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GoDaddy Silences RateMyCop.com
mikesd81 writes "Wired is running a story about GoDaddy shutting down a police watchdog site called RateMyCop. However, GoDaddy can't seem to give a consistent answer as for why. From the article: 'RateMyCop founder Gino Sesto says he was given no notice of the suspension. When he called GoDaddy, the company told him that he'd been shut down for suspicious activity. When Sesto got a supervisor on the phone, the company changed its story and claimed the site had surpassed its 3 terabyte bandwidth limit, a claim that Sesto says is nonsense. "How can it be overloaded when it only had 80,000 page views today, and 400,000 yesterday?" Sesto says police can post comments as well, and a future version of the site will allow them to authenticate themselves to post rebuttals more prominently. Chief Dyer wants to get legislation passed that would make RateMyCop.com illegal, which, of course, wouldn't pass constitutional muster in any court in America.'"
I am hopeful that mankind can avoid ending up like in 1984, for the simple reason that the same technology that enables today's widespread spying by our government on its own citizens can also be leveraged to help us keep tabs on them. Even if they make sites like this one illegal, they will be hosted elsewhere. Furthermore, unless they figure out how to take away all of our camera cell phones, tiny solid state audio recorders, etc then we will continue to have vastly more power to document police corruption than we did just 10 years ago when you'd have to have a camcorder at hand, charged and with a tape in it, to capture anything.
I might even go so far as to say that I'd _like_ to see the government try and crack down on sites like this (and wikileaks etc), as this will only draw more attention to the problem, causing replication of the data and hastening the process of smart people finding even better general solutions for circumventing censorship.
The current situation in America really does look like 1984 already - not just the spying and media manipulation, but also the continuous fearmongering and blatant lies to justify this protracted and costly war. However I believe there really is hope for us to turn this around, and that the solution lies in leveraging the internet, encryption, and the same technologies being used now to spy on us. Let's keep finding better ways to protect information, let's keep uncovering the corruption, and let's turn this around before it's too late.
AFAIK this site went down after it was mentioned on Fark last night. That could easily surpass the limit for a GoDaddy hosted site.
Some punk kid shoots out my headlight with a BB gun. I'm driving to the store to get a replacement. You're saying I should get pulled over on an equipment violation that I'm in the process of correcting?
How about speeding to the hospital because I've got someone suffering a heart attack in the back seat, and the ambulance would have taken another 10 minutes. I'm doing 50 in a 35 zone with light traffic. The cop should give me a ticket right there? Or perhaps escort me to the hospital THEN ticket me?
Even Rule of Law can be taken too far.
become a participant for http://www.copwatch.org/ .
All you gotta do is just simply watch the police go about their usuall routine. If they threaten you to leave remind them that they are public servants and that you are fully within the scope of the law if doing so
Go on and observe, It is your patriotic duty!
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
The site is a stupid, terrible idea anyway. I'm personally aware of many people who have an irrational hatred for the police and police officers, simply because of what they are.
Yes, you have bad cops. You've also got a lot of good cops who would be harassed and defamed by users of this site. Frankly, it's as stupid as that site that lets high school kids make unsubstantiated complaints about their teachers. Just because you have free speech, doesn't mean that you can use it to make a person's life hell.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
You mean sort of how sometimes the citizens they serve are unfairly maligned by baseless charges?
My oh my, but why should being hoisted by your own petard not be permitted?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
A former employee of my company had a handicapped parking permit, and she was told by the police that because of her handicapped parking permit, in Illinois the parking rules basically did not apply to her. She could pretty much park anywhere and not get a ticket. She'd park all day in the two hour parking spaces on the street, park across the lines, you name it - and there was nothing the police could do - nor did they make any attempt.
Had she been blocking traffic, that might have been another question, but the simple reality of it was that she never got a parking ticket in a town that lives on parking ticket income.
Putting moderation advice in your
This is a few minutes away from where I live: A driver got a ticket for driving too fast to the hospital. He was taking his buddy who was accidentally hit by a co-worker's powerful nail gun.
Now if this cop only had discretion enough to waive the ticket.
Those in positions of power must not have the same protections as those who are powerless.
1: The position of police officer is a position of great power.
2: The position of police officer is extremely attractive to sociopaths.
3: Some (many) police agencies are--umm--less than perfect at filtering out these especially-eager applicants. Some departments do not filter at all (i.e. they don't perform personality inventories on applicants), with the obvious results. Given that non-sociopaths generally strongly dislike working with sociopaths, it stands to reason that these departments quickly become dominated by the latter. I've lived in city with a police department that did not test its applicants for mental disorders, and that's a large part of the reason I now live in a city with a police department that does.
4: It does not make sense to give a person in a position of power all the protections that are afforded to others. For those in a position to cause suffering to members of society, the interest of the society in preventing abuse clearly outweighs the interest of the individual. (If you want all the usual job protections, don't pursue a job that lets you hurt people.)
Yes, some police officers will be treated unfairly in such a forum. Some will be publicly embarrassed when they don't deserve it. If the forum is effective, some will lose their jobs when they shouldn't. I would think it would even make undercover operations more difficult. All these issues are far outweighed by the benefit of exposing those who should not be allowed to be in positions of power.
Regardless of whether you believe police discretion is fair (it should be, but it isn't, because police officers are people too and therefore by definition unfair) it is necessary for them to do their jobs.
Discretion in itself is fine with me. What's not OK is laws that are only tolerable because discretion allows them to be ignored most of the time and lawmakers who write them that way under the assumption that discretion WILL be used.
Quite frankly, I don't see a point in a website like this. There are plenty of venues which one can use if one feels that one has been unfairly discriminated against by law enforcement, not the least of which are the courts.
If you're going to court with it, a site like that could be a good place to look for witnesses who can testify to a pattern of abuses and establish credibility. Even anonymous users might respond privatly to a posting requesting assistance in court.