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Having Your ID Stolen Leads to Job Loss, Prosecution
ConfusedVorlon writes "The BBC reports on the sad case of Simon Bunce. Mr. Bunce had his identity stolen, and credit cards were made to capitalize on the theft. Some of those cards were used at sites offering child pornography, and as a result Mr. Bunce was swept up in Operation Ore. The poor man was prosecuted for his 'crime', and was eventually found innocent, but in the meantime he lost his job. It took him six months to find another at a quarter of the salary. 'The police's computer technicians take several months to examine [his computers and records], and Mr Bunce could not afford to wait to repair the damage done to his reputation. "I knew there'd been a fundamental mistake made and so I had to investigate it." Recent surveys suggest that as many as one in four Britons have been affected by it. In 2007 more than 185,000 cases of identity theft were identified by Cifas, the UK's fraud prevention service, an increase of almost 8% on 2006.'"
no one will care, because thats acceptable to protect the children.
All ongoing posts will be the back and forth on this concept.
Its not just something they say on "Law and Order"
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
The government owes him millions in damages. They are clearly the agressors here (in addition to the identity thief) -- they caused him more harm than the thief himself. The unfortunate fact is that even if he is awarded the restitution he deserves (from both guilty parties), it will come out of the taxpayer's wallet rather than the agressor's.
How society prosecutes child pornography... like a lynch mob: guilty until proven innocent and no recompense for those poor souls that did not deserve to be labeled and treated like some monster.
There is way too much leniency given to law enforcement in the process of stopping child pornography. WAY TOO MUCH.
I'm not saying that child pornography is good or even just 'not bad'... I'm saying that lynch mob mentality in prosecuting anyone suspected of it is absolutely the wrong thing to do.
Sex crime laws and their enforcement (at least in the US) are criminal in themselves. They are, at best, mostly subjective in nature and enforced with the tact of a nuclear weapon.
Victims are stigmatized, penalized, emotionally brutalized, and then forever branded as someone that people can't trust.
Laws are good to have. Not all laws are good laws. A law set by a community that cannot be amended or repealed is not a law, it's a dogma. These laws need some changes, big ones.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Or Simon Buttle?
with few exceptions, 'justice' leans in particular ways. Where children and child support are concerned, it's children first and anything else is a secondary consideration such as whether or not a man is the ACTUAL father of the children.
In a case such as this, at least in the US, a person might at least be able to sue the government for malicious prosecution and collect damages specifying that since the accusation ruined his life, that the government should therefore pay for it for a long, long time.
I have personally experienced what an accusation can do to one's employability... not even a conviction, just an arrest or an accusation. Is this an acceptable part of the justice system? I don't think so. While it's important to 'care for the victims' it's EQUALLY important to protect the rights of the accused until there is enough evidence to prove something is wrong.
In the particular case under discussion, they should never have arrested him based on credit card transactions. That is not proof of identity or of anything other than a transaction was made. And if no other evidence of a crime was present, the most they should have done is attempt to verify whether or not it was actually he that made the transaction or someone else. They could do much of that without even bothering the poor guy.
The reality is that this man is a victim of a crime... not necessarily a crime that is actually described in law, but still a violation of his life. I can't see that as acceptable. I think England is one of the last places I'd want to live... but then so is the U.S... and that's where I am now.
This man's problems were caused not by ID theft, but by suspicion of crime. It would be no different if someone seeking revenge reported him on an "anonymous tipline".
The real problem, as I see it, is that even though one may legally be innocent until proven guilty, when it comes to dealing with the public at large, the accused is presumed guilty until proven innocent, and sometimes even afterward.
Mr. Bruce's problems were caused by the society in which he lives, not the ID theft.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
If you can solve the "identity theft" problem, you won't have to worry about this in the future. Whether kiddie porn is involved or not.
And we've been over, often enough, the various means of solving "identity theft". The problem is that the burden is on the victim, not the bank issuing the cards. Despite the bank having far more information and resources than the victim.
If we would just validate the transaction instead of the "identity" of the purchaser, we'd be able to eliminate this fraud.
