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Anonymous Helps Find Evidence In Gang Rape Case
jfruh writes "Evidence of a gang rape committed by members of an Ohio high school football team, including video, was, in the way of digital native teenagers today, put online on various social media sites — and was quickly taken down as students began realizing the magnitude of the situation. The hactivist group Anonymous has been able to find archived and cached versions of the damning content, which may help prosecutors make their case." (The original story from December at the New York Times adds more detail.)
No boundaries, no jurisdictions... just results.
All of the power of the harnessed internet with the face of the silent auction bidder.
Anonymous does something truly useful and good!
Way to go guys!
In the process, Anonymous successfully managed to get the accused released by tainting the evidence. Congratulations, assholes.
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
I've been half-heartedly following this story once I heard the initial reports and what took place was almost, but not quite, as bad as the Indian student who was attacked, raped and beaten on a bus in India and later died.
This girl was, apparently, passed out drunk (she was 16) and while passed out, was raped by at least 2 members of the football. Her limp, violated, body was carried by her arms and legs, all while being recorded and while others stood by and did nothing.
Some people present tweeted what was taking place, some took pictures and one shining example of the human race was recorded for a length of time bragging about how much she was fucked (worse than in the movie Pulp Fiction according to him). No one called the police.
Further, when asked about how he would feel if his daughter was raped (he apparently at the ripe of a late teenager had a daughter) in 10 years, he pontificated that in ten years his daughter would be raped and dead. What a wonderful guy.
While the death penalty cannot undo what was done to someone, we as a society can no longer continue to coddle people who refuse to live with the basic bounds of society. There isn't something new in not raping, murdering, shooting, tealing from, beating or otherwise doing something to someone, and people such as this who have no regard for others do not deserve any sympathy or regard from the rest of society.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
The really disturbing part is not just the fact that a 17-year-old was gang-raped, and no charges have been filed. No, the really really disturbing part was that a significant portion of the population of the town have actively opposed doing anything about it.
I mean, why bother even having laws against rape if you're not going to enforce them?
I am officially gone from
I do not see anything in the article that describes how they 'hacked' their way to the truth. It looks like a simple look up of cached info.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
The better title might be 'Anonymous actually gives a damn about gang rape case, unlike clannish and football crazed natives of some backwater hellhole'.
The perps in this case were almost unbelievably sloppy in concealing their activities; but the people supposed to be enforcing the law were, by turns, overtly apathetic and far more interested in protecting their hometown heroes and their precious football season than actually seeing justice done.
Deadspin has been great about following this story (see the other links(, and this page from a few days ago is more in depth and has the video itself (and some choice quotes if you can't listen to this sort of thing):
http://deadspin.com/5972527/she-is-so-raped-right-now-former-student-jokes-about-the-steubenville-accuser-the-night-of-the-alleged-rape
Truly despicable.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
Anonymous wanted for possession of child porn
... It looks like a simple look up of cached info.
I always use robots.txt to forbid caching my incriminating evidence.
You can't be too careful these days...
Not addressing the rape here, but the tech ... It's striking, I think, that we still frame the conversations "The People", with cameras (social media), and "Big Brother", with cameras. But it's all just data, isn't it? And every side gets a chance to try to obtain and to frame that data. I wonder if London didn't waste a bunch of cash installing their panopticon when crowd-sourcing seems to be getting the job done so nicely.
Right guys, that's the reason they started seeking out and saving this rape video... yep... 'justice'... no other motive at all.
The story or the synopsis posting... "Evidence of a gang rape committed by members of an Ohio high school football team, including video, was, in the way of digital native teenagers today, put online on various social media sites — and was quickly taken down as students began realizing the magnitude of the situation." Enough to make your ears bleed.
OK, the story itself is more disturbing, but c'mon editors; please read these posts before approving them. A touch of grammar saves the day.
Sounds like Anonymous is interested in becoming a political party.
Who cares, it's just random people on the Internet looking for headlines, again. Anonymous is irrelevant. It always has been and always will be.
"Under Ohio law, the Ohio Attorney General is elected by the voters of the state and does not have the independent jurisdiction or ability to undertake investigations or prosecutions of juvenile crime. In this case, the Jefferson County Prosecuting Attorney who has such authority delegated her authority to the Attorney General's office to act as special prosecutor in the matter. The special prosecutors are not from the Steubenville area and graduated high school elsewhere."
Source
You are correct that rape deserves a harsher sentence, but you are absolutely wrong that the solution is the death penalty. The reason why the death penalty should be abolished is that government cannot be trusted with such power. The death penalty is irreversible, and government makes mistakes -- whether accidental or not. That alone is all the rationale we need to abolish the death penalty. But if you care to open your eyes, the evidence is absolutely startling. It is a regular occurance for inmates on death row to later be found innocent, and the rate seems to be increasing. It is very likely that the US government has already executed an innocent man, probably more.
That's not a shortcoming of the judicial system. That's murder, plain and simple.
