Twenty-six year old Fouad Mourtada of Morocco, who was serving a three year prison sentence for impersonating the Moroccan king’s younger brother, Prince Moulay Rachid, on Facebook, has been granted a royal pardon, says the BBC. He was originally arrested in early February 2007, and sentenced on February 25.
CNN and BBC, which have covered the story, have focused on the “appalling” human rights conditions in Morocco and the untouchable status of the royal family. But what I wanted to know was how he was arrested in the first place (noting some similarities to the Yahoo/China situation from 2004). The Moroccan government must almost certainly have had the assistance of Facebook in identifying Mourtada. When I asked Facebook about this last month they would not comment specifically on the situation.
Let’s not forget about the others -NOT so lucky…
“Where there is life, there is hope.”
as users I think we are too trusting. These companies are not looking out for us, but their own behinds, or perhaps market penetration in Morocco, whatever the case may be.
@ 2
“Where there is hope, there is Jail”
@ 2
“Where there is hope, there is Jail”
Give it a couple more years, this will also be the norm in America if not already.
Come on techcrunch! Children subscribing on a social networking site under the name off a famous person are not commiting identity fraud, they are just making fun!
facebook sending people to jail
I think that punk ass needs to be grilled in front of Congress
Facebook cooperation would not be necessary. Their local ISPs could track him with ease.
#9 – sure. but how would they know who to track? I suppose they could try and see everyone who visited the profile if they had access to all ISP data within the country, and narrow it from there, but my bet is they just send a demand over to FB.
@6: Two years? There have already been numerous reports of people writing vitriol about the President and getting a knock on the door from the wonderfully-named Secret Service who interpreted it as a death threat. (Note to self: when in the presence of Americans, never say ‘I could murder an Indian’ instead of “I feel considerable desire for a curry-based evening meal of the sort often enjoyed in the households of India”.) As far as I know jail wasn’t involved, but you don’t need it to intimidate people. Look up ‘chilling effect’.
I was talking to some Australian Government recruiters in the security industry and I asked about whether they are allowed to have a Facebook page and they said no. Then I mentioned that my friend tried to close their account and they couldn’t. The recruiters reply was something along the lines of “Don’t worry, we can take care of it. We have connections there.”
Mike: I recall how very recently YouTube was “Accidentally” knocked offline by some ISP somewhere… something to that affect, right? Is it rational to assume that some of these situations like this are the result of the “government” threatening the websites with major global outages if they don’t secretly cooperate? I can imagine, in FB case, such an outage would cause major disruptions to their service and they would ransom one user for the sake of millions… with heavy hearts and yadda yadda yadda… Is that just me being idealistic that it would have to involve our companies as victims and these governments as tyrannical tech-terrorists?
@# 11 : interesting story. I had a media temple account (sorry mike) for [almost] a year a couple years back… I wanted to see what the hype was about, test some heavy scripts, etc… well I put up many “fake” sites and tests… developers understand… it was a playground account. Well I put up a political satire one day and it might have mentioned something along the lines of a certain someone being guilty of war crimes. Keep in mind this site never even had a domain name propogated to it, i always used the ip to play there… Less than a week after uploading the bush, i mean, political thing I had no media temple account. What’s more… apparently I never did….
Mike: Facebook officially denied a while ago. “Not us”.
Maroc Telecom is the ISP that is believed to have provided the identity of the “offender”.
The question remains about how they traced back to it. How?
Did they set an after the facts trigger to “trap” the guy when he got back to his fake profile (assuming he did) or are they actually recording all traffic all the time and just had to run a query on their archives?
So much for privacy, unless I missed some other more legitimate way to find the IP address?
Some opacity there.
#9 local isp can figure out who visits sites and who actually edits using packet tracking
You guys are overthinking all of this. The impersonator probably bragged to his pals (why would he keep the joke to himself? The very point was to have a good laugh, I am sure), the word spread, the cops nabbed him. No blame on Facebook.