And it's not like it's far-fetched to think that the people purchasing child porn might use stolen or misappropriated credit cards to do so...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I think other posters have missed the point a bit by focusing on the fact that this case was about child pornography. Yes, that's a particularly egregiously aggressively policed crime, but it's hardly the only time cops will use credit cards to track who they think committed a crime. (Nominal) ownership of the credit card used should *never* be considered sufficient evidence to charge someone with *any* crime. It's probable cause to investigate, sure, but not to charge. It's only about one step more reasonable than charging someone because their real name matched the screen name used.
From the Democratic Underground:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3100544
"You're fired!"
Those are the words that millions of Americans could hear if Congress passes the SAVE Act.
The SAVE Act would require every employer in the U.S. to use so-called "electronic employment verification," cross-checking all current and potential employees' citizenship status against databases that the government itself knows are filled with errors and inaccuracies.
And what if the Social Security Administration (SSA) or Department of Homeland Security (DHS) get it wrong and can't verify a person's citizenship or right to work using their buggy database? Tough luck. That person is out of a job, with no right to appeal. And you don't even need to have your identity stolen to be so unlucky.
Does this idea bother you?
uR iGn0ranc3, Their Power
WTF? One in four? are you insane? that would be 15 million people. Does that really seem likely? Anecdotally I know substantialy more than four people and *none* of them have had their identity stolen. They are still the same people I used to know (although with ID theft the way it is who can tell?).
OK, Cifas (whoever they are) pursued 185k cases last year. There are 65M people in the uk. 65,000,000 - 185,000 = 65,000,000 (rounded up). That is not 25%, more like 0.025%. If they can only identify 0.1% of the fraud what are they actually doing? I know the gubment wastes money, but that is crazy.
Scenario: Build a database with every possible social security number.
Next, start gathering whatever information you can and entering it in that database. By theft or purchase or whatever.
How long will it be before you can, digitally, "prove" that you are any person in that database?
The attacks you are talking about are just the tip of the iceberg. It would be possible to perform such fraud on a nation-wide basis. Against just about any person in the nation.
And our system is NOT equipped to deal with such.
Okay, yeah, I've got nothing to say to that. I think I'm just going to go sit in my corner & cry about the state of the world.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
Quote: "This man's problems were caused not by ID theft, but by suspicion of crime."
So many things have been happening like that, I wonder if there is an intent to overthrow the U.S. and U.K. governments. For example, former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura said yesterday that he thinks the attack on the World Trade Center was a controlled demolition.
The U.S. Senate voted against Habeus Corpus, which provides legal protection from unlawful detention.
The U.S. government has been building prisons.
The laws, much like the new set of laws to arrest people for clicking on illegal hyperlinks, is by design set up to create an environment where even being suspected of, or attempting to view childporn is enough to get raided. Even if you have no child porn on your computer, you still get arrested and treated as a pedophile, and thats the problem with these sorts of laws. These sorts of laws cast such a wide net that it doesnt matter who is guilty or whos innocent, the purpose of the laws is simply to arrest anyone who LOOKS or SEEMS or ACTS like a pedophile, whether they actually are a pedophile or not. If you click a link, or search for child porn in Google, thats enough to get you raided because you're acting like a pedophile. And sure thats bad, or perhaps stupid, but the law says you can get prison time for ATTEMPTING to access child porn. The laws are vague enough where a lot of people can be set up, trapped, or end up in situations such as this guy.
Many like him have ACTUALLY been lynched, and killed, by the public.
Those sex offender databases often have incorrect addresses.
He had nothing to hide because he was innocent, so everything worked out in the end, right?
The same thing happened to a guy here : http://www.krem.com/topstories/stories/krem2_040208_chismcomputers.26cb2f44.html although they've yet to drag him through the courts.
A little background. Landslide was the company that sold the AVS and KEYZ age verification codes for access to adult sites. Despite the fact that they had thousands of sites, and their lawyers assured them they were not responsible for content, the government shut them down and prosecuted them over a couple of dodgy offshore sites, claiming the owners were "madams of a child porn bordello," and sent them to prison for life.
