Man Tracked Down and Arrested Via WoW

kabome writes with this excerpt from a story about an alleged drug dealer who was located by law enforcement thanks to World of Warcraft: "Roberson’s subpoena was nothing more than a politely worded request, considering the limits of his law enforcement jurisdiction and the ambiguity of the online world. 'They don’t have to respond to us, and I was under the assumption that they wouldn’t,' said Roberson. ... Blizzard did more than cooperate. It gave Roberson everything he needed to track down Hightower, including his IP address, his account information and history, his billing address, and even his online screen name and preferred server. From there it was a simple matter to zero in on the suspect's location."

Comments

Re:conundrum

[phantomfive]

OK, these are some interesting ideas:

The majority of people in this country are against gay marriage as well: does this mean that gay marriage should be illegal?

I don't personally care if it is legal or not. I'll vote to let them get married, because I have no reason to stop them, but I don't care if they can't. But this is the thing about democracy: if the gays want to change the law, they have to convince the rest of the country (enough of them) that it is a good idea. If they can't, they won't be able to change the law. It really is that simple.

All you have to do is look at segregation, Japanese internment camps, and the Salem Witch Trials to realize that majority rule is not always the right way

People like to bring up the example of segregation, but by the time segregation was overturned, the majority of the country was actually opposed to it. I am not going to say that bad things don't happen in democracy, but they happen in every other type of government too, usually worse. We are living in a society with a bunch of other people, and living with other people is never easy.

In the words of Alexander Hamilton - the masses are asses. Irrational fears often overcome rational deduction.

Of course he felt that way: the masses disagreed with him. It is the old logical fallacy of, "those who disagree with me are wrong." That doesn't mean a minority can rule any more competently than the majority: for an example of this look at Iran right now.

There is a reason that the United States is a Republic and not a pure democracy.

It is, but that does little more than slow down the speed of the implementation of the public's will. If the public feels strongly about an issue, and their representatives go against their will, the representative will be gone quickly. The best example of that recently is perhaps Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska.

Re:Impropriety

[Hurricane78]

Exactly. I was once dragged out of a club by two giant bouncers, fully patted down and insulted by seven cops, because some new idiot bouncer who was a colleague of a bouncer friend of mine saw us exchange little pieces of paper (drink coupons) which he thought were drugs!

One cop even, after he told be to turn my back pockets inside-out (not possible with jeans), himself grabbed in there, and came out with a small bag of drugs! The pockets were empty when I had the hands inside, about 5 seconds earlier!! So he must have had it in his hand when doing this!!

If it weren’t for all the bouncers being embarrassed because of their colleague fucking up, them being my friends, and them getting very angry because of this obvious dick move of that cop, basically chasing them out of the venue, I would perhaps now sit in jail for dealing drugs and/or have my life ruined!

Needless to say, the bouncers were not very friendly to that new guy afterwards. ;)

We later got a official, written excuse from the police headquarter. It was the Cologne police by the way. (Yeah Google, index this!) Cops here basically behave like criminals with a badge (except from some lone exceptions). I would not be surprised, if their reason for the theater was, that they smelled a competition to them controlling the drug market...