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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!
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
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.
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.
I am officially gone from
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...
But sadly most police forces are actually incapable of gathering such evidence,
So can anonymous tips be used in investigation? How can it be known whether the information in a tip was collected legally if the police didn't collect it? And therefore how can any information discovered from following such a tip be allowed?
Long signatures suck.
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.
>In the process, Anonymous successfully managed to get the accused released by tainting the evidence. Congratulations, assholes.
Um no. First of all, Police get evidence ALL THE TIME from secondhand sources. And they don't need a warrant for that either.
Second, I doubt anonymous was able to touch the item that filmed this video. It's still in the camera, even if "deleted". Police got a big heads up to its existence.
Courts most of the time don't go "OMG, IT AINT PURE!!!". They consider many factors and some even *gasp* come to reasonable conclusions.
The prosecutor, you mean the mother of one of the kids on the football team?
Hurray small town america.
In the process, Anonymous successfully managed to get the accused released by tainting the evidence. Congratulations, assholes.
Yes, because police and prosecutors have never relied on anonymous tips to generate leads in cases before.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Actually, it is admissible. IAaL, I am assuming you are not an attorney. Any objection the defense has will go the weight and not the admissibility. All you need is someone to testify to the video, and that the contents are a fair and accurate representation of the events that occurred. It is a matter of course to identify the videographer, people in the video, etc. If the defense wants to attack the authenticity of the video, or if it was edited, that is fine, but it will, as stated above, only serve to limit the weight the jury gives it and not the admissibility for consideration. Additionally, you don't need video evidence of a rape to prove rape. They arrested, convicted and punished people for 1000s of years without video evidence, and in most cases today there is none.
Anonymous tips can be used to get a search warrant, but considering the technological competence of the average cop that I've worked with they wouldn't bother following it up because they wouldn't have a clue how. They mostly become cops because they want to be heroes and/or because they like to push people around, not because they got bored being a computer guru. Most often anonymous tips are used in drug cases (because the cops can seize the property and sell it) and murder cases that have made the front page. In fairness though, there just isn't enough manpower available to follow even the most obvious trail unless the crime has made it to the high priority list for some reason, and police work doesn't pay enough to attract anyone competent at computer forensics.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
"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
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
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.
Yeah, good luck with that. I grew up in a cliquish cesspit like that, in northern Michigan in the '70s. The mayor's kid, a star of the high school football team, date-raped at least two girls (and probably more), and when they had the audacity to complain the entire community branded them as 'sluts' who were just jealous of his new girl. Police refused to investigate, and no lawyer in town would represent them. He boasted later about having gone back and sodomized one of the girls "to shut her up" and that she had enjoyed it so much that she agreed not to complain any more. He's probably someone important there now.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
You still need a chain of evidence. An officer needs to collect it at the scene and then log it and all the rest of that. There is probably supervisors involved as well as technicians.
The chain is needed because, as we are aware, evidence can be easy to fake, so it needs to be strictly accounted for. There are also privacy requirements and constitutional requirements about where you can go getting that evidence. No prosecutor who has a good case will want to add evidence that distracts from the central issue, even if it helps his case. There is a cost-benefit ratio to consider.
That said, they *may* be able to use it, but it might have been better to tell the cops where to go get it on their own, using a search warrant. Ultimately, the defense will try to challenge any and all evidence, if they can, even police provided evidence, it is just that it is much easier to show that there is accounting for police collected evidence.
So can anonymous tips be used in investigation? How can it be known whether the information in a tip was collected legally if the police didn't collect it? And therefore how can any information discovered from following such a tip be allowed?
Legally it doesn't matter. If I break into someone's house because I think they have a big ol' stash of kiddie porn and confirm my suspicious and take evidence to the police they can use that evidence in court and/or to get an actual search warrant. As long as the police aren't involved with my illegal evidence gathering in any way it is admissible. I might get charged with breaking and entering and trespassing, but the evidence is still allowed.
I live in Washington state. Open carry is legal.
I work in physical security, and work with a number of police departments. I'm not pessimistic, just realistic. They work a ridiculous number of hours, they don't have time for both families and outside study to learn something as in-depth as computer forensics. By an large they don't have the interest, either. They didn't become cops to sit in front of a computer all day, they want to "get the bad guy." It's an interesting culture to observe from outside, but not one I'd like to be in.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
In a town like that no prosecutor will WANT to try that case, no matter if there is a mountain of unimpeachable evidence. None of the local judges are going to want to sit that case, either. The best result conceivable result in that little incestuous cesspit where everyone knows everyone is a hung jury, and they're not going to ask for a change of venue unless forced to do so. Hopefully this is enough of an embarrassment to force it.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
I always shudder when I hear people say they're going to raise their kids in South Treestump because they want them to grow up with "small town values". Of course almost none of these people actually grew up in a small town (and the ones who did were from the upper class), or they'd know better.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
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?
then Anonymous defends it!
Exactly, if their leader and hero Assange does it, then it's not rape. After all, clearly those women are lying, or THEY DESERVED IT! He's Julian Assange for God's sake. They should be THRILLED that he was willing to date-rape them!
Watch this get modded down by 14-year-old script kiddies.
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
It's a small Midwestern town. Perpetrators include the prosecutor's kid. Had they provided the information discreetly to law enforcement the guys would have been grounded by their parents until the next football game, and the girl would have the word 'slut' burned into the lawn in front of her parents' house and been shunned until after she graduates and can move away. Until you've lived in one of these hell holes you really don't know what it's like.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin