GoDaddy Silences RateMyCop.com

mikesd81 writes "Wired is running a story about GoDaddy shutting down a police watchdog site called RateMyCop. However, GoDaddy can't seem to give a consistent answer as for why. From the article: 'RateMyCop founder Gino Sesto says he was given no notice of the suspension. When he called GoDaddy, the company told him that he'd been shut down for suspicious activity. When Sesto got a supervisor on the phone, the company changed its story and claimed the site had surpassed its 3 terabyte bandwidth limit, a claim that Sesto says is nonsense. "How can it be overloaded when it only had 80,000 page views today, and 400,000 yesterday?" Sesto says police can post comments as well, and a future version of the site will allow them to authenticate themselves to post rebuttals more prominently. Chief Dyer wants to get legislation passed that would make RateMyCop.com illegal, which, of course, wouldn't pass constitutional muster in any court in America.'"

1984

[seanadams.com]

I am hopeful that mankind can avoid ending up like in 1984, for the simple reason that the same technology that enables today's widespread spying by our government on its own citizens can also be leveraged to help us keep tabs on them. Even if they make sites like this one illegal, they will be hosted elsewhere. Furthermore, unless they figure out how to take away all of our camera cell phones, tiny solid state audio recorders, etc then we will continue to have vastly more power to document police corruption than we did just 10 years ago when you'd have to have a camcorder at hand, charged and with a tape in it, to capture anything.

I might even go so far as to say that I'd _like_ to see the government try and crack down on sites like this (and wikileaks etc), as this will only draw more attention to the problem, causing replication of the data and hastening the process of smart people finding even better general solutions for circumventing censorship.

The current situation in America really does look like 1984 already - not just the spying and media manipulation, but also the continuous fearmongering and blatant lies to justify this protracted and costly war. However I believe there really is hope for us to turn this around, and that the solution lies in leveraging the internet, encryption, and the same technologies being used now to spy on us. Let's keep finding better ways to protect information, let's keep uncovering the corruption, and let's turn this around before it's too late.

not enough boobies, that's why

[themushroom]

The ONLY valid reasons I can come up with why anyone would want this site down are the exposing of undercover officers (not good for anyone, especially the undercover cops, except the criminals they're infiltrating) and the usual state of online abuse anyone who posts to a forum is subject to (but maybe the David Brame [thenewstribune.com] tragedy could have been better avoided had there been more voicing of his abuses?).

Reasons not valid... oh, those are numerous and probably why the cops freaked and GoDaddy's knees buckled.

Re:1984

[Atlantis-Rising]

Or, you could prohibit anonymous speech. This would have the dual purpose of both allowing people to speak and allowing them to be held responsible for their speech if need be (slander/libel).

Re:1984

[Penguinisto]

It's not that simple...

There is a legitimate concern for cops that do go undercover (they tend to do so off and on throughout a career), in that once they do, there's a big, fat online database that folks can check against before even asking "are you a cop?". This can present a legitimate danger if there's pictures or other personally identifiable information right there on the site.

There is a superior need for transparency in any society, but sometimes that has to be balanced against personal safety - including the safety of the cops.

As for the 1984 allegories? I suspect that you all-too easily attribute to malice what can be more easily attributed to incompetence, greed, and disparate desires that happen to run in parallel. For example, the Media manipulates to elicit drama and eyeballs, by which to convert into advertisement profit. Politicians manipulate and propagandize (in both directions!) in order to garner popularity, votes, and power (for both themselves and their ideology).

Trust me - having seen the US Government form both inside and out? I can say with certainty that as a group, it would be easier to put a colony on Mars than to organize that gaggle into any sort of overlord-type Big Brother organization...

/P

Bandwidth explanation reasonable

[Rampantbaboon]

AFAIK this site went down after it was mentioned on Fark last night. That could easily surpass the limit for a GoDaddy hosted site.

Re:not enough boobies, that's why

[sabt-pestnu]

Now, what do you think that guy showed the cop to make him reverse a legally given ticket?

Perhaps proof that it was his house? With a tale of how he was just in-and-out, and thus the equivalent of "standing" instead of "parked"?

Some punk kid shoots out my headlight with a BB gun. I'm driving to the store to get a replacement. You're saying I should get pulled over on an equipment violation that I'm in the process of correcting?

How about speeding to the hospital because I've got someone suffering a heart attack in the back seat, and the ambulance would have taken another 10 minutes. I'm doing 50 in a 35 zone with light traffic. The cop should give me a ticket right there? Or perhaps escort me to the hospital THEN ticket me?

