Slashdot Mirror
HOPE Speaker Rombom Charged with Witness Tampering
An anonymous reader writes "Steven Rombom -- a.k.a. "Steven Rambam" -- the licensed private investigator who was arrested Saturday by FBI agents minutes before his talk on privacy at the Hope Number Six hacker convention in New York -- is being charged with witness tampering and obstruction of justice in a money laundering case the government is pursuing against Albert Santoro, a former Brooklyn assistant district attorney, according to Washingtonpost.com's Security Fix blog. The government alleges that Santoro hired Rombom to locate a government confidential informant whom Santoro accuses of entrapment, and that Rombom visited the informant's in-laws under the guise of an FBI agent and tried to convince them tha their son-in-law was a danger to their daughter and grandkids."
Lets take a look at some of the gems.
And this classic:
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Anything that potentially induces a witness to fail to testify, or to alter their testimony, qualifies at witness tampering. In this case lying to the in-laws was intended to create consequences for the witness if he were to proceed as a witness for the prosecution. The expectation on the witness's part would be that if he continued with testifying that the consequences would escalate, possibly to violence.
I'm surprised they're not also charging him with impersonating a federal agent which is a serious crime in and of itself. Though they may still lay such charges against him, and it sounds like it'd be pretty damn impossible for him to beat the wrap on that.
He's being charged with Witness Tampering. What's not clear? The defendent (allegedly) had Rombom locate the government's CI against him, and then try to intimidate the informant by turning his in-laws against him; exerting any pressure on a witness is illegal. I'm surprised they're not charging him with impersonating a law enforcement officer, too.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
He did get what he deserved. Thats the point. He was charged and taken into custody for being suspected of a crime. He hasn't been proven guilty yet. He's not in prison either.
Yeah, because you can trivially find people at conventions, and there's no way the FBI running around looking for him to arrest might have tipped him off and caused him to flee.
Seriously, a lot of these comments are damn stupid. The absolute best way to arrest someone is to learn they will be exactly at a certain place exactly at a certain time, and then show up there. They probably had a guy sitting outside the prep room, and when he shows up they just grabbed him. It's a much smarter idea than running around the conference willy-nilly and disturbing things and having word get back to him and him fleeing and them having to shut down the airports and wasting tons of tax money.
And, incidentally, police do this all the time. If you don't know they're after you, they wait until you're in a known location before going after you. Like, if you're in your house, they might wait for you to start getting in your car before pulling in behind you and blocking you in.
The police openly approaching someone over open ground is a good way for them to start running. Openly approaching someone at a conference, where it can take quite some time to find someone and there are all those people around, would be completely irresponsible behavior.
Whether or not he's guilty is another matter, but the method of his arrest is not questionable.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
How does lying to the in-laws help obstruct justice?
Specifically, opening up a witness to intimidation by relaying his personal details to the people the FBI is trying to hide him from is obstruction of justice because it might cause him not to testify.
Scummy is understandable, but only when it's goal-directed.
When the goal is exposing a witness under federal protection to the very criminals they're trying to hide him from, you better be happy that people can be arrested for that.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The advantage to arresting him after is that it reduces the likelihood of the event getting slashdotted. The disadvantage is that he may slip away, it wastes the arresting officers' time as the audience plays the perennial game of "spot the narc" and takes pictures of them for posting to their websites, and politically slapping down crackers in public is a desirable act to discourage other casual crackers.
Unfortunately, I now expect that oh-so-Confidential-Informant to have their name and personal details splattered all over the web by the more amused of the crackers in the crowd. Doing this arrest publicly was not a good way to keep a Confidential Informant confidential. And I wonder if, in fact, Mr. Rambam's alleged claims about the informant as a dangerous person are well-founded: they may be, given the FBI's history of hiring and protecting extremely dangerous criminals as informants. (Whitey Bulger comes to mind as an example of the FBI protecting murderers from prosecution.)