Slashdot Mirror
Googling the Trail of a Serial Rapist
theodp writes "Innovative Interactivity has a behind-the-scenes look at the Washington Post's On the Trail of a Serial Rapist series. Information Designer Kat Downs details her experience designing and building the impressive interface for the series, including the use of Google Maps to track the rapist. Wary, perhaps, that it might encourage vigilantism, the WaPo stopped short of allowing readers to add their own input to the maps and urged anyone with additional information to contact the police."
Who would put a map up on a wall and stick thumbtacks into. What a bunch of tools.
He was 21ish and 5'7" in 1997 and 6'1" and in his 40s now?
I understand the DNA links, but the other cases?
-Will P.
Therapist for $400
Looks like a simple widget that I could build in a couple of days.
That cheerio was beggin for it.
Tracking people in this fashion is unethical, even if it is a rapist. Leave it to the authorities -- this is vigilantism, nothing more. And that's not something that we can tolerate in an information-saturated society. Anytime a person is tracked electronically like this by someone with a personal agenda, it's wrong. There should not be exceptions, because the moment we allow that line to be crossed, we damn all of us to the potential to have our privacy invaded under false pretext.
You want to help? Volunteer your services to a responsible authority like the local police. Work with them and follow their ethical guidelines. Believe me, they want citizens to come to them and the system functions best when done under professional and ethical oversight by a disinterested party. This kind of behavior, however well-intentioned, harms those efforts and undermines the entire system of justice.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
anyone else noticing a pattern of evolution here....
Package it as a product that detectives could use with their cases, have it tie into a database warehouse/backend with existing data. Sometimes a bit of data visualization goes a long way.
The problem is that at the best of the case , the witness are unreliable. In a stressful situation like rape this is much worst. So 5'7'' or 6'1'' could be the same guy. Really. Now tehre are still problem with DNA matching, as it seems that collision over a huge population can happen (so you can't try to match against a whole database), so I would not trust that too, unless it is to ground a case when the suspect is shown to also have been at the place.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Ahhh just facebook the individuals like that mafia hitman.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What I've notice reading the additional details they've found on this guy. It appears that he like to take a sh*t at he crime scene. Maybe DC correctional need to go back and look at some parolees files and see which one of these guys like to leave feces as calling card that could narrow things a bit.
http://michiganmessenger.com/36610/arrest-of-most-wanted-sex-offender-raises-policy-questions
in a nutshell: lansing michigan got a $900,000 federal grant to monitor sex offenders. but a journalist, spending five minutes using google and facebook, found an offender working at a daycare center... an offender on the Michigan State Police's most-wanted fugitives list! and someone the lansing police describe as "always one step ahead of us"... since 2007. the fucking pedo is posting on facebook with his real name and picture... posing with children on his fucking lap, working at a fucking daycare center
seriously?!
the only justice that exists in this particular case is vigilante justice. and i agree with you: vigilante justice sucks. however, vigilante justice is better than NO justice
therefore, it is nice to know vigilante justice is out there to pick up the slack, for when the responsible authorities are outright BUMBLING INCOMPETENTS who never heard of google search and waste NINE HUNDRED THOUSAND of our tax dollars... doing what exactly?
put it this way: the responsible authorities better do their fucking jobs, or we'll do it for them
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
What happened to "it is better 10 guilty go free than 1 innocent gets punished"?
Who are you to judge who is guilty or not, and maybe you and your family should be murdered, if you make a wrong judgement in your vendetta for revenge and blood?
Blood-feuds is a mark of less advanced societies. Violence breeds violence. They can last for generations, and usually develops to become worse and worse with time and violent events, not better.
It is not necessary EVERY crime gets punished. But that notorious criminals gets locked up, and get time to rethink their strategies in life. Sometimes they get educated in prison and become better human beings after a few years. Sometimes not.
Your own lust for revenge does not count in this context. You should learn to deal with your own emotions, or you might get stuck in a vicious violent cycle yourself! Wether you are police or criminal, you will be no better than your counterpart then. Not a very wise move..