Even Rule of Law can be taken too far.

Get Involved as well!

[scenestar]

become a participant for http://www.copwatch.org/ [copwatch.org] .

All you gotta do is just simply watch the police go about their usuall routine. If they threaten you to leave remind them that they are public servants and that you are fully within the scope of the law if doing so

Go on and observe, It is your patriotic duty!

Just because you can, doesn't mean you should

[Nimey]

The site is a stupid, terrible idea anyway. I'm personally aware of many people who have an irrational hatred for the police and police officers, simply because of what they are.

Yes, you have bad cops. You've also got a lot of good cops who would be harassed and defamed by users of this site. Frankly, it's as stupid as that site that lets high school kids make unsubstantiated complaints about their teachers. Just because you have free speech, doesn't mean that you can use it to make a person's life hell.

Re:Chief Dyer?

[MightyMartian]

You mean sort of how sometimes the citizens they serve are unfairly maligned by baseless charges?

My oh my, but why should being hoisted by your own petard not be permitted?

handicappped permit trumps all, in some places

[name_already_taken]

A former employee of my company had a handicapped parking permit, and she was told by the police that because of her handicapped parking permit, in Illinois the parking rules basically did not apply to her. She could pretty much park anywhere and not get a ticket. She'd park all day in the two hour parking spaces on the street, park across the lines, you name it - and there was nothing the police could do - nor did they make any attempt.

Had she been blocking traffic, that might have been another question, but the simple reality of it was that she never got a parking ticket in a town that lives on parking ticket income.

Re: Ticket for driving to the hospital

[KenAndCorey]

This is a few minutes away from where I live: A driver got a ticket for driving too fast to the hospital [canada.com]. He was taking his buddy who was accidentally hit by a co-worker's powerful nail gun.

Now if this cop only had discretion enough to waive the ticket.

Re:Just because you can, doesn't mean you should

[sleigher]

I might agree with at some point in the past but the police have failed the public time and time again. I know that overall it really is only a few that are bad, but when the same problems continually arise people get tired of it and begin to distrust all police officers. If this site is able to provide some type of oversight and it causes police corruption to decrease then it is a great site. There should be 0 police corruption period. These are people who are there to "protect and serve." The idea that they can make "mistakes" and "are just people" or whatever excuse you want to use is not good enough. Anyone who works to put in a position of power over other citizens and abuses that power needs to the worst type of punishment. Because not only are the betraying the honor of the position, but they betray the public trust and lead us to exactly where we are now. Running websites to report on police activity because they cannot police themselves.

Re:1984

[techpawn]

Or, you could prohibit anonymous speech.

No, you couldn't

Won't stop them from trying [slashdot.org]!

Re:1984

[SPY_jmr1]

The town hall shooting (which is local to me) was also about free speech.

The shooter-subject in question wasn't a random guy who had a parking ticket and was pissed... this was a honest full out crazy. Batshit-Loco. This was the sorta character who was 100% unrational, and would often show up to make a scene at the meetings.
People had wanted him ejected from the council meetings before, but the mayor made the decision that everyone had the right to speak in the public forum.. even if they were not going to be coherent in the slightest. It should be noted that the same mayor was severely wounded in the shooting.

So yes. Free speech. Double edged sword. Doesn't make it a bad thing though.

The site should stay up. It will stay up; streisand effect and all that ;-)

Re:1984

[Damocles the Elder]

I'm not saying that they need to, I'm saying that they have the option of rebutting if they care enough to. And we already have plenty of rate random people sites; hotornot, facebook, and myspace all come to mind. And as for your final point, that's all they do: Allow people to rant. The payment for the site isn't coming out of your pocket, beyond that, it's free speech. I'm not sure what you're getting so worked up about.

Re:1984

[mixmatch]

I'm sorry, the fact that someone was going to town hall meetings and talking nonsense and that same person went in and shot people don't seem to have any particular connection to me. Did free speech allow and/or encourage the person to shoot people? Would have shutting him up/barring him from the meetings somehow pacified this individual? Is there a direct correlation between people who are boisterous and loud and people that irrationally shoot others? Certainly I would agree with your statement that free speech is a double-edged sword in that you can be publicly criticized in the same way that you critique others, but I don't see the connection with the violent acts that followed.