Not content with this, they then took Landslide's entire customer list, sorted it by country, and sent it out to foreign law enforcement organizations demanding they raid everyone on it. They couldn't prove anyone on it had even visited an alleged child porn site, or what they had looked at if they did, but they could use the list for "probable cause" to search the victims computers, and if they found illegal porn while doing do, they could prosecute them for that.
Most countries ignored the US demands, except for those conducting their own child abuse moral panics like the UK. The UK ran with the list, and called its version "Operation Ore."
So they ran around raiding everyone in the UK who had purchased an age verification code from Landslide, and managed to find porn on a few computers, and sometimes were able to terrorize people on the list into making incriminating admissions. Of course, everyone so targeted was featured in the UK press as "a person who had paid for access to child porn."
The problem here is not identity theft. The problem here is a fishing expedition into the lives of mostly innocent people based on something which no reasonable person would consider probable cause.
From the article:
Four years on, he is bringing a High Court action against the shopping website for allowing his personal details to be compromised. So no more internet shopping? "No, no, no. Once bitten, twice shy," says Mr Bunce, who now sells encryption services.Oh no.
http://outcampaign.org/
My reading of the story may be wrong, but I can't find anywhere in it where it says that he was prosecuted. Perhaps this is a transatlantic definition problem. Here in the UK, there are basically four stages to a criminal prosecution (yes, I have simplified).
- Arrest: The police suspect that you might have committed a crime.
- Charging: The police decide that their suspicions were correct and ask for the case to go to trial.
- Prosecution: The Crown Prosecution Service (a body independent from the police) decide that the case is likely to succeed and will be in the public interest. They prepare the prosecution case and go to the courts.
- Conviction or aquital: A court decided whether or not the defendant is guilty and if guilty imposes a penalty.
So far as I can tell, in this case Mr Bunce only passed through the first stage. The police eventually decided that he had not committed a crime and therefore didn't charge him. Now, that is not to minimise his suffering. He has clearly been very badly treated and he hope he succeeds with legal action against not only the web site, but also the police and his ex-employers. I should also point out that here in the UK police state, he will have had his finger prints and DNA taken and that these will now be retained forever (even after his death) even thought the police accept that he did nothing wrong.
A wrongful dismissal lawsuit might be helpful here. The man was innocent and the company should have supported him. If they did not trust him, they could have put him on leave. He should not have been fired unless his job performance was poor and even then they should have offered help.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=216934&cid=17629948
This is a case of fraud, not theft. This man's identity was not "stolen," but used fraudulently in an attempt to gain illegitimate access to goods and services under the guise of someone else. Using words like "identity theft" is no better than the RIAA calling copyright infringement "theft."
Child pornography is one of a few accusations where a person is presumed guilty until proven innocent... and even after he's proven innocent.
When you say "the EU Constitution", do you mean the Lisbon Treaty? If so, has that entered into force yet? I thought Ireland still had to hold a referendum on it.
If he wins his case, pretty much every online store is going to have to do an extremely thorough review of their data protection, because if you get hit for a few million each time this happens and it happens often, then you won't have a business.
And it is well overdue. So many businesses have poor data security past the initial SSL client-browser to web-server communications it isn't funny. I'm sure it's improved for many since 2004, when this happened, but being liable for the losses and damages caused by being the source of leaked data used for identity theft should get them to buck their ideas up.
Of course also to blame were the police, for grossly misusing the data they were provided. Performing arrests without any investigation is beyond reproach, and the people involve should have been fired. This situation shouldn't have happened if they had done even some basic data verification and intelligence.
As for the employer who fired him, I can understand the logic, but the guy was innocent then, so as far as I am concerned it was wrongful dismissal. This guy had done nothing wrong at any point in the proceedings. Suspension without pay would have been a reasonable alternative, with his job available if he was entirely innocent.
Cases like this are also why the legal system in the UK needs a "totally innocent" verdict, so that people's reputations don't get sullied. I bet this guy is still on all the criminal databases and comes up in job searches (hence the difficulty for someone who was clearly skilled at his job to earn £120,000 ($240,000) a year to get another job, until he settled on a £30,000 job).