When notorious criminals are rewarded with million dollar bonuses instead of even the *threat* of legal action, we are so far from a functioning justice system that the alternative is indeed more appealing. Our justice system protect those who should be jailed, and jails those who should be protected. No justice system at all would be better.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
You, sir, need to calm the fuck down. My guess is that you've never been anywhere without a western justice system, or you wouldn't be saying that. Frankly, you come across as an ignorant, spoiled, sheltered child.
But anyway, who do you want to talk about specifically? The vast majority of the shenanigans on Wall Street was perfectly legal. The guys responsible were dicks, no doubt about it, and they fucked us over pretty good, but they broke no laws.
There was a Slashdot story not so long ago related to this issue.
All your attention are belong to my old internet meme.
The vast majority of the shenanigans on Wall Street was perfectly legal.
Which is exactly why vigilante justice is needed. They own the legal system, so we can't expect any protection from it.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Exactly! I agree completely with this. Although anarchy follows close behind.
It is not enough to succeed, others must fail. - Gore Vidal
Wonder why he spent 4 hours at Heinz Field in Pittsburgh on Sunday afternoons in the Fall?
... which has nothing to do with rapists. On the other hand, you have a point - for decades there was a problem of well-connected, powerful Japanese men molesting women on subway trains that, despite the efforts of the police, was covered up by the (ashamed) women.
Yet Another Tech Blog
(but so much more, including game and movie reviews)
http://yanteb.peasantoid.org
Tracking people in this fashion is unethical, even if it is a rapist. Leave it to the authorities -- this is vigilantism, nothing more. And that's not something that we can tolerate in an information-saturated society. Anytime a person is tracked electronically like this by someone with a personal agenda, it's wrong. There should not be exceptions, because the moment we allow that line to be crossed, we damn all of us to the potential to have our privacy invaded under false pretext.
You want to help? Volunteer your services to a responsible authority like the local police. Work with them and follow their ethical guidelines. Believe me, they want citizens to come to them and the system functions best when done under professional and ethical oversight by a disinterested party. This kind of behavior, however well-intentioned, harms those efforts and undermines the entire system of justice.
If this tracking system actually helps to catch the rapist, it will be objectively ethical based on the actual results of the experiment. You can only measure whether something is ethical or not based on the outcome. I hope the rapist is captured and handled appropriately so that it is ethical. And if there is DNA evidence and multiple individuals coming forward thats enough to track the person.
Tracking people in this fashion is unethical, even if it is a rapist. Leave it to the authorities --
If you can prove the rapist actually is a rapist, and if you have physical and material evidence, a trail of victims you personally know, this is reason enough to start investigating on your own. Community policing is not new, and it's really the only method known to catch rapists. Got a better idea?
this is vigilantism, nothing more. And that's not something that we can tolerate in an information-saturated society. Anytime a person is tracked electronically like this by someone with a personal agenda, it's wrong. There should not be exceptions, because the moment we allow that line to be crossed, we damn all of us to the potential to have our privacy invaded under false pretext.
Privacy is dead. This sort of stuff already is happening under false pretexting to millions of people. The only way to stop it is to counter it with investigations into the "victims" to find out if they are lying or not and to examine their mental stability. I'm sure statistics and math can help determine whether the victims match the red flags of an individual with a personal agenda or not. Finally it should not be determined that an individual actually has raped someone unless DNA evidence and actual semen is found at the scene of the crime. He said she said does not a rape make.
You want to help? Volunteer your services to a responsible authority like the local police. Work with them and follow their ethical guidelines.
The police should be involved. But if your mother or sister were raped you know damn well you wouldn't wait for the police to detect the rapist. You would use every resource you had to catch and track the rapist. The simple fact is that people get tracked by vigilantes who aren't rapists. People can get tracked for commercial reasons, political reasons, or because they pissed off a rich person who can hire a private investigator, so the fact that it's happening to a rapist should not concern anybody.
Believe me, they want citizens to come to them and the system functions best when done under professional and ethical oversight by a disinterested party. This kind of behavior, however well-intentioned, harms those efforts and undermines the entire system of justice.