From this article:
"Why put their names out there? Why put their addresses out there? With all the crackpots we have running around this country? With all of the sex offenders were have out there, plenty of them in Jefferson County, why put children’s names out there?” said Abdalla. "Mothers have taken their children out of school in fear of what may happen. This has gone too far. Enough is enough." Abdalla also claimed to know the identity of the person leading the online effort. "I'll deal with that at another time," said Abdalla. "I know where he lives. I know his name, his mother's name, his father's name, his brother's name."
-August 11-12, 2012. The incident that began this case occurred.
-August 14, 2012. The incident was reported to Steubenville Police.
-August 16, 2012. Electronic devices of people who potentially had knowledge of the incident were taken, pursuant to search warrants.
-August 17, 2012. Steubenville Police request technical and investigative support from the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation "BCI" (a state agency supervised by the Ohio Attorney General). At the request of Steubenville Police, BCI expedited the evidence analysis. The analysis involved uncovering and reviewing tens of thousands of emails, texts, and photos from approximately a dozen electronic devices. The vast majority of such data was unrelated to the case. Investigators and forensic examiners never found any video of the alleged crime.
-August 22, 2012. Based on the investigation of the Steubenville Police, two juvenile males were arrested and charged. Their names are Trent Mays and Ma'lik Richmond. Suspects remained in juvenile detention until November 1, 2012 when the Visiting Judge (from outside the county) assigned to the case placed the suspects on home arrest.
-August 28, 2012. County Prosecuting Attorney delegates her authority to special prosecutors from the Ohio Attorney General's Office.
-August 30, 2012. Steubenville Police meet with the special prosecutors.
-The Juvenile Court trial in this case is scheduled for February 13, 2013. Circumstances surrounding media and public access to that trial are controlled by the Visiting Judge.
Source
I hope they get everything they deserve.
I bet the girl who got raped will be forced to still keep on living in this "Small town AMERICUH" where everyone is related to everyone else through incest and she will get no help whatsoever in dealing with being raped and her parents won't move out of that town so she doesn't have to face her rapists everyday in school along with the other kids who just stood there and watched taking pictures.
"Yep gotta just say here GOD BLESS AMERICUH AND DUR FOOTBALL"...
And they wonder why the rest of the world looks down upon the USA as one giant landmass of fucking morons and rednecks...
Um, I'm a little puzzled by the phrase "Gang Rape" in the headline here.
Reading through the two-page article in the New York Times, it sounds like a lot of drunken high-school idiots making assholes of themselves... but the only part that is actually "rape" seems to be one kid bragging that he "slipped a finger" inside the drunken girl. No question here: if he did that, and isn't just bragging to his buddies, that is indeed rape, since she was too drunk to consent (and, apparently, too drunk to even know). ... but if it's one person, it can't be "gang" rape.
IANAL, but if Anonymous hacked into various computers to obtain the information, are prosecutors allowed to use it? It is my understanding that normally, investigators would obtain search warrants to legally get the information. I would hate to see the outcome of this case jeopardized because evidence was obtain illegally.
While I believe, in this case, Anonymous, was trying to do the right thing, very often, in courts of law, doing the right thing can jeopardize a case because of rules of evidence, rights of victims and accused, etc. Hopefully, all of this will be resolved and justice will be done.
Anonymous
Even if the evidence itself is not admissible in court, it still may be useful to obtain evidence that *is* admissible. Not all the evidence has to be used by the prosecutor.
These evildoers should spend the rest of their lives in a PMitA prison with Bubba for a cellmate.
aspies : this post may contain hyperbole and/or irony.
is that she was a drunk slut who got what she was asking for, and that boys will be boys, and that no crime was committed. I can't help but wish that I could change the whole relationship this culture has towards sex with a wave of a magic wand. Since I can't, I can only hope that a stand is taken here against men taking advantage of women who can't give consent, and that boys learn that sex isn't about what you can take from a woman, but what you can share together. And that when you rape an unconscious girl, you aren't sharing anything.
Bravo Anonymous.
IANAL, but everything I've read so far says that all this is going to do his hamper the investigation. Plus, some of the "evidence" has been presented in a false context. Had they provided the information discreetly to law enforcement instead of their usual public self-gratification, maybe this would have done some good.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
The problem we have is that football in america is a religion, it's bigger than Christianity -- football player are elevated to god status, and we cheer them on while we chug our beer.
As a result, these high school jocks feel that they can get away with anything, because in this small-town America, places that Sarah Palin called "the REAL america", these football players are all the town has to cling to, so they are coddled, protected, insulated, and when a few of them do reach "pro" status, they will be the complete and utter pricks we expect them to be, beating their wives, crashing their cars, and carrying guns into their local bar, and arranging dog-fighting.
So what if they raped some girls? They are football players. Yeah! America Number ONE!
And the town is trying to cover the whole thing up because, well, they are football players. Yeah! America Number ONE!