Ohhh... I'm sooo scared Mr. Policeman, please use biometrics
on me, put a camera me all day and night, bug my phones and read my
mail... so I can be safe, please Mr. Policeman, I don't want to
got to jaiiiill..
So first they fix things so that SSNs and other identity information
is more or less freely accessible to anyone that wants it, then
they fix it too that once its "stolen" you're in a deep world of
hurt and shit, putting the burden of proof of innocence on you
and making it a slooow process to get out of like with Mr. Bunce here... so we all are eager to line up, be thumb-printed,
iris-scanned and infrared T-ray imaged. And get "Lifelock" too at
$$ a month so we can be saaafe.
Well you know what, I'm still not going to get in line for your
stupid Real ID scheme, ass wipes!
Mod parent flamebait/troll.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Actually I had such a dispute. Damaged my credit pretty badly at the time. I still refused to pay. To make a long story short, a man's word is not worth gold anymore, a man's word is worth not a penny, while other men's words about that man are worth more than gold.
Makes you wonder why so few people are responsible nowadays... perhaps because all they have to do is be robots at work, and vege at night. Had they had to live up to what it was they said, life might be a bit different... for all of us.
The question that must be asked is... "what makes a bunch of bankers and liars for a living, make their word more worthwhile in people's eyes than the word of a man who actually produces something tangible and sells it for a living and therefore has at least some chance that he isn't just a liar for a living?"
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
.. Oh wait, I do have something to fear after all..
This is a typical poster child to that crap defense on privacy violations.
morons.
yea it is. im no psychopath, badass wannabee or anything. i just recognize stellar shit when i see it.
this 'child pornography' scare has been made into a modern day witch hunt. its totally stupid and idiotic. no less than a medieval witch hunt - you just need to be accused by someone to be prosecuted. try it. just accuse someone, and watch their computers getting confiscated. their sensitive data, passwords, everything passing through some obscure personas in local police department.
mankind really lacking in wisdom. higher the level of disgust/horror a crime induces, the higher they are regarding that crime.
hundreds of thousands of people around the world are dying every year due to various atrocity related events, genocides, strifes, terrorism, repression, disease, hunger. but our current overly politically correct public is more appalled at the wake of pathetically negligible percentage of child pornography cases than hundreds of thousands of people dying. what ? when a child grows up, s/he is not important anymore ? s/he dying due to hunger whilst the world has the means to aid them is not something more horrible than a child pornography case ? if you just read this last sentence, and thought that child pornography is a more horrible and bigger crime, even if a second, you need to really straighten up yourself and get smart - because you yourself are judging the seriousness of a crime by the horror it induces, not its real merit. right to life is the foremost right on the face of the earth.
Read radical news here
I should have said,
Quote: "This man's problems were caused not by ID theft, but by suspicion of crime."
This man's problems were caused by government corruption, which was the point of my parent post.
Are there people who are child molesters? Yes. Is everyone who is charged, convicted, or treated for child molestation a child molester? Nope.
What happens with this crime and several others is they become weapons for women to use against men. It's very simple; accuse your husband / boyfriend of this crime and the police will arrest him immediately. Make that complaint Friday evening and you'll have 3 or 4 days to clean out the bank accounts, conceal assets, etc. before he can bail out.
Does this happen? You better believe it does. More often than most people can imagine. This abuse of the legal system (and others like it) are brought to you courtesy of your elected representatives who are giving you what you ask for: crack down on child molesters, wife abusers, etc. Too many are getting away, let's make the laws a bit more general and a bit more "guilty until proven innocent". For the win, make them so that the accused is guilty until proven guilty.
Nope, not me. But I've seen this scenario play out time and time again. I feel bad for what our country has become and cast a worried eye at England. They seem to be leading the way in the race to Fascism...
"He had nothing to hide because he was innocent, so everything worked out in the end, right~"
Fixed it for you.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The same thing occurs in big cities, where people mingle all day long, yet many buildings use intercoms to filter out "undesirables".
