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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?"
Didn't some guy write an article something along the lines of "Who's a Government Agent Whose Husband Disagrees With the Policies of the Current Administration?"
There was a bit of a kerfuffle over that if I recall.
"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Drink deeply or not at all."
Talk about a list that you don't want to be mistakenly included!
I wonder about legal liability for releasing this information if it leads to the death of the undercover agents...
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
When you risk getting informants or cops murdered in reprisal killings. That seems like a good line to draw.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
They don't care. This is probably from the crowd that things the only thing wrong with comitting a crime is getting caught.
That being said, they need to put the creators/curators on the list - aren't they rats themselves now?
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Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
If this site does in fact gather all its information from documents that are in the public domain (as it claims), then there's not much in the way of recourse.
I wonder if soon we'll see a prohibition on this sort of data mining...making it a crime, or at least a regulated activity, to collate publically available data into a more usable form. I don't see how such a law could be enforced, however, since data-mining technology is already available to practically everyone. Perhaps we'll see restrictions on data-mining technology we currently see on encryption algorithms.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
What exactly is the whole premise behind this idea, if not to protect those who do wrong from being called out or caught? Isn't the whole point of being a whistleblower or informant that you can either help put bad guys behind bars or expose a corporate scandal or safety breach without fear of reprisal, because your identity is kept secret? Or am I completely missing the point here? It just seems to be that the whole point of this website is to give bad guys the ability to track down and "punish" those who actually help the authorities curtail their wrongdoings.
If judges and prosecutors are going to use people's MySpace, Facebook, and Google search results against them and claim, "Hey, it's a public record!" then they shouldn't be surprised or outraged by this. The whole trend of using publicly available online data to snoop on people is a two way street.
If they are using public records to compile the list, then how "secret" is the information expected to be?
If anyone *really* wants somebody from this list dead, doesn't it seem reasonable to think think they would've acted on that desire back when the information originally became public in the respective court case?
in east coast cities like baltimore and philadephia, street violence continues unabated, and police have a problem getting witnesses to cooperate in shooting death investigations due to t-shirts, songs, and the like that demonize cooperating with the police
but of course, you will hear the regular cacophony of folks here on slashdot who can only think of subjects like this in a vacuum, outside of real world effects, and support "who's a rat", just because it's vaguely antigovernment
as if the government is the source of all of our problems in the world. as if the police are only the brutal shock troops of tyranny
gee, i dunno, maye sometimes law enforcement is there to fight simple straightforward crime and protect us and we should help them do that?
i know, wacky reactionary ultraconservative fascist and authoritarian of me to say that, huh?
pffft
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If the site puts law enforcement officers in danger, it should not be protected by free speech. It should be taken down.
I'm getting the feeling that many Slashdotters really, really hate law enforcement.
"This definitely seems like attack on law and order - when properly authorized and overseen, undercover investigations are one of the few legitimate means of acting to prevent crime in a way that can be ethically and logically defensible for a state."
Bullshit. Informants are often criminals themselves and are paid for their information. Undercover policework walks a very thin line to keep from crossing over into entrapment. Not to mention, almost all of the "wrongdoing" that this network of lies is trying to stop is victimless drug crime.
If you fall off a building, go real limp, because maybe you'll look like a dummy and people will be like hey, free dummy
Is the aggregation the problem, or the disclosure? The information is already publicly available, it is simply being pulled together and republished. If the disclosure is the problem, then the law surrounding the initial disclosure should be changed. If the aggregation is the problem, any remedy needs to give careful consideration to the fact that someone with sufficient resources can go ahead and get this information any time they want it, whereas people without those resources can not. Yet another reason to make sure that you are rich and powerful.
At the moment, it doesn't appear to be illegal. If there is no good way to change that, tough noogies for law enforcement.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Let's face facts here, the vast majority of prison inmates, people whose lives have been ruined by our justice system, are in there for victimless crimes involving drugs. Undercover agents are often instrumental in putting them in there. They're not making the world a better place.
They use lies, deceit and misdirection as the tools of their trade, to put normal people in jails and prisons where they are systematically abused and indoctrinated into actual hard criminal activities, to the detriment of all society. Your average person who gets charged with the average crime that an undercover agent helps to bring about also has no chance of getting a job afterwards as well, because he's got a criminal record now. Which means he's now stuck with either a low paying job for the rest of his life, or a life of crime in order to pay the rent.
Yea, we need to stop all the data mining going on to research the cure for cancer. In addition, we need to stop the data mining looking for intellegent life in space. Heck, we need to stop the data mining involved in global warming research. Dude, here's your sign.
In God we trust, all others require data.
So basically, everything goes as long as it's somehow difficult or annoying to do it? But as soon as an automated system is up, then it becomes illegal?
Riddle me this, is it right or wrong to have the identifying information available in court orders etc? If it's right, this guy has done nothing wrong. And if it's wrong, it shouldn't have been available in the first place (AND you support oppressive, secretive gov'ts, but that's an argument for another day). Either way, it's not this guy's fault. Unless it's also Google's and pretty much every other entity on Earth capable of compiling a list of things.
Global warming is a cube.
The question posed at the end of the summary is wrong; it implies secrecy through obscurity.
If the information is available from court files online, then it has already passed the legal transparency barrier.
Obviously, the problem here is that the names of those informants and undercover agents have already made it to the public sections of the court files, instead of being censored appropriately - especially nowadays that everything is searchable.
The website seems to be suspended. However, the screenshot from the nytimes article shows that the site also encourage users to submit information. Users can submit profiles of others, and I wonder who verifies the information? It seems like an easy task to falsely submit someone's name, and seriously harm their reputation.
Well, that is the point of the sex offender lists. Whether you agree with them or not, it is plainly obvious that the lists were designed to help generate vigilante behavior.
Good for him, drug dealers are the freedom fighters in the War on Drug Users. Anyone taking that kind of risk upon themselves to distribute marijuana to needy people is a hero in my book.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Publicly publishing already publicly available even if not widely known true information about matters of public concern is about as protected an act as there is under the first amendment.
How about the legal drug, alcohol? We need to keep in mind that legal recreational drugs are already present and that most users of those drugs don't harm others.