacy and undermine non-discriminatory ethics, the expansion of digital black operations stands to further complicate positioning these issues within principled, self-consistent network politics.

Digital black ops thus forces a peculiar fragmentation of the networked body so as to contort its web of digital relations and assume an unfamiliar pose.

Engaging in an undercover investigation, whether on- or offline, is an intimate act by its nature, requiring the impersonators’ utter commitment to their covert persona. For this reason, a double standard has persisted since its inception, whereby officers are expected to divorce themselves entirely from a processes by which they must also convincingly forge entirely new identities. But this affective entanglement, when transposed to online policing, produces an added strangeness deriving from digitization of the mind and body. The processes of creating an online identity begins with the dislocation of memory to the distributed corpora of online media and various social databases, and culminates in a biometric dissolution of physical presence: tracked calories, whereabouts, and music selections. Digital black ops thus forces a peculiar fragmentation of the networked body so as to contort its web of digital relations and assume an unfamiliar pose.

La Sûreté

Before covert digital operations, infiltration required an exhaustive research process and on-the-ground cultural immersion in order to form relationships with targets and their constituents. Some of the earliest records of undercover policing are from 19th century Paris, involving the criminal Eugène François Vidocq who, upon being placed under arrest, offered his services as a police informant in exchange for an early release. After serving a reduced sentence, he worked for the french police masquerading as an escaped convict and used his extensive criminal network to aid with ongoing investigations.

Since Vidocq, familiarity has been the cornerstone of undercover operations and infiltration by way of trust is still the best means of gaining access to a network. For undercover investigations conducted on social networks, this is achieved by manufacturing a persona through the target’s affinity data and online history – an identity so finely tailored they appear familiar. Often familiar faces and other personal imagery are hijacked from the accounts of suspects and their acquaintances, or as testimony in the recent Sondra Price case revealed, taken taken off confiscated devices. Neither Vidocq, nor his successors, manufacture this sense of familiarity in isolation, rather undercover operations the use resources available.

Second Life Policing

According to a Lexis Nexis² report from 2012, approximately 80 percent of law enforcement agencies in the US use Facebook, Twitter, or another social network for investigation, either after a crime has occurred, or as a pre-crime monitoring tool. Introduced in December 2011, Facebook’s timeline feature is purpose-built for indexing biographical, location, and relationship changes, surpassing past and present by allowing access to the entire chronology of a person’s online activity. And by offering the ability to retroactively construct personal histories, Timeline is also ideal for fabricating the backbone of a new covert identity. Former CIA Director David Petraeus explained the agency’s need for such a tool as follows:

Beyond the considerable ease of creating covert personas, social media’s architecture allows catfish police officers to move freely among information within the target’s profile and those of their friend circle. The profile picture acts as a contemporary interrogation mirror, making today’s process of data collection significantly faster and more convenient. No need to respond immediately during conversation, no risk of losing face or making a gesture out of character. A rich personal dossier that once required a trusting relationship built over months or years can now be accomplished at will.⁴ A quote from the Justice Department’s tactical social media documentation puts it succinctly:

Teenage Decoy Ninjas

Use of computers as a source of pleasure is crucial to effective digital policing, but the coupling also makes these systems prone to abuse. Whether NSA agents exploiting the surveillance apparatus to spy on loved ones,⁶ or military officers living out fantasies through combat training VR simulations, voyeuristic perversions of the military-entertainment complex are inherent to its means of control.

There is something oddly romantic in aspiring to be the most friend-able, follow-able person in the eyes of one’s coveted opponent. According to recent revelations in the UK, undercover police have started relationships and families during their lives undercover.⁷ Studying a target’s environment, social circle, and schedule, and then molding a persona in the hopes of being accepted into the fold is a deeply intimate activity. As the target, it must feel as if you have never found a match so fitting.

While online undercover operations afford the covert officer physical separation from their target they can also intensify emotional proximity. When digital black ops allows an officer to assume an identity far removed from their own physical appearance, any intimacy cultivated during an undercover investigation could also suggests the erotic tension of online role-play: a gender-bending covert identity could offer tantalizing escape for the rare officer with a patriarchal policing complex.

Assuming various genders and personas depending on case requirements, social media black ops leverage attraction and curiosity to entice targets into exchange. Yet simulating the mannerisms of the pretend-body by acting out their desire for acceptance establishes a power differential between the officer’s IRL authority and that of their submissive undercover persona. Catfishing in the name of the law thus disrupts the officer’s sense of self on numerous levels, as it incorporates a bizarre mix of desire, gender fluidity and a distorted perception of police authority.

The Logistics of a Profile Picture

The premise of virtual reality platform Second Life is to allow deliberate construction of the digital body for use in online socializing. Offering total freedom over physical design, the ‘character creator’ subverts conventional bodily realities, while normalizing the production and modification of the body as the predominant source of identity formation and self expression. Anything from limbs, skins, faces and clothes can be purchased on the avatar marketplace and one can imagine law enforcement employing similar facial and biometric databases as avatar marketplaces to create false undercover identities.

From a webcam feed to the local supermarket’s CCTV,⁸ the digitised face can travel far removed from the physical body, traversing the network, coalescing with other metadata and imagery as a completely foreign identity and then stored away for later use. The potential for curation of customised identity profiles has never been so diverse or accessible. Quoting philosopher Jacques Rancière: “photography is an ingredient of a new political art of montage”.⁹

Black Ops Sisterhood

Donning inverted skin colour bomber jackets and dog tag USB sticks replete with identity.zip files around their necks, the fictitious Black Ops Sisterhood is a future covert pre-crime unit conducting their daily patrol online under the guise of multiple carefully assembled digital cover identities. With proximity no longer of importance to their work, they quietly monitor from afar, receiving real-time notifications of their targets’ activities and whereabouts through their mobile devices.

Document Archive

	Obtaining and Using Evidence from Social Networking Sites: Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and More. U.S. Department of Justice, Computer Crime & Intellectual Property Section, (EFF FOIA request 2012).
	Social Media and Tactical Considerations for Law Enforcement IACP (International Association of Chiefs of Police) Center for Social Media, May 2013.
	Developing a Policy on the Use of Social Media in Intelligence and Investigative Activities. IACP (International Association of Chiefs of Police) Center for Social Media, February 2013.
	Online Groups: Investigation, Forensics, and Prosecution ICE & DOJ, (EFF FOIA request 2012).
	How are Innovations and Technology Transforming Policing? Police Executive Research Forum, January 2012.
	The Art of Deception: Training a new generation of online covert operations Published by First Look, February 2014.
	Use of Social Networks for Investigative Purposes-General Procedure Posted on MuckRock January 2014; NYPD, September 2011.