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.'"

Comments

1984

[seanadams.com]

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.

Re:1984

[mixmatch]

I'm sorry, the fact that someone was going to town hall meetings and talking nonsense and that same person went in and shot people don't seem to have any particular connection to me. Did free speech allow and/or encourage the person to shoot people? Would have shutting him up/barring him from the meetings somehow pacified this individual? Is there a direct correlation between people who are boisterous and loud and people that irrationally shoot others? Certainly I would agree with your statement that free speech is a double-edged sword in that you can be publicly criticized in the same way that you critique others, but I don't see the connection with the violent acts that followed.

Re:1984

[rtechie]

Cops have a sucky enough job as it is and while I see a rating system like this as useful for many things, it'll be used for pettiness most of all. The serious issues cops get called out on have more efficient means of getting handled. It's very difficult for me to imagine what tangible harm could be caused by internet review of police officers. Sure, they might be ANNOYED that people on the internet are talking smack about them, but so what? What do they really "suffer" exactly? You mentioned games, are game designers cripped by the criticism they receive on web forums? I don't think so.

And police officers aren't like game designers. Police officers have the right to come into your house and kill you. Given that, I think they deserve a bit of scrutiny. Hell, I think they deserve a LOT of scrutiny, like 24/7 surveillance, GPS implants, weekly gas spectrograph drug tests, yearly competency testing, affirmative action, no unions, etc.

Obviously the problems with police officers aren't getting handled, that's why there is all the guerrilla surveillance going on.

handicappped permit trumps all, in some places

[name_already_taken]

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.