Re:1984

[joeytsai]

Of the dystopian futures we've imagined, one like that in 1984 is the one most people think of and are worried by. Things like this happen, and usually get addressed, but you are correct - technology has been great in informing and empowering people. I don't like this administration's secrecy nor its manipulation of the press, but if you think this is like 1984 you need to relax and exercise your imagination a bit. Things need to get much better, but people are at least aware of and dealing with their rubbish - the RNC emails, illegal wiretapping, etc. There are other countries that are more 1984-ish than America.

The dystopian future to worry about isn't 1984. It's Brave New World. Orwell warned us that we would be oppressed by a totalitarian government, but Huxley realized that Big Brother isn't even required to deprive people of their liberties.

Do you, like Orwell, worry about books being banned? I, like Huxley, think we should worry about the more pervasive problem that nobody wants to read books. Are you afraid that information and the truth will be deprived from us? The fact is we get more than enough facts to know the problems - it just gets obscured in wave after wave of irrelevance. We have so much information available and constantly given to us that we don't deal with any of it. We've become passive; we don't require an organization to take away our liberties, we give them away voluntarily.

1984 was a future where society was controlled, repressed, monitored. People are kept in line by strict enforcement and punishment. Brave New World's future is trivial, preoccupied, distracted. People are kept in line by hedonism, drugs, pleasure.

Like the parent post many are quick to identify anything that looks like Big Brother. But I think we need to be aware of the possibility that we're closer to The World State. I'm grateful for our technology but am hopeful for where it takes us. But I think people need to be aware that while this technology can enpower us, it can also enslave us.

Protection must be inversely proportional to power

[harrumph]

In light of comments against this sort of site in general, I wish to point out a couple of things:

Those in positions of power must not have the same protections as those who are powerless.

1: The position of police officer is a position of great power.

2: The position of police officer is extremely attractive to sociopaths [wikipedia.org].

3: Some (many) police agencies are--umm--less than perfect at filtering out these especially-eager applicants. Some departments do not filter at all (i.e. they don't perform personality inventories on applicants), with the obvious results. Given that non-sociopaths generally strongly dislike working with sociopaths, it stands to reason that these departments quickly become dominated by the latter. I've lived in city with a police department that did not test its applicants for mental disorders, and that's a large part of the reason I now live in a city with a police department that does.

4: It does not make sense to give a person in a position of power all the protections that are afforded to others. For those in a position to cause suffering to members of society, the interest of the society in preventing abuse clearly outweighs the interest of the individual. (If you want all the usual job protections, don't pursue a job that lets you hurt people.)

Yes, some police officers will be treated unfairly in such a forum. Some will be publicly embarrassed when they don't deserve it. If the forum is effective, some will lose their jobs when they shouldn't. I would think it would even make undercover operations more difficult. All these issues are far outweighed by the benefit of exposing those who should not be allowed to be in positions of power.

A tale of two traffic stops

[UbuntuDupe]

What's important for people is not so much an anonymous person's numerical rating, but his description of what happened, which can then be further substantiated, and if possible, lead to an investigation.

Example (and this is true):

Traffic Stop 1: I see the lights. I pull to the side. Megaphone tells me to go to a driveway. I roll down window.

Cop: Step out of the vehicle. [I get out]
Cop: The reason I pulled you over is for speeding. Are you in an emergency?
Me: No.
[gets insurance and license from me]
Cop: What's all this on your back window? It's a mess! You can't see out of that! Why are you driving with it like that?
Me: Well, that just formed because of the weather.
Cop: Have you been smoking marjuana in this area recently?
Me: [stunned, both at the sudden pot accusation and why he cares about "in this area"] ...?
Cop: [repeats]
Me: Uh... no. (?)
Cop: I'm just asking because you're acting real funny right now.
Me: Yes, I'm just kind of introverted.
Cop: And that's supposed to explain your bloodshot eyes!???
Me: I've been at a computer all day.
Cop: Wait here.
[writes ticket for forever]
Cop: What's your phone number?
Me: [Not sure if it's a home number he wants, or if I'll have to be called in a few days, since I'm traveling] Um, like the number for where I'll be for the next few days?
Cop: I need a number WHERE YOU CAN BE REACHED.
Me: Well, you can always get me on my cell...
Cop: No, [moron,] not a CELL PHONE!
Me: [gives home number]
Cop: Now, sign right there.
Me: What does my signature here mean?
Cop: You've got to SIGN RIGHT THERE!
Me: What am I agreeing to by signing this?
Cop: [dumbfounded for a few seconds] By signing this, you are saying you received this ticket.
Me: [signs]
Cop: [Takes forever again, I take the chance to wipe condesation off back window, then dismisses me.]

