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

[timster]

But what if you were the Police office who unfairly got poor reviews because you arested someone who deserved it..

So what? Free speech has nothing to do with what's "fair".

Re:1984

[Wandering Wombat]

So far, they've pepper-sprayed a girl having an asthma attack, kicked a pregnant woman in the stomach, illegally searched my car for pipe bombs, rear-ended me by driving with their lights out, and told me to watch out for "indians with axes" at night. I'd hate to see what they'd do if they actually knew our NAMES.

Re:1984

[Damocles the Elder]

Several things. One, free speech. Two, it even says in the summary about how they're hoping to allow cops to post rebuttals. Three, I'd rather have people venting at cops in a public forum then getting steamed enough to pop like the cork on bad wine (I recall a story a couple weeks ago about someone shooting up a town hall and killing several people therein over parking tickets).

Re:1984

[MrSteve007]

Of course the site certainly could be used to shine a positive spotlight on the great officers we also have. The last time I was pulled over was a couple months ago. It was a female state trooper who pulled me over for doing 10 over on a county highway at 10pm and I had a trailer tail light out. I only got a warning, but it was actually an 'enjoyable' event. I was so impressed with her professionalism and personable attitude during the stop that I wish I would have gotten her name so I could write her superior to say she was an outstanding officer. When I worked in media, I knew many officers personally - they too were great to work with. A site like this would be useful to post this info to.

Re:1984

[element-o.p.]

How was this moderated as insightful? It's not even consistent:

But what if you were the Police office who unfairly got poor reviews because you arested someone who deserved it...Being a policeman is not a good job if you want to be popular...Police also need a strong watchdog towards them because they fail to police themselfs (sic)...There are a lot of good cops but there are also a Lot of bad cops. and we do need find a way to get rid of the bad ones...
I agree; there are good cops and bad cops. My wife used to be a police dispatcher where I live, and by virtue of that, I met a lot of cops. Every one I met was a pretty good guy (or gal), but I have had run-ins with cops who seemed to have a severe case of "Barney Fife syndrome". For example:
* when I stopped behind the stop sign at an intersection, waited for a car to clear the intersection, then drove through the intersection (all as I was supposed to do), but was pulled over by a cop who couldn't see me stop at the stop sign because of a bush on the corner of the third street where he was stopped. He intended to give me a ticket for failure to stop until the passenger in the car with me verified that I had, in fact, stopped;
* when, as a teenager, I was asked for ID while standing in my own driveway in front of my own open front door at dusk. I was doing absolutely nothing suspicious (talking with my g/f), I was in a place where I absolutely had a right to be, and I most likely hadn't been anywhere else since I was barefoot at the time (in fact, I had been in the shower until my g/f came by).

IMHO, web sites like this one are *exactly* what the framers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights had in mind when they drafted the First Amendment. While that doesn't preclude GoDaddy from terminating a domain (it's a private entity, not a public one), it does reflect poorly on GoDaddy.

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

[dreamchaser]

I have been pulled more than once over and every time I have been treated with respect. You're making huge generalizations. Most police and troopers are good people. Heck, here in PA the State Police protested a raise in fines by not giving ANY tickets for a period of time a few years ago.

Are some cops assholes on a power trip? Sure. Are most just decent hard working people? Yep.

Re:1984

[wumingzi]

Oh, and considering the police, teachers and professors already have regular reviews of their performance what on earth do these "rating" sites bring to the table other than the chance to rant?

I wont speak to teachers and professors, but I'd say the police review mechanism may be a little flawed.

Here in my hometown, 40-odd people have been killed by police officers since 1980. Number of cases where a fatality shooting by a police officer resulted in criminal prosecution? Zero. Not zero since 1980. Zero since the establishment of the city.

I don't have any particular axe to grind with the police. I don't get pulled over very often, and the few times it's happened, the officers have been polite and professional. But please. Not one criminal prosecution in over 150 years? Just from a point of statistics, I'd say something is wrong here.

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.

Re:1984

[zen-theorist]

Of course the site certainly could be used to shine a positive spotlight on the great officers we also have. The last time I was pulled over was a couple months ago. It was a female state trooper who pulled me over for doing 10 over on a county highway at 10pm and I had a trailer tail light out. I only got a warning, but it was actually an 'enjoyable' event. I was so impressed with her professionalism and personable attitude during the stop that I wish I would have gotten her name so I could write her superior to say she was an outstanding officer. When I worked in media, I knew many officers personally - they too were great to work with. A site like this would be useful to post this info to.

hmm, so what you're saying is she was hot!

Re:1984

[elrous0]

Every time I see someone pulled over, I just thank God I'm white.