I'm freaking moving out of this god forsaken country.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
This needs an update to include the town sheriff's amazing press conference ("Anonymous, I am coming after you!") and Anonymous's response.
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
You fools!
You're assuming the prosecutor *wants* to make this case, Not sure how far Stuebenville is from Canton (Football Hall of Fame), but the sport at all levels is rather sacrosanct in that state.
then Anonymous defends it!
the family of the girl who was raped hasn't made these kids swing in the wind yet.
You say this as if no woman has ever gotten a guy drunk to have sex with him. Or gotten a guy really drunk when he really wouldn't want to have sex with her. So how much time should these women be serving?
"Coddling" people like the Duke Lacrosse men, who were found innocent before they were sent to jail? How about the equally innocent Central Park Five - they would all be dead right now if the "eye for an eye" people had their way.
I blame the media for encouraging such behaviour!
Perhaps parent's should encourage kids not to drink until they pass out in front of other people who may or may not use that as an opportunity to harm them? Of course the girl is a victim, but over PC proselytizing seems to think that the victim plays no part in the event. Are the boys at fault for using her like a fingerpuppet? If they actually did what they are charged with, then yes. But this isn't a "she was asking for it" argument. The point is if you don't put yourself into potentially dangerous situations you won't groggily wake up to find some pimply faced cretin using you as a sockpuppet in his parent's basement.
The take home from this whole thing is if you have daughters, lock them in the basement until they're 35. If you have sons, buy them a pair of chinese finger cuffs and whatever you do, don't parent your kids and instill any sense of decency in them or teach them to respect themselves and utilize common sense, because that would mean sky fairies and spaghetti wizards.
The "confession" video has a boy saying "They raped her harder than that cop raped Marcellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction."
You are aware that this is a "confession" made by a kid who wasn't actually there, right?
http://www.wtov9.com/news/news/sheriff-anonymous-hacker-im-coming-after-you/nTnNX/
The word you want is "chain of custody". But that isn't the case here, since it's not physical evidence.
In any case it's irrelevant, since the prosecutor already had the videos that Anonymous released. What Anonymous did was to make them public. Whether it's a good thing to put videos of a purported rape out onto the internet is another discussion.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
When this story came out, the prosecutor told the press that they already had collected the video in question. And still hadn't charged anybody.
Huh? didn't you read the NY Times article in the link? The two teenagers involved were arrested eight days after the incident was reported to the police, which is to say, four months before Anonymous got involved.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/17/sports/high-school-football-rape-case-unfolds-online-and-divides-steubenville-ohio.html
In other words, there's an untainted trail of the evidence, and the reason that Anonymous got involved at all is that they're trying to shame the prosecutor's office into doing something.
If they're trying to shame the county prosecutor... they are about three months too late. The alleged rapists had already been arrested and charged, and the county prosecutor had already stepped down over possible conflict of interest and delegated the prosecution to the Ohio Attorney General's Office.
As far as I can tell, "Anonymous" saw the New York Times article, said "ooh, there are probably some juicy photos in caches somewhere, maybe I can find them, and spread them over the net"-- but they didn't dig up anything that the police didn't already have, and it was hardly as if the matter was being ignored at the time, seeing as it was the subject of a two-page article in the New York Times.
The prosecutor, you mean the mother of one of the kids on the football team? Hurray small town america.
So, will she prosecute her sons' sociopathic friends and allow her snowflake to be shunned and bullied? Probably not.
Since the county prosecutor stepped off the case three months before "Anonymous" got involved, I'm not sure it matters who she's related to.
If there had been, why did she leave the house, shop, come back, make breakfast and have ANOTHER go at sex, then over the next two or three days brag about the sex?
And she STILL HERSELF says it wasn't rape.
Ever thought that the reason why Assange is defended from accusations of rape IS BECAUSE HE'S INNOCENT?
Whereas here we have people who are video'd doing it. At the moment, we can't fake video evidence that well, so it can't be made up (hence the chain of providence is invalid).
Why is it you guys defend rape by Americans but will not condone any idea of innocence at the accusation of rape from a foreigner who doesn't like the USA much?
So I am really getting a kick out of most of these replies. Some of you guys are very good at making it sound like you know what you are talking about.
But trust me... You don't.
I think you just want to make yourself sound smart, when in reality you dont know what you are talking about.
This is how bad info gets passed around.
If you dont know about the topic....Dont make yourself sound like you do.
The Internet cancer.
Why is it necessary for people to get prurient details about "exactly what happened"? It is totally unnecessary and revictimizes the survivor to print and publicize detailed descriptions like that. Sexual assault is horrific enough, and the public does not need to know details like this. The language they use is appalling. Using words like "slipped" sexualizes the crime and also minimizes what happened. The only people who need to hear descriptions like that are the judge and jury.
I applaud Anonymous! The Ohio case made me physically sick. I wish there were something I could do besides just sign petitions. Like magical powers to stop people before they do horrible, horrible things.