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Feds Arrest Private Eye at HOPE
An anonymous reader writes "FBI agents today arrested Steven Rambam, the owner of a company that bills itself as the largest privately held online investigative service in the United States, according to Washingtonpost.com's Security Fix blog. From the story: 'Rambam was arrested this afternoon by FBI agents just moments before he was to lead a panel discussion on privacy here at the HOPE hacker conference in New York City. Rambam and three other panelists were to discuss how they dug up -- in just 4.5 hours of searching private and public databases -- more than 500 pages worth of data on HOPE attendee Rick Dakan, who agreed to be the guinea pig for the project.'"
AFAIK, digging up information on a willing person and presenting isn't illegal.
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
No one has any idea why he was arrested? I read the article and there wasn't any hint at a reason.
"There is no real right or wrong, just what the majority accepts at the time."
Maybe, he was being arrested on other charges, not necessarily linked to the presentation e was about to give.
How about we wait for more info before we start screaming one way or the other.
I've already noticed that about 60% of posts are conspiracy theories about shutting him up..
we know nothing about the charges, and generally in high profile arrests there is a lag time between the actual arrest and the announcement of charges to the relevant media.
Now if he just disappears after this and we hear nothing.. then ill be worried, but as of now I see absolutely no red flags here.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
On the subject of Rambam check out previous talks given at HOPE conferences. He's a good speaker and quite interesting on the topic of information availability. He stated a couple of weeks ago in an interview leading up to this conference's talk that he had planed to do the same basic presentation at the last hope but the "victim" got cold feet at the last moment after he realized just how much information was available and threatened to sue. If you listen to the old presentations he does make a point that almost any information is available legally but it is more difficult to get it legally than illegally. I have to believe from hearing him speak several time that what he would have done for this presentation would at least to be best of his knowledge been legal.
Four previous presentations.
Privacy - Not What It Used To Be
http://www.the-fifth-hope.org/mp3/privacy.mp3
Databases and Privacy
http://h2k2.hope.net/media/databases.mp3
Information on the Masses with Steve Rambam.
http://h2k.hope.net/post/panels/h2kinfo.mp3
Info for Masses
ftp://ftp.2600.com/pub/oth/beyondh/nfo4mses.ra
Ramdam was charged with impersonating a mime, mopery with intent to loiter, probity, nothosonomia, and one moving violation.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
I can actually find out a heck of a lot about somebody with their name and Google. If you know power searching tips, and construct searches based on what you already find, you can find out a lot. If I had somebody's name who was a frequent Internet user, I could probably find out a fair amount of biographical information on them with a few variations on their name. Then I could search using those pieces of information as keywords and find out even more information.
...and you can too! A lot of the information he says he found in 4.5 hours is not that impressive. Pics of his former roommates? Easy if they're Myspace or Facebook friends. Places he lived before? Check the history for his wall. Places he worked before? If he was in IT, and you can find his favorite internet screenname, you can find his postings to internet tech forums such as Slashdot, Devshed, Sourceforge, etc, complete with the details of what he was working on.
And God help you if you have a MySpace account with a wall. Then I can learn everything about your social life, including the names of your friends. Then I can look them up too and construct a whole web of information about you.
That's just with Google. Combine that with even modest law enforcement databases and you can find out a heck of a lot about one person.
Granted, that still scares me a LOT. I value my privacy but I feel like I don't actually have it anymore. All I'm saying is his deal is not all that unique. Or maybe I'm just The Power Google Searcher From Hell!!!!!
If only for Rambam's suit against oretec and Joe Jared, I'd say it was fate balancing the scales.
And again, this is in advance of knowing what Rambam is charged with. If it's silly, then I'll have to (yuck!) support him. If it is legitimate AND he's guilty, then I hope he gets tossed in jail and the key thrown away.
My sense of justice doesn't allow me to not object when an injustice is done, even if it's against someone I think deserves what happens for another reason. The law must be fair and just for everyone, even if I think a particular person is a piece of human garbage.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
"Can you say "Police State"? I voted for George Bush because he promissed me a smaller and less invasive government. This is what I got."
<Nelson Muntz>"HA-ha! You're a gullible idiot!</Nelson Muntz>
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From TFA: Conference founder Emmanuel Goldstein said organizers were trying to figure out where the FBI had taken Rambam, and were contacting his parents and his lawyer.
What's funny is that in 1984, Emmanuel Goldstein is "the Enemy of the People" after having once been a leading Party member almost at the level of Big Brother.
If we're going to (badly) juxtapose reality with fiction, Rambam would be Winston, the guy who follows Goldstein's lead & eventually ends up arrested by agents of the Thought Police.
(I know, the FBI != Though Police. I said it was a bad juxtaposition)
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Yes, I'm advocating a bit of hostility towards government actions, because the preservation of freedom requires just that. Otherwise, we start trusting government, giving them the benefit of the doubt, a bit of time, a bit more time, and eventually you do reach a state where the government can detain anyone for an indefinite length of time without needing the formality of charging them. I'm not demanding that they explain anything to me, only that I'm going to assume that he's innocent until evidence is presented at trial, and he's convicted of a crime. The mentality that considers that unreasonable is what I was criticizing. You have to give someone the benefit of the doubt, and I give mine to the accused, every time. By definition the only alternative is to give the government the benefit of the doubt.