I agree it can go wrong. It does go wrong. And it is going wrong. What you don't understand is that you already do not have any privacy. You already get tracked. Whether the police do it or corporations make no difference. They will invade your privacy and track you and there is nothing you can do about it. There is really no law against tracking people. Anyone can hire a private investigator to track you, in fact they can hire a private investigator to track you just because you made a post on slashdot they disagree with. A corporation can hire a private investigator because you apply for a job, and corporations share what they discover. Your neighbor, your ex, your best friend, could decide to track you via facebook and there is nothing you can do about it.
If you have a problem why choose the one case where the person being tracked is a rapist? Why not use this argument when people are tracked for political purposes or just stalked on facebook? Obviously these individual trackers should be regulated by laws and if you have some ideas for how to do this lets figure it out, but privacy is dead and you cannot put the toothpaste back into the tube. You can either investigate the investigators, or you can regulate the investigators so they go to prison for a very long time if they investigate under false pretext.
So why not let the Vigilantes track the rapists and the rapists track the Vigilantes? Everyone can track anyone because privacy is already non-existent for anyone who has a very strong intellect.
I already can track people by their cellphone, IP address, cache, screen name, email address, Google Earth, employment history, not to mention I can form a posse and just follow them around everywhere they go.
And of course anybody can do that to me. So the fact that it happens to a rapist is not my concern. The concern is that it already happens to people who haven't committed any crime whatsoever and will continue to happen because the private investigation industry is a capitalist industry.
If you are a billionaire you can spend unlimited amounts of money to track anyone you want, or even track entire families of individuals you dislike. If you have billions of dollars you can decide to track all the powerful families in New York and there is nothing they can do about it.
The argument can be made that vigilantes cannot solve crime. The solution to this argument is to actually decide to stop being a victim and become a private investigator, and make it your personal mission to hunt down rapists and murderers.
Speaking as someone who was sexually assaulted, yes, tracking the person responsible down is unethical. In my case, they filed it under miscellany and never interviewed him, and less than a month later, three more cases turned up and the guy skipped state. The police never followed up, and so he's very likely still out there. I did the responsible thing and contacted the authorities once I got out of the hospital. Granted, I did it while staring at the floor, stuttering, and being held by a friend, but I did do it.
Can I say I'd do it the same way if it happened again? No, not really. It was a traumatic experience and I won't sit here and say if given half a chance I wouldn't have returned the favor at the time. But I don't think two wrongs make a right, and feeding this guy to a woodchipper because the police wouldn't do their job, while maybe emotionally fulfilling, isn't right.
If there is a such thing as right and wrong in a scientific context it must be based on the result of the act and not the emotion or nature of it. If reporting the rape to the police results in the rapist going to jail then that was right. If the police can't catch the rapist then you have a responsibility as a victim to do everything in your power to track the guy if you have the resources to do it. As long as you don't break any laws or hurt any innocent people in the process, it's ethical for the victims of crime to track down the individuals who victimized them. If the guy commits another rape then you got him, if he doesn't then you can blacklist him but the point is he must be stopped one way or the other if it is to be an ethical result.
So I have to stand by what I said -- vigilantism is not a public service. A public service would be my day in court, along with the others who that son of a bitch hurt. So I do understand the motivations behind such behavior on a very personal level. I don't agree with it.
If the rapist does not respect your civil or human rights, why respect his privacy? It all depends on what the law says, what you can get away with, the resources you have, the whether the police are corrupt or not. You cannot always depend on the police is what I'm saying. And no being a vigilante is not the answer but neither is depending entirely on the police. At some point you have to protect yourself.
Why? You explained your circumstances, but I don't understand your reasoning. If anything, it's the police who ignore you who are unethical. It's not unethical to do their job when they won't.
If somebody raped you, the first thing you should probably do is track them down. Later on you can determine what to do about them.
