'Constable iPlod' mistweets journalist in Facebook hacking debacle

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.