Here's another example:
Benemar Benatta was arrested in September, 2001 after the 9/11 dragnet. The government determined he was innocent in November, 2001. He was held in solitary confinement for 6 months anyway.
He was released... yesterday. July 22, 2006. That's right, held without charges even though he was known to be innocent for almost 5 years.
I'm not making this up, here's the link
The same goes for torture. Today, if you object to torture, you have to justify your position, because Gitmo and Abu Ghraib have inoculated everyone against the idea that torture is by definition wrong. Police states don't happen overnight, and as they develop into fruition, "normal people" won't recognize the status quo as a police state--it'll just be normal, a "nothing to see here" common-sense extension of what we see every day.
I call them detainees, not suspects. Some are no doubt suspected of crimes, but many in Gitmo and Abu Ghraib were caught up in sweeps, or are held because they are thought to have information. Holding someone because you want to interrogate them for information isn't the same thing as holding them because you think they themselves have done or will do something bad. "Interrogation" does not address guilt or innocence, and in fact any of us can be interrogated, regardless of our guilt or innocence. Some of these people have been the victim of a Kafkaesque "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" imprisonment. They knew a guy who knew a guy who was at this place this other person might have passed through, and ergo they might know something, so we'll hold them for a while. Since there is very little oversight, very little accountability for abuse, coupled with high accountability for failing to get information, in short order we have waterboarding and people being beaten to death. Calling them "suspects" makes us feel better about not caring, because we're at least halfway implying that they might have done something, but in reality being held for interrogation doesn't even assert guilt, much less provide evidence for it.
I'm not saying that we should man the barricades and break out the ammo, only that we have a responsibility to not let it get to that point before we say, "hey dammit, this is wrong." This is where the battle is, for the most part--with words. Ideas and principles matter. What we are willing to tolerate changes to accomodate what we've already tolerated, because we largely can't admit that we looked the other way. If we tolerate it on the small scale, what moral argument do we make to oppose the exact same practices on the large scale?
We have to recognize wrong and raise bloody hell about it, if only via a few posts on a lame blog or in a conversation over the water cooler at work. I'm not an activist, but when I speak up, here or in real life, it may give confidence to someone else who has been quietly thinking "you know, this doesn't look right." If I'm silent, that one quiet little voice caves into the raucous majority and eventually they don't have any doubts that it's okay for Padilla or anyone else to rot away in jail without the "privelege" of a trial. A voice of dissent, one who brings up the ideals we all ostensibly believe in, is more important than you think. If I followed your lead, I'd wait until no voice was possible. What do you want me to do, wait until I'm being herded into a black van with a hood over my face to cry out "golly, this is wrong?"
Next time they should just deport without an appeal?
No, "next time" they should let the matter drop once a fair trial finds someone innocent, rather than petulantly deporting the poor bastard for daring to defend himself in court.
Same thing happened to Sami Al-Arian - A court found the DOJ's case against him basically nothing more than a trainload of cow dung, and as payback for winning, the DOJ gave him a "choice". After an innocent man had already spend almost three years in solitary confinement, he could either accept a plea on the weakest of the charges and accept another eight months plus deportation; or he could waste the next 20 years of his life, still imprisoned of course (respected professors pose a high flight-risk, dontcha know) fighthing retrial after retrial on a neverending stream of fictitious charges.
Perhaps you consider that "fair" - Just the system working like it should... I consider that a sign that if the system "should" work like that, we need a massive overhaul of the system itself. "Justice" needs to exist as a concept that doesn't overly burden innocent people; The weak shouldn't need to accept a plea on a bogus charge because they can't afford (in time, not just money) to fight it. No one should rot in a cage for years while the government tried to scrape together enough circumstantial evidence to intimidate the defendant into a plea. And once found not guilty, people shouldn't need to watch their backs out of fear of retribution.
I'm not quite sure what to think about you. Do you live in some kind of fantasy world where police never break the law, where police never show any inclination to abuse their power just to be petty and vindictive? For fuck's sake, police are human just like the rest of us, and are (if anything) even more likely to be nasty little ethically-challenged pricks than the rest of humanity.
"Can the police walk up to you at a public function, where you're doing absolutely nothing illegal, just minding your own business, and showing no indications of fleeing the country -- and arrest you without a warrant? Never."
Never??? Seriously dude, you hardly need to look very far to find examples of police abusing their powers (and getting away with it). And the reason they can get away with it is because there's just not a lot you can (legally) do to stop an officer arresting you (you can hardly say "I refuse to let you arrest me, you don't have proper legal authority" and expect them to listen). And the only worthwhile option you have of fighting back (in most cases) is the risky, expensive and stressful option of a civil suit.
And as far as actually getting police charged with an actual crime... heh, good luck with that. Police are very very well aware of how far they can go without even the slightest risk of punishment to themselves. One lovely example is exactly what happened with this guy - arresting them early on the weekend (or late on Friday), so they have to wait out the weekend before having a chance to go before a judge. And even if the judge then immediately orders the person's release, the cops can still laugh "ha, we chucked him in jail for 2-3 days for no reason at all."