I can't (nor should I be allowed to) assume police powers because the person or group that has them doesn't want to excercise them. That's lunacy. If I want to track this guy down privately, using lawful channels, and the police are willing and able to prosecute -- it's a win for everyone. But if they don't, my only lawful recourse is to go to the media (weren't interested), protest (one person with a sign didn't exactly make an impact), write letters (got form letter replies and courteous brush-offs), and try to help the other victims to find him and build a case against him (only found one of the three I knew about, and that person didn't want to rehash an old wound).
Don't kid yourself -- I tried. I did more than this website did, and with less fanfare. But I never crossed the line of going public. The risk of someone being misidentified and harmed by that isn't one I am willing to take, then, now, or ever. I want him as bad as anyone else who's ever been raped. That doesn't give me the right to endanger innocent lives to correct that injustice.
Exactly. As long as no innocent lives are endangered and as long as you get the job done, let the ends justify the means. Just make sure that you don't put yourself or anyone you care about at risk of going to prison. You have an unlimited number of creative options for taking a person down.
But if they don't, my only lawful recourse is to go to the media (weren't interested), protest (one person with a sign didn't exactly make an impact), write letters (got form letter replies and courteous brush-offs), and try to help the other victims to find him and build a case against him (only found one of the three I knew about, and that person didn't want to rehash an old wound).
Just because it's not lawful doesn't mean it's unethical. When the law itself (or those enforcing it) is unethical, the only ethical action may be to break the law.
If you are raped you have to decide which laws you are willing to break and which laws you aren't willing to break. It starts becoming unethical when the jailtime and risk involved in capturing the rapist outweigh the rewards. If people are dying to catch a rapist it's unethical. If people are being raped to catch a rapist it's unethical. If people go to jail for many years to catch a rapist it's unethical.
On the other hand many people would risk losing their job or some jailtime to catch a rapist. Any many individuals would refuse to hire a rapist which is completely legal. And most importantly many people would physically beat up a rapist and go to jail for a night or even not at all if the police don't mind.
The point is that if somebody is a serial rapist they aren't ever going to stop until somebody puts a stop to them. So the ethical thing to do is to stop them using all of your resources, without breaking the law. This isn't anarchy, as long as you follow the law.
This is what I mean. You should utilize the police as a resource, but you should also utilize powerful private citizens as a resource. The combined might of the public and private sector will take anybody down.
But I don't think two wrongs make a right, and feeding this guy to a woodchipper because the police wouldn't do their job, while maybe emotionally fulfilling, isn't right.
Isn't it though? The laws and justice system evolved originally to stop family feuds turning bloody and escalating, so justice would remain in the hands of the king, as in the code of Hammurabi. If the justice system fails badly, clearly, and obviously, along with the enforcement system, I personally would have no moral qualms about ensuring the punishment is exacted myself, by whatever means neccessary, up to and including a sharpened piece of metal. But only after exhausting all other possible avenues.
And I bet anyone else he had subsequently hurt wouldn't complain much either.
However you should guarantee that no innocent lives are at risk when you take down the rapist. If the rapist has a wife and kids you have to consider their fate before you take him down by sword. If you take him down by word then you'll spare his family the unnecessary anguish.
Also you need evidence this individual is a rapist and it must be irrefutable. If you manage to get him on camera raping someone, then you can move on him. If it's just a bunch of women claiming he raped them with no physical evidence then it's just a witch hunt.
The wiki would allow groups of investigators to work together on cases such as this.
The methods in this case aren't as important as the results.
In my opinion they ought to offer a bounty for anyone who can provide information leading to the arrest and/or conviction of the rapist. This will encourage friends and family members of the rapist to turn against the suspect and provide any information they know. It will have a domino effect on the investigation.
They could get the money for these bounties from rape victims and this a portion of this money can be given to bounty hunters who have the legal authority to conduct these sorts of investigations.
As long as there's a single pot smoker in jail, "limited resources" has no pull whatsoever.
The police spend a greater portion of their money solving drug crimes and paying off drug informants than they do trying to catch rapists. If they want to catch rapists where are the informants? Somehow they have an endless supply of informants who will rat you out for smoking a joint but nobody when it's time to catch a real criminal?
Typical.
