The operation often entails reading private Facebook messages between friends and is sometimes coupled with phone and video surveillance.

To read the private Facebook messages, wouldn't this require access to PRISM or a like-developed system? I thought that was supposed to be used for National Security purposes only? I thought private communications of US persons were to be considered private for criminal investigations under ALL circumstances by law?

One teenager, Jelani Henry, said he was held in Rikers for nearly three years simply because of his associations on Facebook and his likes and comments on various Facebook posts.

This reminds me of that research that found that if you liked a specific "coffee" page (it was just generic coffee, but apparently there are like 20 generic coffee likes), you were more likely to have high IQ than the average person. They found out how it worked, it was because the person who created the page liked it, and shared it to their group of friends only, then it spiraled out from there.

That being said, I would actually like to see his arrest report to know for sure that what a teenager said was actually factually accurate. Not sure how he knows that it's by his Facebook likes/comments alone, that's the sort of secret thing they wouldn't tell a suspect about.