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Site Claims to Reveal 'Tattle-tales'
Dekortage writes "Have you ever ratted somebody out? If it was a legal case, you might end up on Who's A Rat, an online database of police informants and undercover agents, identified through various publicly-available documents such as court briefings. The data-mined information is now available online at a price. As reported in the New York Times, 'The site says it has identified 4,300 informers and 400 undercover agents, many of them from documents obtained from court files available on the Internet.' Understandably, U.S. judges and law enforcement agents are upset, although defense lawyers seem to like the idea. Where do you draw the line between legal transparency and secrecy?"
...I am!
Registrant:
Sean Bucci
Sean Bucci
23 Marshall Street
North Reading, MA 01864
US
Email: SeanB00@aol.com
Registrar Name....: REGISTER.COM, INC.
Registrar Whois...: whois.register.com
Registrar Homepage: www.register.com
Domain Name: whoisarat.com
Created on..............: Fri, May 21, 2004
Expires on..............: Mon, May 21, 2007
Record last updated on..: Tue, Jan 02, 2007
Administrative Contact:
Who''s a Rat
Anthony Capone
9 Tanbark Circuit , Suite 1945
Werrington Downs, NSW2747
AU
Phone: (02) 9475-0699
Email: contact@whosarat.com
Technical Contact:
Who''s a Rat
Anthony Capone
9 Tanbark Circuit , Suite 1945
Werrington Downs, NSW2747
AU
Phone: (02) 9475-0699
Email: contact@whosarat.com
DNS Servers:
ns32.servershost.net
Also, one of the MAJOR purchasers of data mining services: law enforcement. I work for the IT staff at a local county government (which includes the Sheriff's department naturally). They have a subscription to a service (it's run by the same company that does LexisNexis) that lets them look up ALL KINDS of information on people. You want a Blue . . . maybe Grey SUV registered within 50 miles of a crime scene that has a 5 and either an I or 1 in the license number? Yeah, it'll pull that up for you. You want a GIS driven map showing every sex offender within a certain radius of a coordinate, complete the mug shots and everything? It'll do that. You want to find every person remotely connected to a suspect? As a demonstration the sales guy plugged in a random person from our office and it brought up a list a list that included a college roommate of his wife from 20+ years ago. All of it was sorted by "closeness" and it was a long ways from him, but it found it.
ALL of this information was data mined from public record. Basically, everything you could want to know about someone or something they had, and it was for sale. Only restriction is that they blank out the SSN of people if you're not law enforcement (we had to give specific IP's of the machines using the service so that they could ID us and open that up too).
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
When you risk getting informants or cops murdered in reprisal killings. That seems like a good line to draw.
Reprisal killings are this big scary monster that is blown way out of proportion. About 50 officers a year are murdered, and in '04, there were ~850,000 officers in the US. That's a homicide victim rate of 0.00058%. Guess what it is nation-wide? 0.0056%. You read that correctly. Police officers have a homicide victim rate that is one tenth that of the general population despite working a job we'd assume puts them at more danger of being murdered. The #1 cause of death for police? Traffic collisions, overwhelmingly. Don't believe me? Go check out the DoJ and FBI statistics; they spend a lot of effort compiling these stats.
On the flip side, "snitches" are a huge problem, as are "expert" witnesses. If you want to be scared out of your mind, read John Grisham's The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town, ISBN 0385517238. A hick prosecutor and police department, with plenty of help from a state crime lab "expert", put SEVERAL men on DEATH ROW despite massive flaws in the evidence and witnesses against them and horrendously flawed trials.
Please help metamoderate.
Denying that drug use is a victimless crime is astonishingly ignorant... of the definition of "victimless crime".
Drug abuse does increase the likelihood of other crimes which do have victims, but drug use in and of itself is indeed victimless. (Hint: If you're consensually engaging in behavior which harms you, you're not a victim. Stupid, yes. A victim, no).