Site Claims to Reveal 'Tattle-tales'

Dekortage writes "Have you ever ratted somebody out? If it was a legal case, you might end up on Who's A Rat, an online database of police informants and undercover agents, identified through various publicly-available documents such as court briefings. The data-mined information is now available online at a price. As reported in the New York Times, 'The site says it has identified 4,300 informers and 400 undercover agents, many of them from documents obtained from court files available on the Internet.' Understandably, U.S. judges and law enforcement agents are upset, although defense lawyers seem to like the idea. Where do you draw the line between legal transparency and secrecy?"

Who is a rat???

[D-Cypell]

...I am!

Registrant:
Sean Bucci
Sean Bucci
23 Marshall Street
North Reading, MA 01864
US
Email: [e-mail]

Registrar Name....: REGISTER.COM, INC.
Registrar Whois...: whois.register.com
Registrar Homepage: www.register.com

Domain Name: whoisarat.com

Created on..............: Fri, May 21, 2004
Expires on..............: Mon, May 21, 2007
Record last updated on..: Tue, Jan 02, 2007

Administrative Contact:
Who''s a Rat
Anthony Capone
9 Tanbark Circuit , Suite 1945
Werrington Downs, NSW2747
AU
Phone: [phone]
Email: [e-mail]

Technical Contact:
Who''s a Rat
Anthony Capone
9 Tanbark Circuit , Suite 1945
Werrington Downs, NSW2747
AU
Phone: [phone]
Email: [e-mail]

DNS Servers:

ns32.servershost.net

Just a bitter criminal

[Anonymous Coward]

BOSTON, MA - A North Reading man was convicted late yesterday in federal court of conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute over 1,000 kilograms of marijuana, money laundering, structuring financial transactions, and tax evasion.

United States Attorney Michael J. Sullivan; Douglas A. Bricker, Special Agent in Charge of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, Criminal Investigation in Boston; and June W. Stansbury, Special Agent in Charge of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in New England, announced that SEAN P. BUCCI, age 34, of 23 Marshall Street, North Reading, Massachusetts, was convicted by a jury sitting before Senior U.S. District Judge Morris E. Lasker on charges of conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute over 1,000 kilograms of marijuana, possession with intent to distribute over 100 kilograms of marijuana, conspiracy to commit money laundering, two substantive counts of money laundering, seven substantive counts of structuring currency transactions, and four counts of tax evasion.

name and address correspond with the whois data

http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/ma/Press%20Office%20-%20 Press%20Release%20Files/Feb2007/Bucci-Sean-convict ion.html [usdoj.gov]

Re:Who is a rat???

[Oztun]

Not only are you a rat (ratting out rats) but it appears you are a drug dealer and tax evader as well...

http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/ma/Press%20Office%20-%20 Press%20Release%20Files/Feb2007/Bucci-Sean-convict ion.html [usdoj.gov]

Re:Undercover Agents?

[space_in_your_face]

it is probably time to pull the plug.
Apparently, it's already done. Or down. Whatever. The adress http://whosarat.com/ [whosarat.com] points to http://xicom.biz/suspended.page/ [xicom.biz] .

Re:Poison the data

[Maximum Prophet]

The hell they can't. Example. In most states, judges are allowed to "correct" trial transcripts at will with no oversite. If the judge were biased, and didn't want his ruling to be overturned on appeal...

Anyway, I'm sure that with a helpful judge, the witness relocation project has created tons of false court documents. As long as no one is convicted based on a falsified document, I'm not sure it's even illegal.

Besides the document wouldn't have to exist anywhere except for this site. You could even set up alarm bells that go off is anyone starts to search for certain bogus names in the court databases.

Re:Undercover Agents?

[MBGMorden]

Also, one of the MAJOR purchasers of data mining services: law enforcement. I work for the IT staff at a local county government (which includes the Sheriff's department naturally). They have a subscription to a service (it's run by the same company that does LexisNexis) that lets them look up ALL KINDS of information on people. You want a Blue . . . maybe Grey SUV registered within 50 miles of a crime scene that has a 5 and either an I or 1 in the license number? Yeah, it'll pull that up for you. You want a GIS driven map showing every sex offender within a certain radius of a coordinate, complete the mug shots and everything? It'll do that. You want to find every person remotely connected to a suspect? As a demonstration the sales guy plugged in a random person from our office and it brought up a list a list that included a college roommate of his wife from 20+ years ago. All of it was sorted by "closeness" and it was a long ways from him, but it found it.

ALL of this information was data mined from public record. Basically, everything you could want to know about someone or something they had, and it was for sale. Only restriction is that they blank out the SSN of people if you're not law enforcement (we had to give specific IP's of the machines using the service so that they could ID us and open that up too).

Reprisal killings are extremely rare

[SuperBanana]

When you risk getting informants or cops murdered in reprisal killings. That seems like a good line to draw.

Reprisal killings are this big scary monster that is blown way out of proportion. About 50 officers a year are murdered, and in '04, there were ~850,000 officers in the US. That's a homicide victim rate of 0.00058%. Guess what it is nation-wide? 0.0056%. You read that correctly. Police officers have a homicide victim rate that is one tenth that of the general population despite working a job we'd assume puts them at more danger of being murdered. The #1 cause of death for police? Traffic collisions, overwhelmingly. Don't believe me? Go check out the DoJ and FBI statistics; they spend a lot of effort compiling these stats.

On the flip side, "snitches" are a huge problem, as are "expert" witnesses. If you want to be scared out of your mind, read John Grisham's The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town, ISBN 0385517238. A hick prosecutor and police department, with plenty of help from a state crime lab "expert", put SEVERAL men on DEATH ROW despite massive flaws in the evidence and witnesses against them and horrendously flawed trials.

Re:Reprisal killings are extremely rare

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

If you want to be scared out of your mind, read John Grisham's The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town, ISBN 0385517238.

Which, for the record is non-fiction, despite Grisham's widespread fame and sucess as a writer of pop fiction.

Re:They deserve to be outed

[cduffy]

Denying that drug use is a victimless crime is astonishingly ignorant... of the definition of "victimless crime".

Drug abuse does increase the likelihood of other crimes which do have victims, but drug use in and of itself is indeed victimless. (Hint: If you're consensually engaging in behavior which harms you, you're not a victim. Stupid, yes. A victim, no).

Re:They deserve to be outed

[Surt]

http://www.drugwarfacts.org/prison.htm [drugwarfacts.org]

It's not the vast majority, but neither is it a small fraction.

Re:They deserve to be outed

[raddan]

Laws can be unjust. In that case, I believe that we have a moral obligation not to follow them. Henry David Thoreau [eserver.org] covers this subject rather nicely. Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King considered civil disobedience to be the central tenet in their own reform movements.