Campus police have been using Facebook to track down on-campus parties, but some students decided to turn Facebook against their tormentors with a prank that got big-time media coverage.

The story plays out on campuses around the country: students throw a party, beer gets consumed, police stop by and put a stop to the underage drinking. In the 21st Century, law enforcement has been using the same tool to track down parties that students use to communicate them: networking site Facebook.

Then the New York Times picked up on how a George Washington University student, Kyle Stoneman, turned the tables on the campus police, with a little help from his friends. Stoneman later posted that he didn’t organize the party, but he did attend.

BoingBoing.net selected a choice passage from the Times article to describe the turnabout:

Once again they used (Facebook), which is visited by more than 80 percent of the student body, to chat up a beer blast. But this time, when the campus police showed up, they found 40 students and a table of cake and cookies, all decorated with the word “beer.” “We even set up a cake-pong table,” a twist on the beer-pong drinking game, he says. “The look on the faces of the cops was priceless.” As the coup de grce, he posted photographs of the party on Facebook, including a portrait of one nonplussed officer.
A GWU spokesperson insisted the cops didn’t get their 411 from Facebook, but did concede that if a party is talked about on Facebook, it will get back to the police. The Times noted two campus police officers and a chief’s assistant have Facebook memberships at GWU.

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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.