Why I'm uncomfortable with @medhatpolice following me on Twitter.

Let me start off by saying that I am a 35 year old, married, mother of two, property-owning, tax-paying, law-abiding citizen.  So my problems with this have nothing to do with trying to hide bad behavior.

Earlier this week many of us Medicine Hat Tweeps (Tweep - A person with a mutual following on Twitter) were surprised when we discovered that we were being followed by the Medicine Hat City Police.  I've followed them for a while, since they tweet out information about calls, arrests, etc., but they weren't following many (or any, I don't actually know the numbers) of us back, which was perfectly fine with me.  I considered the police account to be an information service, rather than an invitation for interaction.  So when I saw that they were following me I tweeted this:

"I'm sure I'm not the only #medhat tweep that suddenly felt nervous today when discovering that I was being followed by @medhatpolice"

I heard murmerings from other Tweeps about being followed by the police and then we all got this Tweet:

"Sitting with CHAT explaining why the the MHPS are following #medhat on Twitter. Nothing to be concerned about, just trying to engage"

Followed by:

"Chief McGrogan here please send us your feedback about twitter following good or bad?? #medhat"

Many of my fellow Tweeps responded with humourous replies about how they'd rather be followed by police on Twitter than on various Medicine Hat roadways.  My answer won't fit in 140 characters, so I didn't respond.

Then CHAT tv news ran a short story on it in which Chief McGrogan said, "We mean no harm, we come in peace." Actually that's not what he said, that was just my interpretation.

I have two main concerns about the police following local citizens on Twitter:

Firstly, the active Twitter community in Medicine Hat is not large and our interactions are frequent.  As with any relationship, whether it be online or real life, you begin to recognize the nuances of personality and conversation, and understand when someone is speaking in jest.  My concern is that whoever is monitoring the police twitter account does not have that relationship, background and understanding, and will misconstrue statements or conversations which will lead to a lot of undeserved hassle for someone.

Secondly, I know that this makes me sound paranoid, but it must be addressed.  Whoever holds power has the ability to abuse that power. While it may not be the intention now, Twitter is a valuable tool for monitoring people (ask anyone who's cyberstalking an ex).  It can be viewed as one of many small steps towards invasive measures used to monitor people under the guise of safety.  It's such a slippery slope to a police state.

UPDATE: This post was printed as a letter to the editor in the Medicine Hat News.  Two days after it was published I came upon this article from Mother Jones in my Twitter feed regarding the FBI using Twitter:

"Since late January, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been asking the IT industry to help it develop an open-source social-media application that would provide a panoramic real-time picture of any "breaking event, crisis, activity, or natural disaster…in progress in the U.S. or globally," according to statements released by the agency. Essentially, the bureau wants to crowd-source software that would data-mine Twitter and other websites to scan for—and perhaps predict—mass uprisings, criminal activity, and terror plots."