I prefer being able to shoot bad guys that break into my home, or trick another user of the intercom into letting them into my "home" area.
Thus I prefer to live out towards the country, where the sheriffs tend to have less "city slicker" tendencies and enforce some bullshit regulation that says I should let someone rape my woman, kill my dog, steal my property, and that I should give him the keys to my truck and feed him too, ("give him what he wants") and maybe he'll go away and not come back next time.
I was merely pointing out that a gated community where many of my friends lived was not only secured (at the obvious entry points, the roadways) by private armed security but was also secured at the "home owner" level with the residents being more than willing to bag any crook if they ever tried to break in or steal what didn't belong to them... (think cheaper than blackwater and less gung ho, but just as professional, and that's no joke either, try to meet some of these folks and observe them before passing judgment). Also, roads were maintained privately. Most of the lines were laid privately (I'm not sure on electricity or commo, but I am fairly sure that most of those people were eccentrics, not just my friends... and well off eccentrics at that.)
Balkanize all you will. The Balkans were hell before America discovered them, they will be hell long after America changes its official language to Cantonese. I should know, I was born out there.
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
All of the giant database companies (like ChoicePoint) have giant bullseyes on their databases for hackers.
Crackers or script kiddies but NOT hackers. A hacker is more likely to fix a hole in ChoicePoint's system they find then inform them of it.
FalconShould there be a Law?
sig.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
/rambleon
/rambleoff
it's public employees that have the least privacy and thus the least respect for continued protection of privacy laws. Even non-sensitive, non-financial positions frequently have full credit report disclosure (nevermind that this is basically the gov't using private sector financial systems geared toward business and the middle-class and that have a record of discrimination against minorities). I've also seen full mental health record disclosure and monitoring and polygraph for sensitive positions without any explanation of _what_ was being evaluated in a risk analysis sense (no oversight).
As a result, the people I know in police and psych and general gov't don't even bat a fucking eye about invasive information gathering and unexplained (mis)usage of information. It's all for security and risk protections--and exceptions are given under the table, on an as needed basis, etc. Again, no oversight...all good old boy. And for the record, the government is exempted from the section of the civil rights act that prohibits hiring systems that create a pattern of discrimination.
In other words, the article is dead on...though a little too nice since there is almost no quality control with the private credit agencies and still a bit hidden because it's generally only abused in govt hiring. That will probably change as agencies become better integrated and the cost of going full background checks goes down.
that will take your job for half the pay. What utterly unique skills do you have that are worth double the going rate of pay? [...] Jobs are going to go to the lowest bidder, and as an employer I get to choose, you don't. There are laws about employment discrimination that make it illegal to use just about any form of constructive "discrimination", like choosing to only hire native-born Americans.
If US companies can't hire cheap labor in the US, they are going to move their facilities to Mexico or China and save even more money.
No nation owns jobs, and any nation that tries to keep salaries artificially high is going to make itself uncompetitive and destroy its purchasing power and its industrial base.
Besides, what moral justification do you have for making several times the amount of money as a Mexican or Chinese for the same work? Where do you think the difference in salary is coming from? It's being paid, one way or another, in part by other US workersand in part by people in the rest of the world, and neither is fair.
He can't have been lynched TOO effectively, if he's still here to whine about it!
(I keed! I keed!)
If somebody steals my identity and I kill them, is it suicide? Or, since I am still alive, it is only attempted suicide?
He was not "prosecuted for his 'crime', and was eventually found innocent". "Prosecuted" implies there was a trial. He was arrested, and later the charges were dropped.
He shouldn't have been arrested either, given how slight the evidence against him was. A search was justified, but no more.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
You're an immigrant. Glad to have you! Half my neighbors are immigrants from India - and they are wonderful. However, this thread is about aliens, otherwise known as illegal immigrants. So your observations don't apply.
Most of the reason why hiring aliens is so cheap has less to do with wages, and more to do with not paying social security, employment insurance, tax withholding, medicare, etc, and all because the "employee" doesn't exist in the tax system. All it takes is a little creative accounting to cover where the (cash) wages are going to.
