This page is not about online crime.
But rather about the difficulty of criminals in hiding information about their crimes
in the world of the Internet.
The Internet is a serious threat to the privacy
of criminals.
It used to be that they were named in soon-lost newspaper reports.
Now they are named online forever.
Privacy
- friend of the thief, kidnapper, rapist,
torturer and killer.
Crimewatch UK
- Another example of how the Internet can be used by the "good guys" as well as by the bad.
All unsolved crimes should be listed on the Internet, searchable by area.
All stolen property
should be listed and described online, searchable by type.
In a small community, everyone knows you, and it is
hard to get away with certain crimes.
Commit one bad crime and it becomes hard to live there any more.
Everyone will shun you.
Potential employers and potential girlfriends will know about you.
You may have to leave town and start again.
This "public shaming" is a powerful deterrent to many crimes.
In the move to big anonymous cities, that deterrent was lost.
But the Internet may be bringing it back.
And that may be a good thing, not a bad thing.
Criminals, before you act, consider this:
What if you are caught, and every future girlfriend is only one Google search away from seeing what you did?
Richard Gatiss
mugged a tiny disabled pensioner in 2015.
For years to come,
whenever any potential girlfriend Googles
"Richard Gatiss",
she will get this.
A fate worse than prison?
Is this wrong?
That you can never get your life back after doing such a thing?
That his name is poisoned forever?
No. You can get your life back.
There is one way and one way only he can restore his name:
Devote years of his life to the care of the elderly and disabled.
Eventually, if he is sincere,
the media will cover that story
and cover his redemption,
and it will neutralise the poison in his Google hits.
Stories like this are everywhere in the Internet age.
In 2009,
Michael Edmonds of Texas
was in a gang that, for fun,
shot the dog of US military war hero
Marcus Luttrell
(the "Lone Survivor")
and then threatened to kill Luttrell himself.
In Seaham, Durham,
in June 2014,
four young men
stole a family's beloved pet rabbit Percy.
They tortured it and killed it.
The family's three children, age 14, 10 and 4, are devastated.
The 14 year old said:
"I just can't believe anyone could be so cruel".
The young men are
Martin Bell
and Frank Hudson
and two 17 year olds.
The Guardian publishes
"Erwin James",
who served 20 years in prison,
and is now free to pontificate to the rest of us.
For 9 years, from 2000 to 2009,
until forced to do otherwise,
the Guardian did not have the guts to tell us
(a) his real name,
or (b) what he did.
One presumed he was a killer, but they wouldn't tell us.
Nor would they tell us his name.
Typical Guardian.
Brilliant.
He is outed in 2009. Hurray for the Internet:
"About Me"
on his blog declines to mention his crime or his victim. All it says is this:
"I drifted into crime, and spent 35 years in prison."
That's it!
A journalist
finds him very creepy:
"it is quite striking to observe that my taped interview with
[the victim's daughter] reveals many pauses for tears, whereas Hirst's is filled with his own laughter."
Murderer
John Hirst appears on TV,
showing no remorse or sensitivity.
He expresses no remorse about the woman he killed.
He even grins about it.
Search for more.
They have taken legal cases to stop people talking about this.
Bizarrely, they consider that they have "served their time"
and we should not be allowed to talk about this any more.
Even more bizarrely, they think suing Internet sites
is a good way to remove their names from the Internet
(as opposed to propagating their names).
As at Feb 2011:
In a Google search for
Wolfgang Werlé,
the entire first page is all about the murder
(except for a single link about another Wolfgang Werlé).
In a Google search for
Manfred Lauber,
the entire first page is all about the murder.
Manfred Lauber (left) and
Wolfgang Werle (right) murdered a 64 year old man in 1990.
They say we should not be allowed to talk about this any more.
Photo from Wired.
The Streisand effect.
The attempt to remove information from the Internet
can have the unintended consequence of publicising the information far more widely.
Brett Kimberlin
spent many years in prison,
and
has been trying to stop people talking about his past.
A Google search for
"Brett Kimberlin"
shows that isn't working out very well.
German jihadist
Marc-Daniel Jungnitz
registered the
terrorist site
millatu-ibrahim.com,
and then got upset when anti-jihad people pointed out its
publicly available
whois record
with his name on it.
He even
hired a lawyer
to try to stop people publishing his name.
Millatu Ibrahim banned in Germany, June 2012, after massive police raids on homes, meeting halls and mosques.
"Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich ... said
authorities believed there were preparations under way to replace the German constitutional state with Sharia law, and warned that anyone who does so can expect to face prosecution."
It is illegal to campaign for sharia law in Germany.
Nice!
