The London newspaper The Guardian has been monitoring chat about the riots on Blackberry’s BBM messaging service and posting newsworthy posts that it sees. But the paper now says it’s going to stop publishing messages that anticipate violence. At least one British MP is now asking Blackberry to suspend its messaging service in order to stem the rioting. The British police are looking into this as well, says the L.A. Times.
“The police are ahead of the curve in information technology and would have experience of the use of social networking sites by troublemakers,” Steve O’Connell, a member of the Metropolitan Police Authority that oversees London’s Metropolitan Police Service, told Bloomberg Businessweek magazine. “The bad guys were using these sites to target areas quickly. Small bands of ne’er-do-wells were descending on high-quality stores to loot.”
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