WASHINGTON — The Drug Enforcement Administration set up a fake Facebook account using photographs and other personal information it took from the cellphone of a New York woman arrested in a cocaine case, to trick her friends and associates into revealing incriminating drug secrets.
The Justice Department initially defended the practice in court filings but now says it is reviewing whether the guise went too far.
Sondra Arquiett’s Facebook account looked as real as any other. It included photos of her posing on the hood of a sleek BMW and a close-up with her young son and niece. She even appeared to write that she missed her boyfriend, who was identified by his nickname.
But it wasn’t her. The account was the work of DEA agent Timothy Sinnigen, Arquiett said in a federal lawsuit. The case is scheduled for trial next week.
Justice Department spokesman Brian Fallon said in a statement Tuesday that officials were reviewing both the incident and the practice, although in court papers filed earlier in the case, the government defended it. Fallon declined to comment further because the case was pending.
Details of the case were first reported by the online news site BuzzFeed News.
Arquiett pleaded guilty in February 2011 to a conspiracy charge and participated in jailhouse telephone calls with co-conspirators and at times made three-way telephone calls connecting jailed co-conspirators with others, records show.
In a court filing in August, the Justice Department contended that while Arquiett didn’t directly authorize Sinnigen to create the fake Facebook account, she “implicitly consented by granting access to the information stored in her cellphone and by consenting to the use of that information to aid in … ongoing criminal investigations.”
Nate Cardozo, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties organization, said the government’s rationale was “laughable.”
“If I’m cooperating with law enforcement, and law enforcement says, ‘Can I search your phone?’ and I hand it over to them, my expectation is that they will search the phone for evidence of a crime,” Cardozo said, “not that they will take things that are not evidence off my phone and use it in another context.”
