Tar and feathering in the digital age

What happens when you combine a good online cause with vigilante justice? Sometimes, the innocent get caught in the crossfire. In this case the good cause is cleaning the ‘Net of pedophiles. The vigilantes are a group of cyber savvy citizens (read: hackers) who pose as children in chat rooms, wait for a predator to come at them, then post the predator’s name, address, home, cell and work numbers, family names, church, employer, and whatever else they can find that will cause such misery the guy would have to leave town and assume a new identity. And the innocent are the guys who are wrongly accused. The vigilante group I speak of, Perverted-Justice has a good idea: publicly humiliate the bad guys, destroy their lives and send the cops knocking at their doors. But they’ve also wrongly identified the innocent many, many times, according to Julie Cison, who helps administer a year-old Web site, Corrupted-Justice speaking out against Perverted’s tactics. While there are plenty of media reports quoted on her site to back up her assertions, one recent cover story in the Cincinnati CityBeat is most comprehensive. It tells of several men who’ve been publicly ruined only to find out later it was a case of mistaken identity. In some cases, it turns out their computers were remotely controlled by Trojan horse bots; or IM accounts were hijacked by criminals posing as them. In one case, the accused simply had his photo stolen and used. In that case, the wrongly-accused man told the CityBeat writers that he felt sick and scared when he saw his photo on Perverted-Justice.com. “I still have fears about going out and talking to people because they may have seen the site,” he added. “It makes it hard to live life.” And yet, the article says, the hacker administrator of the site was nonchalant. True to hacker form, the Perverted hackers have also gone after the opposition. Cison contends their site was hacked at least twice by the Perverted hackers late last year. “They hacked us because they cannot stand the fact that we speak out against their efforts, and more commonly, their many mistakes and violations of the law,” Cison writes me in an e-mail earlier today. “We have the server logs to show proof of this, and the crime has been reported to the FBI Internet Crimes division in Houston, TX. Unfortunately, the Feds will not prosecute any case with losses less than $50,000 because of the sheer volume of such reported cases!” Ah, yes, the lack of law enforcement conundrum. In this age when there aren’t enough cyber cops to go around, it’s inevitable that members of the endangered society would want to take matters into their own hands. But maybe there’s a better way to give law enforcement a leg up, like the Ethical Hackers Against Pedophilia, which I reported on back in 1998. Those hackers actually knew how to do their forensics and lead the cops directly to the servers the illegal images are hosted on. Cybercops could finish the investigation legally, and use their own forensics data in a court of law. Now that, I think, was a very good thing.