Meet the New Keystone Kops
Charles Carreon
Because crime often pays fairly well, and because every increment in technology brings special advantages to those who master it before others, criminals are often the earliest of early adopters. Quick to catch onto the value of fast cars, automatic weapons, and the latest in bathtub chemistry, criminals have harvested passing benefits from adopting these technologies. Computers are far more powerful than these technologies, however, and criminals have seized upon their value decisively. Certainly every gang that lacks a geek is slated for extinction.
The same might be said for police departments and other law enforcement agencies. I just listened to a hilarious interview that was conducted by a police officer who was trying to elicit statements from an atavistic geek who confessed to a series of information crimes. The cop was a nice country sheriff’s deputy, easygoing, pleasant and clueless. The interview is simply a disaster, and the deputy drew all the wrong conclusions from it, failing to realize that the real criminal was sitting right there confessing, and instead accepting the atavistic geek’s preposterous statements as if they made sense. The wool, in other words, was pulled over his eyes, and as a result, he proceeded to arrest the wrong person – my client.
Months later, after my client fired his other lawyer and retained me, I pointed out to the judge and prosecutor that in the course of accusing my client of directing him to commit the crimes, the atavistic geek had confessed to committing all of those crimes himself. The judge seemed surprised, and asked the prosecutor, effectively, “What’s up with that?” In response, the prosecutor dug into his large supply of dumb looks, and produced one of the dumbest, but a month later, he filed criminal charges against the atavistic geek who now, of course, will take the Fifth Amendment, leaving no one to accuse and convict my client, which is good, because I think he’s been falsely accused.
Assuming I am correct, and my client was falsely accused by the atavistic geek, multiple injustices have been committed by bad police work. An innocent man has had his life turned upside down, and has been forced to pay lawyers more than the annual per capita income of your average Oregon citizen just to stay out of jail. His accuser, a criminal who concealed his guilt using technical jargon, nearly escaped prosecution entirely. Finally, the victims of this atavistic geek were tricked into hating my client, a man who did them no harm.
Now all that sounds bad, and it is, but at least that little Oregon county had one deputy trying to figure out the crime. At least the county sheriff answered the phone and assigned a deputy to the case. By contrast, the United States Department of Justice has only thirty prosecutors tasked with prosecuting Internet crimes, and the last time I called the Portland FBI office to report a crime, I got an answering machine. FBI has paid over $180 Million for a dysfunctional computer network to their old friends at Strategic Applications International Corporation (SAIC), whose Board of Directors is comprised entirely of old defense and intelligence dinosaurs like Bobby Inman (ex CIA director) and Frank Carlucci (ex Secretary of Defense). It would have been cheaper just to pay criminals not to commit crimes.
Let me break it to you here. There is an Internet crime tsunami on the horizon, and the federal government is as clueless about how to respond to it as the governments of Thailand , Indonesia , Ceylon and India , when faced with the killer wave of 2004. The cops either don’t know it’s coming, or they don’t know what to do about it, and they aren’t going to warn us about what they do know. Why? It’s just nobody’s job. The FBI is primarily engaged in the business of solving bank robberies, which is to say, serving as insurance investigators for the FDIC. The federal Marshals are busy managing the large numbers of drug users and illegal immigrants currently housed in the nation’s federal prisons. The Treasury cops are focused on counterfeiting of paper money and staffing the Bush Inauguration with enough snipers to wipe out the citizens of Washington D.C. , should the need for such a citizen-containment action become necessary. The DEA sets up drug deals and disburses funds to buy drugs, thus maintaining the cost of drugs, making them too expensive for honest people to buy. The FTC goes after a clutch of fraudsters I’ve referred to as “the usual suspects,” about which you can read at www.businessfraudlawyer.com.
It sounds like, for all the good the federal government will do you if you are victimized by an atavistic geek, you might as well call the Better Business Bureau. Neverthess, if you are an information crime victim, unless there are unique circumstances, you should immediately make a police report to your local police, and be sure the investigating officer “opens a case,” which just means assigning it a case number, and recording your statement in a police report. Sometimes cops dodge out on this responsibility, and that could be bad for you – if there’s no case number, you’ll never find a report. Of course, opening a case could lead to an investigation, or even a prosecution, but at the very least it will provide proof that you identified yourself as a crime victim.
Unique Circumstances
Obviously, the FBI isn’t going to get involved in a domain name theft. They never have, and never will. Since most stolen domains are comprised of sexy words that attract sexually starved men, you can imagine your local cops will not be too interested in helping people to recover them. Indeed, they might take an altogether unhealthy interest in a pornographer’s affairs. So this is one unique circumstance, similar to that presented by the theft of narcotics, where the victim may be best advised not to make a crime report.