Prison time for windows security incompetence is something I fear of every single day. Update those virus definitions every day and ... well... maybe just leave your computer off during spring break and christmas vacation when there is an extra lag in new virus/spyware/downloader removal definitions.
I almost had a heart attack today when I found my work computer and home computer having similar lags in performance without updating anything.
Then I remembered its the time of year to clean the dust off the computer fan.
This is just ridiculous. No, plain stupid. Agree, not more than still using feet and pound for creating machines.
Why not make an encrypted 6 digits PIN code?
This is an example as the USA spreads its ineffective obsolete technology around the globe using soft power: advertising, marketing, etc.
This guy spoke about children in his bed AND mentioned the word erect ALL IN THE SAME POST.
He needs to be investigated.
Identity theft is when somebody gets a credit card issued to them in your name. This case is just regular old fraud -- somebody using your credit card number.
dom
It depends on what you call affected. I have a joint account with my wife, and her card was compromised. I guess the compromise was at the bank because the first we heard was a call from the bank saying that the card had been compromised but they had proof it was a fraud and all the transactions had been refunded. Anyway that would be two people affected, and I could believe one in 6 or one in 8.
The death penalty for anyone who is found to have lost or misused someone else's identity. Soon enough, we will either have no identity crime at all, or a planet in which there is only one living person and therefore identity theft is impractical.
(Or we could, you know, start passing laws making the banks, credit card companies, credit bureaus, and other identity-holding companies liable for triple damages for any losses incurred by someone whose identity is stolen or misused.)
Atlantis is not an island that sank, its USA that will sink, its a prediction of the future.
Blame it on all the old farts in charge who grew up as smeg head stuck up know it alls.
Asia knows the future, less govt, 10% taxes, no capitol gains tax, let people do their thing, less expenses taking care of loosers.
Sack 90% of the govt, they deserve unemployment because they do not benefit mankind.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Not intending to Godwin this but:
"The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation." -Adolph Hitler
"The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation." --Adolph Hiter
Make more sense now?
A big lawsuit against the UK government, most probable carried to the EU level, not only will result in a big compensation (for psychological damages), but also make agencies to be more careful.
The best IDs were invented pre war days with IBMs help etc.... using census info and guess what the nazis used that data for'?
Yes... persecution.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Even seeing a baby smile can make my day. I like playing with children. But they don't turn me on in any way at all. Never have, and I can't image they ever will. But I have started to pay less attention to children in general for the above reasons.
The sad thing about these situations is also thus. If your choice to flee is unavailable, and the only other is to confront your invader (likely leading to physical confrontation), you are actually more likely to get through court proceedings if he/she is dead.
There are enough cases where an invader has broken into a home, and threatened the occupants, but been beaten off, only to threaten them again through the courts. Dead invaders, on the other hand, do not have such an options, and in most cases the justice system does have better things to do than make a case for a dead criminal (unless he/she was obviously killed while not a threat, e.g. shot in the back while on the ground, etc).
Why am I not surprised by any of this?
Under UK law, if you are accused even informally of so much as thinking about looking at child pornography (which is defined as any picture apparently depicting a child -- even if they are over 18 in real life, even if they are fully-clothed, and even non-photo-realistic drawings count) then you are automatically considered guilty, even despite possibly being later proved innocent.
It's already got to the point where parents aren't allowed to film their kids' school nativity plays (in case the recordings get into the wrong hands) and adults are unwilling to volunteer to work with kids (because of the bureaucracy, the paperwork and the interviews; it's considerably less bother for an ex-embezzler who's served his time to get a job cleaning bank vaults after all the staff have gone home). Next thing, schools won't even put on plays at all.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
TFA didn't mention Mr. Bunce's armaments, fortunately he was attacked from Indonesia so no lives were lost.
"The odds are much better that you'll get shot with your own gun in the scenario you describe."
These odds you mention, I have heard before. (derision deleted)
"consider that police officers miss nearly 90% of the time when they discharge their weapons. They have lots of training up front and ongoing training in firearms use which you almost certainly do not have. What makes you think your skills are better than theirs?"