The cops have the ability to use unlimited surveillance, informants, and they have good forensics to catch petty drug dealers, but their surveillance doesn't work on murderers and rapists?
So if the private sector offers to use surveillance on a suspected rapist via an undercover investigation, and the suspect commits a rape ON CAMERA, is this not good enough evidence?
Hopefully the suspect is dumb enough to leave his cellphone on while he/she commits the rape.
An eye for an eye is to send the rapists to a special prison designed to house all rapists and to pay off the guards so they look the other way while they gang rape the individual.
"John Q. Rapist moved into the neighborhood at 123 Main St. Let's blacklist him so he can't get a job and force him to move away."
Here is a suggestion for victims of rape. Form a surveillance corporation which allows other victims of rape to pay you to technologically track and spy on individuals accused of rape by more than two individuals. This corporation will collect the information via open source intelligence collection and provide a continuous feed to the cops and to the feds if the rapist decides to cross state lines.
... which has nothing to do with rapists. On the other hand, you have a point - for decades there was a problem of well-connected, powerful Japanese men molesting women on subway trains that, despite the efforts of the police, was covered up by the (ashamed) women.
This is why the Yakuza exists. These men can pay the gangsters and keep their lives, a portion of the money can be transfered to the victims. Yes this is extortion but that is street justice.
This way next time there is a driveby there is no chance of the criminals getting away.
Hey they should have thought about killing their enemy without endangering everyone else.
As a libertarian, this scares the hell out of me.
As a process improvement professional, this sounds like a damned cool thing to have access to!
Libertarian isn't the same as "anarchist". Libertarian means you want to maximize liberty for people who don't harm anyone. The legalize drugs, prostitute, line of thinking is not the same as thinking rape or violence crime should be legal.
The best we can do as libertarians is design technology which promotes freedom for the user.
I read "some" of TFA, but surely - ethical discussions about vigilantism and law enforcement well aside - all TFA actually does is help us track the victims? What do we learn about the rapist: inconsistent descriptions, three childish, generic, totally different ID sketches and a photo of a jacket and a blade... but about the victims - wow... all those maps, and photos of their houses, descriptions of their age and race, whether or not they have children, how old the children were at the time... I think one could identify most of the victims pretty easily armed with little more than google. Perhaps the victims were happy to sign away their privacy to help try to catch the attacker, but the site seems to put the information they volunteered to decidedly voyeuristic use - I don't see any of this helping "track" the attacker. And the designer? "I knew instantly that this was going to be a great multimedia story" - exactly... (shabby) business as usual. Not "I knew this could help jog people's memory and get the public to aid the police in their work". And are we really impressed that they put markers on google maps in this day and age? Srsly. At least they could have used Simile Timeline along with google earth and some custom overlays, in html5 with the canvas element.
I live in DC, so I understand this story's importance, but I don't understand what's so great about this from a technical point of view. Basically a bunch of pages with the information about the attack and a google map embedded. What's so earth shattering about this?
You just take their eyes first and then they wont be able to see your strikes.
If this information is not attached to an legal identity then it's okay to have a machine or computer datamine the information. It's only when this information is pieced together, analyzed and exploited that it becomes more than just data but an information weapon.
It's already too late, information already is used as a weapon.
spy on individuals accused of rape... if the rapist decides to cross state lines
And that right there is part of the reason why this sort of idea makes me uneasy.
You meant alleged rapist, yet in one paragraph you've managed (accidentally, no doubt) to switch from talking about an alleged criminal to an actual one.
But if they are going to spy on everyone anyway, lets start with the rapists right? They are going to spy either way because they have the money and power to do it. They can spy indiscriminately or they can spy on the people accused of violent crime. Either way you are just as likely to be spied on if you piss off a rich person.
I'm well aware that an accused rapist is not a rapist. But since it's legal to spy on anyone if you have the money, anybody rich can hire a private detective and legally spy on anybody. Anybody powerful can take it one step further and have people set up via corrupt cops. There is no solution to corruption because when the economy goes bad the society becomes more corrupt.
Expect to see more of this.