Re:1984

[D'Sphitz]

GREAT SERVICE, WOULD SPEED AGAIN!!!! A+++++++











(caps filter ruined this joke jfkl jflkdjlkfj skldjf lksdjklf jaskdlj fkldj ealkjfkls jfkljsdaklfjsdkl )

Hot or not?

[Izabael_DaJinn]

I want a site with all their pictures so I can rate them 1-10 based on looks alone.

Hot-or-not-cop.com.

The site is back up now.

[Paeva]

ratemycop.com is back up now... which makes this story pretty uninteresting.

Re:The site is back up now.

[spud603]

ratemycop.com is back up now... which makes this story pretty uninteresting. Not for long... slashdot may be even more effective than the host pulling the plug.

This is not the first time.

[hilather]

This is not the first time GoDaddy has shut down sites without notice or just cause. Fyodor's seclist was shut down by them quite some time ago.

Our popular SecLists.Org public mailing list archive is back up and running after it was inexcusably shut down with no notice by our soon-to-be-former domain registrar GoDaddy at the behest of MySpace.Com. We believe web site content is the responsibility of the site owner (registrant) and (if that fails) hosting or bandwidth provider. If the whois contact data is valid, registrars shouldn't be involved without a court order. They even started up a website to document the poor customer service GoDaddy provides http://nodaddy.com/

Nothing to hide argument

[warrior_s]

If cops are not doing anything illegal they have nothing to hide..

We should definitely have websites like this.

where 1984 comes from

[sdedeo]

As for the 1984 allegories? I suspect that you all-too easily attribute to malice what can be more easily attributed to incompetence, greed, and disparate desires that happen to run in parallel.

I suspect that you all-too easily assume that the erosion of our freedoms is driven mainly by malicious intent.

Re:not enough boobies, that's why

[sm62704]

The ONLY valid reasons I can come up with why anyone would want this site down are the exposing of undercover officers (not good for anyone, especially the undercover cops, except the criminals they're infiltrating)

I disagree VEHEMENTLY. I don't think Secret Police belong in any country that claims to be a free society. IMO every police agent should be in uniform with his or her badge prominently displayed. Rather than bring a slashdotting to my site, I'll reproduce a blog posting from September 2005 here in its entirety.

A few weeks ago while I was eating lunch at Top Cat's on Stevenson, I saw something that unnerved me a little bit.
Four middle aged men wearing suits were sitting at a nearby table. One of them wore a pistol in a holster, as if he were a character in a TV western, only without the hat.

Nobody seemed to notice or mind. Of course, I noticed and I minded, but there would have been no way for anybody to notice that I noticed, either. My assumption was that these were cops; they looked like cops.

But I had a nagging worry. What if they weren't cops? What if they were here to rob and kill the restaraunt's workers and patrons?

What if they were cops and another Secret Policeman from another jurisdiction (say, the county or state) mistook them for thugs and bullets started flying?

I didn't even finish my beer that day. As soon as my lunch was done I was out of there. I'm uncomfortable around firearms, having been taught firearm safety and hunting at a young age. I mean, shit happens, you know?

The Secret Police are more commonly referred to in the mainstream media as "undercover agents" or "undercover police," and their sole function is to enforce laws that should never been passed, such as alcohol prohibition in the 1920s or anti-prostitution laws today. Laws that nobody is going to call the police for because nobody is victimized by those crimes that should not be criminal.

"The prostitute is the pimp's victim," the authoritarian anti-freedom busybodies whine. If so, why does this victim wind up in jail? These laws make little sense to me.

Besides, if prostitution were legal I could get laid. But that is beside this post's point. And trying to stick to the point I'm not going to mince words and use euphamisms like "undercover" but call them what they really are: the Secret Police, not at all unlike Soviet Russia's Secret Police or Hitler's Facist Secret Police, or the Secret Police in Communist China.

They're not "undercover agents" dammit, they're Secret Police. 1984 may have been a little late, but Orwell was wrong about one thing- when the city council voted to put the spy cameras on 5th street last week (sorry, I can't find a link) they neglected to vote for any money for the "Big Brother is watching!" posters.

Cameras everywhere and Secret Police. Our freedom has been gone for quite some time now. The 9-11 terrorists only speeded up a process that was already underway.

But back to the Secret Police.

Today I heard on the news that what I feared at Top Cat's happened at the Citrus Bowl yesterday. At the inevitable tailgate party, the Secret Police were (of course) sneakily wandering through the crowd pretending to be football fans when a drunken brawl broke out.

A Secret Policeman intervened, and while trying to break up the fight, drew his weapon and fired into the air. Another cop saw this, assumed logically and rationally that this was an armed drunken brawler and shot him dead, in the back.

He died slowly, coughing up blood. The news reports I saw didn't say whether the cop killer was a uniformed police officer or another Secret Policeman.

Here are a few links to mainstream news about it: The Orlando Sentinal, the Tampa Bay C

competence isn't necessary to suppress

[SuperBanana]

it would be easier to put a colony on Mars than to organize that gaggle into any sort of overlord-type Big Brother organization...

I've often rolled my eyes when people have suggested varying data-collection-from-various-agencies kind of conspiracies; here in Massachusetts, they can't even handle informing the Registry of Motor Vehicles when you've paid a parking ticket that was overdue.

However, competence and thoroughness are not necessary to suppress and control. You can have a third world dictator whose goons are lazy slobs and sleep all day and never manage to come to the right conclusions on investigations when they're not taking naps. What makes them feared is whether they run around shooting people.

Want a great example? The TSA. They're feared and hated, and it has nothing to do with them being thorough or competent. Tests have repeatedly shown that they miss more than half the stuff secret testers try to sneak by. Rather, it is their complete ineptitude and nearly limitless power- you never know if you're going to get pulled out for additional screening, or told your car key is a 'switchblade' key and thus can't be allowed on, or told to drink your own breast milk because agents think it's liquid explosives instead of milk for your baby, or, or, or...and there's always the thought that you could end up in Gitmo with a black bag over your head 18 hours a day.

In fact, incompetence and power are more likely to suppress the population, because now they can't even count on living by keeping their noses squeaky clean.

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.

fuck undercover

[Deanalator]

You know what? Fuck undercover cops. The idea that my tax dollars go towards tricking people into doing illegal activities annoys me to no end. This website has far more potential for good than bad. Hell, I am a clean looking law biding white male, and I have been arrested and lied to by police. Just last week I had three rifles pointed at me by overzealous police. A friend of mine from Kenya who has never committed a crime in his life gets thrown down on the street with guns pointed at his head about once a month. How the fuck is that fair, or even legal?

I should mention that I live in Portland, Oregon. We have one of the lowest crime rates in the country. Whenever there is a story of a shooting on the news, it is most likely a police officer shooting an unarmed man. A few years back, police tasered a man to death while he was still in his car with his seatbelt on. The excuse that the police gave was that it looked like he was putting drugs in his mouth.

A couple summers ago, in the neighborhood I grew up in (A peaceful lower middle class suburban neighbourhood, I never heard of a crime anywhere in the area the entire 18 years I lived there), a woman called the police saying that her 18 year old son was suicidal, and he needed help. When the police arrived, three officers shot him a total of 8 times in the back.
http://blog.oregonlive.com/washingtoncounty/2008/01/previous_stories_and_the_tort.html

These police officers are all back on duty doing their regular routines after murdering all of these people. These are the people that are protecting and serving me. This is why we need services like this.

Cops don't actually get shot that much.

[ClioCJS]

Taxi drivers, fishermen, and garbage men all die at a rate greater than police. This was in mainstream media just a few months ago -- article probably still up at CNN.com. Meanwhile, police act like this, and pretty much get away with it the majority of the time. Criticism is more than necessary, and being skewed has nothing to do with it -- They are already skewed by being in the position they are. They can already shoot someone in the back and have internal affairs clear it in a week. That's pretty skewed too. Like the others said, Free Speech isn't necessarily about being fair. You need a little more perspective into the police. Go RSS subscribe to BadCopNews and read EVERY article for 6 months and tell me if your worldview is not changed by the experience.

Back to the fundamental issue: GoDaddy.

[Futurepower(R)]

I'm keeping a list of stories about GoDaddy on Slashdot, in order by date:
Go Daddy Usurps Network Solutions (2005-05-04)
GoDaddy Serves Blank Pages to Safari & Opera (2005-12-08)
GoDaddy.com Dumps Linux for Microsoft (2006-03-23)
GoDaddy Holds Domains Hostage (2006-06-17)
GoDaddy Caves To Irish Legal Threat (2006-09-16)
MySpace and GoDaddy Shut Down Security Site (2007-01-26)
That incident prompted this web site:
Exposing the Many Reasons Not to Trust GoDaddy with Your Domain Names.
Alternative Registrars to GoDaddy? (2007-02-03)
GoDaddy Bobbles DST Changeover? (2007-03-11)
850K RegisterFly Domains Moved To GoDaddy (2007-05-29)
GoDaddy Silences RateMyCop.com (2008-03-12)

Any error or stories not included?