Traffic Stop 2:

While approaching an interstate, I see a police car parked under the overpass. An overloaded pickup turns infront of me and drives through. As I pass the officer, his lights go on and he gets behind me. I turn into an apartment complex, as does the pickup, which turns to the left thereafter, and I turn to the right and take a parking spot. The police car comes to me and parks. I roll down my window and turn off the engine. The officer approaches.

Cop: Good evening sir. The reason I pulled you over is for doing 40 in a 30 mph zone. Are you in an emergency?
Me: No.
Cop: May I see your license and insurance.
Me: Yes, I'll get it out of the glove compartment.
Cop: Is this on your license your current address?
Me: Yes.
Cop: [Leaves for a while and then comes back]
Cop: Please sign right here. It is not an admission of guilt, just that you will show up in court on the specified day.
Me: [signs]
Cops: Here's your ticket, please drive safely.

***

These descriptions are more useful than the actual numerical value, since they tell exactly what the officer did that was objectionable. I would describe the first as being a complete dick, and the second as professional, even though the legal outcome was the same.

Re:1984

[rtechie]

Cops have a sucky enough job as it is and while I see a rating system like this as useful for many things, it'll be used for pettiness most of all. The serious issues cops get called out on have more efficient means of getting handled.

It's very difficult for me to imagine what tangible harm could be caused by internet review of police officers. Sure, they might be ANNOYED that people on the internet are talking smack about them, but so what? What do they really "suffer" exactly? You mentioned games, are game designers cripped by the criticism they receive on web forums? I don't think so.

And police officers aren't like game designers. Police officers have the right to come into your house and kill you. Given that, I think they deserve a bit of scrutiny. Hell, I think they deserve a LOT of scrutiny, like 24/7 surveillance, GPS implants, weekly gas spectrograph drug tests, yearly competency testing, affirmative action, no unions, etc.

Obviously the problems with police officers aren't getting handled, that's why there is all the guerrilla surveillance going on.

Re:1984

[vertinox]

I have been pulled more than once over and every time I have been treated with respect. You're making huge generalizations. Most police and troopers are good people.

Hold on there! Anecdotal evidence a universal case does not make.

Personally, I've seen both but it really depended on where you live. Generally, in larger cities you'll see cops that are too busy deal with little things whereas smaller municipalities often have quotas simply to meet budgets.

However, there are always cases of high level corruption everywhere and I've heard some nightmare stories about NYC cops. The real reason you haven't met any bad cops is because you haven't traveled enough.

Re:not enough boobies, that's why

[sjames]

Regardless of whether you believe police discretion is fair (it should be, but it isn't, because police officers are people too and therefore by definition unfair) it is necessary for them to do their jobs.

Discretion in itself is fine with me. What's not OK is laws that are only tolerable because discretion allows them to be ignored most of the time and lawmakers who write them that way under the assumption that discretion WILL be used.

Quite frankly, I don't see a point in a website like this. There are plenty of venues which one can use if one feels that one has been unfairly discriminated against by law enforcement, not the least of which are the courts.

If you're going to court with it, a site like that could be a good place to look for witnesses who can testify to a pattern of abuses and establish credibility. Even anonymous users might respond privatly to a posting requesting assistance in court.

Re:1984

[kcdoodle]

I was rear-ended during afternoon rush hour and cop (on his way home, on his own time) responded to the scene.
He didn't have to. We could have easily waited 4 hours for another cop to come along.

He was very nice and professional, calming the girl whose car was pushed into mine in a chain reaction.

I wrote a note to his superiors about how great he was.
They sent me back a thank-you which had also been copied to the superior's superior, the cop himself, and the cop's service record.

Always Always Always Always try to reward good behavior when you observe it.

Re:Bandwidth explanation reasonable

[H310iSe]

Wrote GoDaddy here's the response in full - I don't know if it's reasonable or not.

Office of the President Response
Dear xxx,

The situation with the Web site RateMyCop was absolutely NOT about censorship in ANY way.

The site's operator has publicly disclosed the concerns were over bandwidth. More accurately, Go Daddy's concerns were about how the RateMyCop site was far exceeding the amount of server usage for which it had contracted.

This customer paid for a shared server plan. The connections to his site were six times more than an entire 'shared server' accommodates. While he was paying for a service that cost $14.99 a month, his site actually required a much more extensive set-up.

Basically, he was paying for compact car, when he really needed a semi-truck.

The customer was not willing to work with our staff to resolve the issue.

While the "censorship" allegations certainly make for an edgy "story," they simply had nothing to do with this situation.

- Go Daddy
Office of the President