Gangs join Twitter generation, and are closely watched

LOS ANGELES - When a gang member was released from jail soon after his arrest for selling methamphetamine, friends and associates assumed he had cut a deal with authorities and become a police informant.

They sent a warning on Twitter that went like this: We have a snitch in our midst.

But that tweet and the traffic it generated were being followed closely by investigators, who had tracked the San Francisco Bay Area gang for months. Officials sat back and watched as others joined the conversation and left behind incriminating information.

Law enforcement officials say gangs are making greater use of Twitter and Facebook, sometimes posting information that helps agents identify gang associates and learn about their organizations.

"You find out about people you never would have known about before," said Dean Johnston with the California Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement, which helps police investigate gangs. "You build this little tree of people."

In the case involving the suspected informant, tweets alerted investigators to three other gang members who were ultimately arrested on drug charges.

Tech-savvy gangsters have long been at home in chat rooms and on Web sites like MySpace, but they appear to be gravitating toward Twitter and Facebook, where they can make threats, boast about crimes, share intelligence on rivals and network with people across the country.

And gang members sometimes turn the tables, asking contacts across their extended networks for help identifying undercover police.

Gang use of Twitter and Facebook still lags behind use of the much-older MySpace, which remains gang members' online venue of choice.

The Crips, Bloods, Florencia 13 and MS-13 have long used MySpace to display potentially incriminating photos and videos of their people.