Considering the native aptitude of some of the people selected for police service, which no amount of training can compensate for, a 10% hit rate sounds about right. I'm guessing those were mostly within three meters.
I can't speak for DaedalusHKX, but I have been shot at, and if I'd been armed at the time, I'd have returned fire calmly and accurately. Instead I had to calmly walk over and take the rifle away from the guy and beat him for a while.
I can recall four times I've asked for service from the police, the times when the thief was there, the cops didn't even take their names. Otherwise, it was "probable cause" for a check on my bonafides, and my gun's. I hate to be down on cops, Its a bad job that I don't want, But most of the people available are NOT QUALIFIED and we all need to look out for ourselves.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
There's a simple formula you can apply to mobs:
The inverse of the IQ of a mob is equal to the sum of the inverses of the IQs of each of its individual members.
Just like resistors in parallel.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
This all comes down to the crazy law system (on both sides of the Atlantic), that allows anonymity for the "victims" or crime, and / or valuable witnesses in such cases, but allows the accused to have his name and photo smeared all over the front page of the local rag.
Innocent until proven guilty is one thing, but in the real world, you are innocent only up to the point The Sun or The National Inquirer decides you are not. Once you are identified for the world to see, innocence is no defense against the cynicism and general "I thought there was something shifty about him" mentality that pervades our society.
Ethics seem to be subjective. CYA plus "SAVE THE CHILDREN" have trumped this now and malicious prosecution is legally protected/required. Letting an innocent man escape prosecution is obviously more than their jobs are worth.
I guess data security and integrity are too high a price if it might inconvenience one person's access to easy credit.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
The funny thing about data brokerages: I can't recall ever hearing a legitimate argument for having them in the first place.
"You know, Doris, what this country really needs a is a vast corporate entity collecting everyone's personal data for sale at a profit without our knowledge. Only then will we know true happiness and freedom."
The whole industry was set up without voluntary customer involvement and its high effing time the customers demanded a say in how their information is managed, or profited from. That's the real identity theft.
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
This is interesting. Not having done any actual research, I had to develop this theory out of nothing but paranoid delusion: 'After giving up Vietnam to the local government, certain factions of the US government decided that the failure of that particular bit of foreign policy was due to abuse of civil rights by American Citizens. Constitutional loopholes, particularly the First Amendment, had to be closed. Local police got free surplus helicopters if they could conform to the new federal guidelines.' (I've always wondered if the Hitler Youth haircuts on the rookie cops since then were just coincidence.)
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
If that fund came from the budget of the "Public Service" department that created the problem, it might work, OTOH it might add to their incentive to cover up their malfeasance even more than present SOP. The "Police Code" is not a myth. I hate to use this example, but what happened to Rodney King was not any sort of abberation, only that a videotape was released. Maybe if we added amendments to our Constitution to protect our citizens from the govern- oh wait...
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Yeah, "I keed! I keed!". That wouldn't be your tune if it was YOU who was accused of 'not being convicted of a crime'.
...according to the usual stats. Here's a table with live-birth statistics based on gender/race: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005083.html
I don't care how charged of an issue rape is. It's absurd to treat half the world's population like potential criminals because a tiny percentage of them are sexual predators. People who are so terrified of life and human interaction because they might encounter someone in that teeny, tiny minority should probably never leave their homes, or stop hanging out in high-risk areas. Judge people based on BEHAVIOR, not on superficial traits. Enough of this victim of fear culture.
Finally, some further stats that anyone who wants to talk about rape or child molestation should look into, in order to take educated precautions rather than just cower in ignorant fear. I know the gist of them, but not the specific numbers, so I won't just make them up. :)
--The overwhelming majority of sexual assaults and rapes are perpetrated by acquaintances and friends of the victim. Strangers are certainly on the radar, but these sorts of crimes mostly involve dysfunctions in existing relationships, rather than strangers preying on archetypes involved in their disturbed psyches.
