Cyber Criminals Caught and a Young Boy Gets His Mother out of Jail

Sometimes it doesn’t seem as if the human race has much to recommend it. From a certain perspective, it's a dirty, anarchistic world. Countries are trillions in debt but they manage to borrow more money. Politicians lie and cheat the people they're supposed to be representing. Bankers destroy economies and get rewarded for it. Individuals' lives are ruined when they can't make a couple of payments on their mortgage or credit cards. 

A pregnant woman in India gets wrongfully convicted of murder and stuck in jail for 19 years because she couldn't put together the $180 bail money. Hundreds of thousands of people languish in prison for years - some for most of their lives - without being charged. 

Another woman commits a federal crime, is prosecuted and found guilty but escapes prison, gets a new identity, lives a decent life for dozens of years until she's caught but she gets off with a good lawyer. Yet another woman commits a lesser crime but can't afford a clever lawyer and her life is over. It's possible that race has something to do with it, because although on the surface it's coincidence that the one who gets to live the rest of her life as a free woman is white and the other one is black, it's no coincidence that most of the wealth, resources and opportunity have historically been available to whites and not to blacks in that country.

People are tried, condemned and executed on insufficient grounds unless you count the grounds of some DA or police department needing to bump up stats. Corporations that produce arms control politicians who create wars out of nothing and get away with it. 

Upstanding members of a community and various business men who wear suits and who everybody respects get to screw around with a woman's fledgling business, sexually harass her, contribute to the destruction of that business and get away scot free while she picks herself out of the gutter, stumbles and falls, stumbles and falls. This time it's not about race because they're all white. Might be about gender, though. Partly it's about people who don't give a damn but mostly it's just about what they know they can do and what she doesn't know she's allowed to do.

It's not hard to get totally bitter and twisted about the way things are. Yet in the face of such overwhelming evidence that the human race has nothing recommend it, some of us - maybe even most of us - still believe that good conquers evil; that everybody has something within them that nobody can touch or assail. That the darkest hours actually contain the light.

That it's possible to climb out of the gutter even when you don't know how and things look hopeless for you. It's possible to retrieve your life no matter how much anybody's screwed you around, no matter how much the odds seem - and are - stacked against you. 

We believe it's possible to turn your life around when it seems too late, that help is always at hand in reality; that we just have to learn how to see it. Because no matter how bad things look and are in the world people are fighting back. And conquering. Bankers are investigated eventually as are banks for illegal home repossessions. In a world that’s tailor made for the worst kind of criminals, when profits from child pornography and crime to the tune of $6 billion are laundered through shadowy cyber organizations they actually get caught. 

Corrupt systems and rulers fall apart. When you have lousy entitlement and self esteem you can get help and rebuild until you're very clear about what people can and can't do in your presence and to you. 

And in a country with so much poverty it's blinding to the soul, a young boy, Vijai Kumari, who was born in prison and spent his life being shunted around juvenile homes because his mother is unjustly and unnecessarily in prison, grows up straight somehow. Somehow learns a skill and gets a job. Miraculously saves and saves until he has the money to pay for a lawyer to get his mother released. And he succeeds.

FBI Push to Tap Internet Communications Triggers Big Brother Paranoia

The Washington Post and the New York Times have both reported that the Obama administration is considering a bill that will enable the FBI to tap internet users in much the same way as it has permission to wiretap. The matter has been debated for years, as far back as 2010, when the FBI asked Congress to pass a bill that would force internet companies to update their technical capacity to comply with a court order to intercept and unscramble internet communication in specific cases. 

This would include social networking sites and encrypted email transmitters. All companies would be required to put adequate technology in place so they could comply if asked, or face a $25,000 a day fine.

 FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III

The FBI didn’t succeed then and they’re pushing again for the same law to be put in place. Their rationale then and now is that methods of communication have evolved but their ability to pursue criminals hasn’t kept pace. Everybody knows about wiretapping and how to avoid it now so the FBI has lost its edge.

This is not Hollywood; the FBI will still need a court order just as they do for wiretapping, but it’s creating a firestorm of protest among IT companies and internet users. Both are bringing in the big paranoia guns, arguing that this is a big brother move which will make privacy even more of a joke and facilitate hackers. They’re also warning it will impact negatively on Silicon Valley and the US IT industry as a whole; that established IT companies and startups will gravitate to other countries without any controls. Which argument isn’t much different from the 1% protesting that if they have to pay taxes they’ll leave and the economy will collapse without them.

It's difficult to distinguish the difference between the real work that the FBI does in protecting society and the Hollywood version of a corrupt, inept, megalomaniac organization. It's also hard to know where sanity kicks in, in the war on terror, given that nobody really knows what happened on 9/11 and that the Iraq war was initiated on fabricated ‘evidence’. And that conservatives with an agenda and their media have played a huge role in cultivating paranoia.

It’s also impossible to know whether the FBI will abuse this capability or whether it will really help them pursue criminals. Probably both will happen. The firestorm is understandable but it isn’t logical. Everybody lived with wiretapping and if this bill passes everybody will get used to it too. In any case it’s ludicrous that companies like Google and Facebook would protest about people’s right to privacy. Personally I’d rather be guarded by the FBI than intruded upon by either of those two thugs. 

And right now the internet is the wild west; there aren’t any controls at all, so maybe it would be good to introduce some. What can anybody do if you’re the victim of internet crime? Absolutely nothing. So maybe this will actually facilitate not just catching terrorists but hackers, pedophiles and internet bank robbers.

CNN Report on Steubenville Rape Case Shows Sympathy for Rapists

Yesterday in Juvenile Court, Judge Thomas Lipps found two young men guilty of raping a young girl in Steubenville Ohio, and taking photos of her naked and spreading them round the internet. “In this case…um…you know…regarding the charges of rape, both defendents, Ma’lik Richmond and Trent Mays, are committed to the department of youth services for a minimum period of one year and a maximum period until you’re twenty-one.”

Three eyewitnesses testified against the accused. The first said he was in the car with the two boys and the girl. He saw Trent Mays use his fingers in sexual activity. He photographed it on his iPhone for a couple of minutes then deleted it the next morning. The second eyewitness said they drove the girl to a basement, where Ma’lik Richmond did a similar act, then took photos of her naked. The third eyewitness said the girl wasn’t talking, she wasn’t moving, so obviously she wasn’t participating. 

The girl woke up the next morning, still naked. That the eyewitnesses weren’t charged for complicity, and that nobody has even mentioned their wrong-doing is mind-boggling.

This incident has created huge debate and practically been tried on social media, with some, incredibly, actually believing the young men were innocent and others baying for their blood. CNN’s reportage of the judgment show quite blatantly on which side of the line they stood.Candy Crawley, on CNN, spoke with CNN reporter Poppy Harlow (the two pictured above), who has been covering the case.

I expected the focus of the judgment and CNN’s reporting on it to be about the details of the crime – that the boys carried her around like a pig, urinated on her, raped her, took photographs of her and put them on the internet - and about what that had done to the girl and her family, how she was coping. And whether the sentence was commensurate with what these two boys had done.

Candy Crawley introduced Poppy Harlow with “I cannot imagine…how emotional that must have been sitting there in the courtroom.” Emotional for who? The victim? As it happens, she was referring to the perpetrators and their families. This is what Poppy Harlow had to say in reply.

“I’ve never experienced anything like it, Candy.” She spoke about how moving the two young boys were, how they apologized with great heart, and broke down in tears. She showed a clip of them doing so. To my mind Trent Mays (who took the photos) he looked more scared than anything else. Ma’lik Richmond did seem truly remorseful, but it’s easy to be in floods of tears and say sorry when you’ve got caught and the whole world is watching you. There were no tears and there was no remorse before the court case.

More shocking than anything else was Poppy Harlow’s clear sympathy for the two boys who were football stars at their school, and whose careers, she said, were over. “They literally watched as they believed their lives fell apart…One of them, Malik Richmond…collapsed in the arms of his attorney…[saying] ‘my life is over, nobody is going to want me now’.”

That is not remorse about what you’ve done to your victim. It’s remorse that you got caught and have to pay the consequences. Which point eluded Poppy Harlow. She painted a very tragic and dramatic picture of the two poor boys and that they would carry the term “sexual offender” for life. Their plight and their ruined careers seemed to bother her more than what they had done, and what being raped, carried round like a pig, urinated on and having photos of it all spread around the internet did to the young girl and her family. In fact, Poppy didn’t even mention that part. And Candy Crawley didn’t point it out.

And this is the 21^st century. Two empowered women, one of whom, Candy Crawley, has a lot of clout. She mediated one of the debates between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in the run-up to the last election. 

Piers Morgan showed more sense. He discussed the case with Tracy Lords (the two are pictured above), who was raped at age 10, and who has spoken out about insanity of the debate. “Young kids” said Piers, by way of introduction, “do behave badly. I’m not going to carry on saying the same thing but they do behave in a ridiculous manner when they’re intoxicated. They all seem to be deeply regretful about what happened and the taking of pictures is a modern-day curse if you like. It’s what they all do. With everything. Do you have any sympathy for these two young boys?”

Tracy Lords replied “Absolutely not. They treated her like she was an animal. They [carried] her around like she’s a pig. They urinated on her. What they did, it’s hard for me to believe we’re even talking about children, it’s so ugly, it’s so…beyond…There’s zero respect…It’s our sisters, it’s our daughters, it’s our mothers. This conversation needs to become much louder…I want to be part of this conversation. Not only because it’s happened to me but because it needs to be screamed from the tallest buildings. This needs to stop.”

Savagery amongst young boys. The debate was mostly fuelled by the fact that the young girl was blind drunk. The argument is that girls mustn’t get drunk because guys might rape them. What about the argument that guys mustn’t get drunk because they might rape a girl? 

The culture that girls and women must take responsibility for themselves but boys and men don’t have to is still alive and kicking. It is tragic that boys are still growing up in it; that these two will carry a stain for the rest of their lives. But so will the girl.

Iceland’s Minister Jonassen Acts to Stop Internet Porn

It’s a world where everybody is constantly clamoring for freedom to act out your own destiny without anybody placing unnatural limits on your right to speak and work and live, where the words regulation and censorship are like red rags to everybody’s bull. But now Iceland’s Interior Minister Ogmundur Jonasson has spoken out against internet porn and introduced the idea that it should be banned because of the effect it has on children, who can access it too easily.

He has appointed committees to study ways to prevent children from seeing these images on games consoles, smartphones and computers. One of the options would be to block the IP addresses of known porn sites and make it illegal to pay for online porn with an Iceland-based credit card. 

If Iceland goes through with this it will be the first Western democracy to block online pornography. Right now it is already illegal to print and distribute porn, and strip clubs were banned two years ago because of how they violate the rights of women who work in them.

Of course, Jonasson has drawn fire, from advocates of freedom of the Web, in particular, a member of Iceland’s parliament Birgitta Jonsdottir. In an editorial in The Guardian (UK) she called the proposed bill “bizarre”, saying it is impossible to erect walls around the internet unless you create an entirely independent internet as Iran is attempting to do. The Iran-fear factor; there’s nothing like it for striking terror into the hearts of people.

Jonsdottir also wrote about the danger of companies not wanting to host their businesses in Iceland as they fear this bill will presage the kind of blanket censorship that China and Saudi Arabia practice. Ah, the China-fear factor. Jonsdottir didn’t address how such a simple, well-defined and isolated instance of censorship could ever snowball into the kind of manic destruction of rights that she suggests we will all have to guard against.

Personally, I think the loss of some paranoid businesses – if they even exist, Jonsdottir didn’t elaborate; fear mongers never do – is a small price to pay for a move that the world should have taken a long time ago, and that would place Iceland amongst the heroes. The internet’s porn trade is the Wild West; unfettered freedom, a breeding ground for criminals and rank exploiters. And children use this medium the most. I think every single thing that can be done should be done.

Jonsdottir has suggested the development of free anti-porn software and educating parents. There’s nothing wrong with her ideas, and she should move on them. The more solutions in the pot the better. But ‘education’ is always the panacea that’s offered when people want to avoid the hard solution because money is involved. The NRA and Republicans in the US tout education instead of gun control. 

On its own, education won’t fix a problem, because you can’t force parents who don’t really give a damn to participate. You can’t force people to read pamphlets or attend lectures either – it’s their basic human right to choose. And in any case one lecture or a series doesn’t always inspire people to act in a sustainable way. This isn't just about people not understanding the dangers, it's about a culture of adult apathy.

It’s kind of like having advanced cancer; you can decide to learn about what has caused it and how you need to change your life, but you’d better also do something about those rampant cancer cells right now. Internet porn is a cancer and it’s rampant, and the way it affects children is as serious a problem in the world as global warming. Lawmakers need to take it seriously. I think Interior Minister Ogmundur Jonasson is heading for a Nobel Prize.