Because crime often pays fairly well, and because every increment in technology brings special advantages to those who master it before others, criminals are often the earliest of early adopters. Quick to catch onto the value of fast cars, automatic weapons, and the latest in bathtub chemistry, criminals have harvested passing benefits from adopting these technologies. Computers are far more powerful than these technologies, however, and criminals have seized upon their value decisively. Certainly every gang that lacks a geek is slated for extinction.
The same might be said for police departments and other law enforcement agencies. I just listened to a hilarious interview that was conducted by a police officer who was trying to elicit statements from an atavistic geek who confessed to a series of information crimes. The cop was a nice country sheriff’s deputy, easygoing, pleasant and clueless. The interview is simply a disaster, and the deputy drew all the wrong conclusions from it, failing to realize that the real criminal was sitting right there confessing, and instead accepting the atavistic geek’s preposterous statements as if they made sense. The wool, in other words, was pulled over his eyes, and as a result, he proceeded to arrest the wrong person – my client.
Months later, after my client fired his other lawyer and retained me, I pointed out to the judge and prosecutor that in the course of accusing my client of directing him to commit the crimes, the atavistic geek had confessed to committing all of those crimes himself. The judge seemed surprised, and asked the prosecutor, effectively, “What’s up with that?” In response, the prosecutor dug into his large supply of dumb looks, and produced one of the dumbest, but a month later, he filed criminal charges against the atavistic geek who now, of course, will take the Fifth Amendment, leaving no one to accuse and convict my client, which is good, because I think he’s been falsely accused.
Assuming I am correct, and my client was falsely accused by the atavistic geek, multiple injustices have been committed by bad police work. An innocent man has had his life turned upside down, and has been forced to pay lawyers more than the annual per capita income of your average Oregon citizen just to stay out of jail. His accuser, a criminal who concealed his guilt using technical jargon, nearly escaped prosecution entirely. Finally, the victims of this atavistic geek were tricked into hating my client, a man who did them no harm.
Now all that sounds bad, and it is, but at least that little Oregon county had one deputy trying to figure out the crime. At least the county sheriff answered the phone and assigned a deputy to the case. By contrast, the United States Department of Justice has only thirty prosecutors tasked with prosecuting Internet crimes, and the last time I called the Portland FBI office to report a crime, I got an answering machine. FBI has paid over $180 Million for a dysfunctional computer network to their old friends at Strategic Applications International Corporation (SAIC), whose Board of Directors is comprised entirely of old defense and intelligence dinosaurs like Bobby Inman (ex CIA director) and Frank Carlucci (ex Secretary of Defense). It would have been cheaper just to pay criminals not to commit crimes.
Let me break it to you here. There is an Internet crime tsunami on the horizon, and the federal government is as clueless about how to respond to it as the governments of Thailand , Indonesia , Ceylon and India , when faced with the killer wave of 2004. The cops either don’t know it’s coming, or they don’t know what to do about it, and they aren’t going to warn us about what they do know. Why? It’s just nobody’s job. The FBI is primarily engaged in the business of solving bank robberies, which is to say, serving as insurance investigators for the FDIC. The federal Marshals are busy managing the large numbers of drug users and illegal immigrants currently housed in the nation’s federal prisons. The Treasury cops are focused on counterfeiting of paper money and staffing the Bush Inauguration with enough snipers to wipe out the citizens of Washington D.C. , should the need for such a citizen-containment action become necessary. The DEA sets up drug deals and disburses funds to buy drugs, thus maintaining the cost of drugs, making them too expensive for honest people to buy. The FTC goes after a clutch of fraudsters I’ve referred to as “the usual suspects,” about which you can read at www.businessfraudlawyer.com.
It sounds like, for all the good the federal government will do you if you are victimized by an atavistic geek, you might as well call the Better Business Bureau. Neverthess, if you are an information crime victim, unless there are unique circumstances, you should immediately make a police report to your local police, and be sure the investigating officer “opens a case,” which just means assigning it a case number, and recording your statement in a police report. Sometimes cops dodge out on this responsibility, and that could be bad for you – if there’s no case number, you’ll never find a report. Of course, opening a case could lead to an investigation, or even a prosecution, but at the very least it will provide proof that you identified yourself as a crime victim.
Unique Circumstances
Obviously, the FBI isn’t going to get involved in a domain name theft. They never have, and never will. Since most stolen domains are comprised of sexy words that attract sexually starved men, you can imagine your local cops will not be too interested in helping people to recover them. Indeed, they might take an altogether unhealthy interest in a pornographer’s affairs. So this is one unique circumstance, similar to that presented by the theft of narcotics, where the victim may be best advised not to make a crime report.