--The overwhelming majority of child molestation and abduction incidents are perpetrated by friends, acquaintances, or family members as well, for many of the same reasons.
--Most rapes go unreported. I'd hazard a guess that the least-reported types of rape are the most common ones too-- those that would cause embarrassment and legal problems within a family, which makes sexual assault by strangers appear to be a larger part of the problem than it actually is by proportion.
All in all, in a city of around 100,000, there seem to be incidents roughly every 5 or so years where shadowy strangers accost women who are walking alone at night or break into their homes and assault them. I think people get struck by lightning here more often. It's just silly to jump to conclusions based on someone's outward traits (i.e., gender, age, ethnicity) without taking into account personality, demeanor, and behavior. And a little good, old-fashioned vigilance is good too. Yeah, I'd keep a closer eye if some guy was trolling around in a library and approaching kids who I knew didn't accompany him into the building. I might even wander into the boy's restroom for a check if I saw a guy go in there and take longer than seemed reasonable, just to make sure he wasn't staking it out. But walking through a library without stopping to browse as if looking for someone? I'd probably assume he was looking for someone. Judging the behavior is a better method of profiling a potential ne'er-do-well than acting like a bigot out of fear.
If I felt someone was profiling me based on my gender alone, I wouldn't hesitate to call them on it. I would not be sympathetic to their unfounded fears, and would try to combat the ignorance component of their perceptions. I've done it before. And I AM very conscious of suspicious behavior, since I work around kids. I know how to stay out of questionable situations, and I pay attention to what's going on around me and occasionally intercept unfamiliar adults who I'm not sure should be here with a friendly, "Are you looking for someone?" just to judge their reactions and reasons for being here.
Simply put, if you steal someone's life, you should loose your own.
No.
A) First world = USA's cold war sphere of influence
B) Second world = USSR's cold war sphere of influence
C) Third world = Countries not developed enough to be taken seriously during the conflict.
All three terms are 'deprecated' in a sense, though they have leeched into modern usage for historical convenience.
That is a local story for me. They didn't find any child porn on home or work computers from what the newspaper is reporting.
They did find some hints of illegal drug use, which may result in misdemeanor charges. Of course, given all the other problems with the case, including the person's frequent mentions that the account had been compromised, those charges might not appear.
I spend more time socializing IRL with a vast group of my neighbors now that I'm out in the boonies than I did living in the big city (i've lived in several big cities so far on the East Coast of the USA) I have yet to come to the conclusion that simply because everyone there lives in a match box which is easily breached by assailants (which often happens, despite their heavily enforced "gun control") that they are safer or spend more time with shared values.
.357 snubby. That is one woman whose consent you will need before getting into her pants. If only more women were like that, we could fire the rape cops and worry about more important things. (Don't forget, women like that would survive long enough and healthy enough to become mothers, and hopefully raise children as self sufficient as themselves. Such can only be a dream for me, but like to live it whenever I can.)
I am quite amicable in person... though I'm not exactly a fan of being disarmed so some professional victim group can "feel safer". If they don't feel safe then they simply leave me be, and I'll nod my salute to them and be on my way with the late I bought from the mom and pop coffee joint down the road from starbucks (at half the price).
Shared values, are one thing, but pretending that forcing everyone to live in matchbox apartments next door to each other in the armpits of the world (big cities) so they will "share values" is like when the communists subverted my grandparents homeland and said "all will be equally well off"... without truly saying "all will be equally POOR, and poorer than before".
Semantics, I'm sure, except that a lot of those screaming for communism and control of those "evil rich separatists" ended up being trodden underfoot by their beloved regime. Thus I'm a fan of everyone looking out for their families by doing what they think is best for themselves and family. If that involves NOT putting targets on their backs by sending them to "gun free/ disarmed victim zones" known as public schools, or by choosing to be ready to stay healthy and alive, then that is a GOOD thing.
Given that the rapists of the world have often spent time getting raped in prison, and that HIV and full blown AIDS are making massive percentages in prisons, rape is basically a death sentence nowadays. My last girlfriend practiced Krav Maga, but after she and I spent time together, she was also very proficient with a
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler