A Canadian political heavyweight has called upon Anonymous to "name and shame" four teenagers accused of raping a girl who committed suicide last week.
Read more at http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/...ke-Down-Rapists

That "Little Bastards" like this exist and get away with it makes me sick to the core! .. so sickened that I took to the internet and signed an online petition !

"That'll Learn 'em !"

I wonder, is there a 2070's collective of a similar nature ? instead of LULZSec ... CHUMMERSec ... or instead of Anons, "Mostly unknowns"

You mean, like Jackpoint? O.o

Yeah, or The Exchange.

yeah yeah, okay /facepalm

In Shadowrun, if something gets enough attention like this, I imagine there's interested parties interested enough to hire some deniable assets to see justice get done.


Actually, in my game, my players wound up completing a bounty hunter's Run when they pulled the details off his commlink after they roughed him up on behalf of the Ancients. He was on a job to track down an elf who raped an elf from Tir Tairngire while she was visiting Seattle. They decided they didn't like the schmuck bad enough that they freelanced his job, picked the schmuck up, and handed him over to the Troll's Johnson.

Then they figured out that the Johnson had planned to doublecross the troll bounty hunter - but he wasn't prepared to doublecross an entire team of Runners with Spirit backup, so he wound up paying them anyway. Then the troll called them, angry they'd freelanced his job, and demanded a quarter of the take as a finder's fee. They decided to pay it out rather than have him cause trouble down the line, and he sweetened the deal with details on someone they had been doing some legwork looking for.


So, yeah. Sometimes, something like this can happen in Shadowrun. I doubt a politician/public figure would make an open, public call for Shadows justice, though. They'd just hire a runner. Alternatively, if something gets heard by the right person in the right bar or the right Matrix feed, some Runner with some time and energy to spare might actually decide to do it on their own. Such things probably wouldn't make the news, though; just a story goes around about a teenaged girl who killed herself after getting no justice for a gang rape, and a month or so later her rapists just vanished, or were killed in "unrelated" street crimes.

Looks like Anonymous has taken the job.

Reports aren't on in how much their face talked up the price.

Yep, they are doing it.

While I'm not generally a fan of groups like anon and lulzsec, I do like watching people direct their actions towards something good like this.

I'd be more interested to see why prosecutors felt they didn't have enough evidence to bring a charge. I mean..if they had a video..that seems pretty damning. Of course, I haven't seen nor do I want to see it, but I would think rape or not rape would be pretty obvious.

OTOH, maybe there is a good reason they didn't bring charges, and all this does is attack people illegally.

I'd say the people have a right to know why charges weren't brought up. It seems like they are mostly holding the Canadian Justice system hostage. They either re-open the case and begin legal actions else they will release the names of those responsible. That, in turn, would lead to actual vigilanteism

which is quite clever actually . .

Until someone innocent gets screwed over. Just a mess all around.

Someone innocent already got screwed over.

But I take your point.

Problem is, even scumbags have to be protected by the law. If they aren't, then it is a small step to those in power being able to define people as being beneath the protection of the law.

Oh ... wait ...

Mob justice as a sign for the breakdown of society certainly has a dystopian feel, but IMO in cyberpunk stories the standard attitude towards crime is total apathy. The only thing which makes people remotely care about crime rates would be body lotteries...

Also, the kind of crime which sends everybody running for the pitchforks changes like every fashion. Chances are they have a different one in 60 years, my money being on something magic-related


I'd say that police work which did not lead to a formal indictment does not belong into the public. Let's say somebody denunciated you as peddling child porn, the police turns your place upside down and goes through every photo you posses and every email you have in your accounts before realizing there is nothing to be found. Would you like the complete inventory to be published because "the people have a right to know why charges weren't brought up"?

And especially in case of sexual offenses, especially^2 those involving minors, it is not just about protecting the rights of the accused: The girl killed herself because of "a vicious bullying campaign spurred by a photo of the attack that was spread around her school by one of her attackers." I doubt her condition would have improved if she had seen the juicy details of the case discussed across the country, complete with the usual suspects accusing her of having asked for it...

You may want to read it a little more. I'm fine if they want to keep the perpetrators unidentified, but the people have a right to know that they were somehow unable to find proof of a gang rape... of which there is apparently video or photographic evidence.

One possibility is that the evidence given, while damning and absolute, may not be admissible in court for whatever reason, and thus cannot be officially released to the public either.

This is a case of the Law protecting the Guilty while letting the Victims just swing in the breeze. The first Dirty Harry movie gives an excellent example of this when Clint Eastwood finds the rifle that was used in murder, but because he was too busy trying to find the location of a (hopefully alive) girl, he didn't have a warrant to search the site and it became tainted evidence and about as useful as a paperweight for a whole lot of files. Now that's a fictional example, and I'm not sure how well the folks in the film did their research on the subject, but I'm willing to bet similar items have happened far more than once.

"The innocent have nothing to fear" is very much a fallacy that the police try to encourage "law-abiding" citizens. The truth is, we're all guilty of something that we can be charged for, even if it takes a week of Sundays to find the law we've broken in the WAREHOUSE that holds all of the laws of the land.

EDIT: And that's without worrying about planted evidence which might be done, especially in highly publicized cases where the public and the politicians are screaming that someone be found, and that they be found NOW! (Sorry if this offends our members that proudly wear a shield, but all it takes is one bad apple who doesn't get caught doing it, and an innocent life is ruined as they get sent up the river.).

I have a hard time trying to imagine what kind of evidence could be "damning and absolute" as regards a gang rape while not being admissible. I mean, I'm not saying it's impossible, mind you, but it would have to be tricky. I mean, it's unlikely that they'd have a cybereye recording from the victim's point-of-view whose existence was (somehow) deemed to have violated the defendant's right to privacy (as if such a thing would exist in a setting with cybereyes.)

Either way, the more I think about this, the more it makes me squirm. I mean, sure, there is an element of frontier justice to it that appeals - if the law cannot or will not help a gang-raped fifteen year old who then had images/video of it passed around, then what is the point of the law? On the other hand, as CanRay suggested, there might be a terrible circumstance here wherein the evidence against the guilty somehow winds up falling under laws designed to protect every relatively innocent, decent Canadian against jackbooted thugs simply kicking in their door, turning their house upside down until they find something illegal, then hauling them out in irons.

They might even have uncovered evidence that the sexual activity was, at the time it took place, entirely consensual, with a role-playing aspect to it that could let the video look somewhere else, and that the girl only felt violated enough to report it as rape after the videos and pictures started going around. I can full well see why they wouldn't want that news released, in which case the internet hate machine just got sicc'd on four boys largely innocent of heinous wrongdoing, when they should be attacking themselves - the people who pass around images and videos and like to degrade other people.

Another thing that bugs me is the bias of the source gone to for justice. This is CNN's take on the story, with several pictures of the victim. If she'd been fat or ugly, I imagine Anonymous would be much less interested in crusading to crucify the boys alleged to have raped her, and far more likely to be taking to 4chan with awful, heinous messages about her and girls like her. (Of course, pretty, thin white girls getting better treatment than fat, ugly or minority girls is hardly unique to Anonymous or the internet, but still, (nearly) everyone is notionally supposed to be equal before the law.)

For those of you thinking of about sniggering at the idea of "Canadian Jackbooted Thugs", they exist, they're real, and they're after anyone they can get their hands on.

We're polite as a nation... Individuals are still just folk, good and bad in all of us.

Now that you've made mention of it, it is kind of hard not to snigger at the thought of a jackbooted maple thug rummaging through all your things and ending every third sentence with a menacing "Eh?" Probably wouldn't be so funny if it actually happened, though.

It isn't.

Let's just say that I have known some people that had to deal with some rather unsavory fellows who would have been little better than thugs and goons were it not for the uniform and a badge.

That said, I've also known a few good, honest souls who wore those same uniforms. Police are folk, just like everyone else. It's just that they have the ability to be much, much worse a monster than your average citizen due to a combination of matters.

This is the big point really, when we get down to it. Obviously the "smear" campaign against her with photos aren't (or rather, shouldn't, in my mind) be met with serious legal action even though it technically is child pornography, because the people spreading it were also minors. It gets into a really weird grey area there. If they investigated and nothing was found, or rather, nothing admissible or there was some sort of proof that it was not a rape case; why hide that and sweep it under the rug? That's probably the main point here, lack of transparency. It doesn't help that the average person doesn't have any real clue about most laws.

X-Kal, therein lies the rub.

If they say "We know these boys raped that girl, but the evidence isn't admissible in court," then they've just sent a shock of unrest through the nation. Chances are they're going to be dealing with protests, people will scream and shout and demand that laws regarding what evidence is admissible or not get torn down or neutered, and more likely than not they'll have to deal with vigilantes deciding that if the law can stand there with a straight face and say that a heinous crime, a special kind of evil crime, was committed against a young girl and they're incapable of or incompetent to act upon it, they'll do so themselves. (Which really, is what's close to happening.) It also prejudices the public against them in the event any kind of criminal or civil proceedings do come against them.

And what happens if they come out and say "What happened to her was not, in fact, rape." That could be just as bad, even if they have concrete, full video proof of the event in which they outline, before anything sexual happens, that it's a role-playing encounter and she wants to live out a fantasy of being gang-raped? That would make it look like they're blaming the victim, and short of releasing the video, they couldn't exactly prove in the public's mind that that's what actually took place - and obviously they can't release a pornographic video like that! So it looks like a cover-up, like they drop-fucked the pooch and let a horribly abused young girl fall through the cracks and that, when the shitstorm boiled into a tempest, they went into full-on damage control mode. "She was asking for it." "She wanted it." Those statements are never going to sound good when a fifteen year old girl alleges she was gang-raped and then kills herself. It would bring the wrath of a vengeful and angry god (not to mention Internet) down on them, unless they did, in fact, have and release rock-solid proof, something along the lines of her on video explaining to the boys exactly what she wants them to do and outlining safe-words and such.


The real culprit, I think, is a culture shared amongst, at least, English-speaking North American societies that celebrates male sexuality while at the same time denigrating female sexuality. It's kind of a catch-22: if you have a penis, you're expected to get it wet, and if you haven't, then you're not a man, but if you have a vagina you're expected to keep it free of penises, or you're a whore and a slut. How the flying fuckadilly doo-daa-day does that make sense? We know it can't be because boys are expected to fuck other boys, because that's far worse in this fucked-up mentality's thought processes. So where the hell does this lead - young men are expected to have sex with young women, any time they possibly can, but young women are denigrated and excoriated if they consent to having sex with young men. Am I really the only one who can see this leading to a bad place? Somehow I doubt I am, yet it is allowed to continue. It is this pervasive culture, I think, which is at least as much at fault for the girl's being driven to suicide as the boys who raped her, if in fact she was raped, or entirely at fault if the encounter was consensual until suddenly it started getting bandied about. This culture, which made her into a victim, a target to be mocked, ridiculed and harassed, an Other, a Whore, the unchaste and unclean one who could be stoned and shamed freely and without reprisal.

Am I the only one who thinks that's monumentally fucked up? Like if they erected an enormous diseased penis twice the height of the Eiffel tower, it could be a monument to the fucked-uppedness of that mindset and culture. I mean, I can't really blame young people for spreading around naked pictures/video of one of their peers. Naked women can be found anywhere on the internet, but someone you know naked is something else altogether, there's an element of reality to it that just isn't present in your garden-variety porno. Such a thing would be a hot topic, and I expect most young people would want it.

What I don't understand, and what makes me furious, is the thought that it is then acceptable to harass, mock, and debase the subject of the imagery. All the moreso if she is alleging rape, that's simply supremely fucked up. They could fire a rocket-penis into the most suggestively vagina-shaped crater in the solar system and it wouldn't be sufficiently fucked-up to be a worthy monument to the fucked-uppedness of the mindset that leads to such things. That is what needs to be fought. The entire culture, the notion that A Man Is Not A Virgin but a Woman Is A Virgin. Really, do the fucking math, how can a man become a man, then, without making a woman not a woman? That does not add up, it's a zero-sum game. The constituents of column A can't achieve their "real" status without depriving it from a member of column B? What?!

I'm probably rambling. Just thinking about this is making me pissed.

Wasn't there a similar case a few weeks back where everybody and their mother was crying how a lawsuit would destroy the lives of 3 college football players who raped a girl?

I think they reference it in your article mate, it was the one that was getting brushd under the carpet until the ANON's picked it up and started applying liberal amounts of "IT WAS THEM WOT DID IT !" to the internets !

as I recall the chief prosecutor was parent of one of the accused .. and it "went away"

And in such cases i wholehartedly endorse making names and faces and phone numbers and email adresses and the such known . .

The fact that they were unable is obvious, you wanted to make public the reasons why. And since a statement like "well, we looked at the evidence and applicable law but couldn't build a case" would be exactly as enlightening as the fact that no formal indictment took place, the only way to implement such a right-to-know would be to bring out all the juicy details for the world to discuss. Remember the Lewinsky case?

An full ACK to SD,.

They don't mention the Duke case, where male students were accused of rape and tried in the court of public opinion, with a DA who broke the law to bring charges and smear these guys...and the 'victim' recanted her story and admitted it was garbage.

Rock and a hard place is where alot of this stuff ends up. I'd go into all decline of society mode, but really the only difference these days is kids can record that stuff and put it out for everyone in the world to see.

You ... you ... GET OUT OF MY HEAD! Stop reading my mind...!!



Seriously. You just said exactly what I've thought about our cultural hang-ups over sex and nudity since ... well ... since I hit puberty, really.

Yes, but, you see, those were STAR ATHLETES, and thus young nobility in the USA.

You're right, they don't mention that but honestly it's an outlier case. I wish I could find the numbers so I wasn't just doing "internet stats" (ie pulling it out my ass) but the number of people who believe women cry rape versus the actual number of false cases is staggeringly high. I want to say 5% or less of rape cases are false whereas people think its at least 5 times that.

And yeah, Ray, of course they were nobility, they played FOOTBALL in the midwest. That shit is like religion there.

As an aside, it's nice to see this can be discussed with differing viewpoints in a calm and rational matter.

Yeah, but I think we are all doing 2 things here,

1) trying to look for an SR angle
2) really trying not to attract MOD attention, by playing nice ... someone'll Frag it up though .... in ... 3...2.....1......

*shrugs*
this is neither politics not religion.
technically, they have less reason to shut this down than the War-Thread about North Korea i posted some days back.

That and we've seen more vitriol in the SRR thread about them using HPs. Sort of goes along with EA winning "worst company in america" 2 years in a row. Not that they aren't a terrible company, and I think their COO is a tool for the letter he put out about it, but he makes a good point about them somehow being worse than banks who fuck up mortgages.

<edit> Should actually point out my point that we see far more hate on the internet directed towards things that have more affect on the internet denizens; In this case games.

I think I read today that those 3 football players were arrested, or maybe it was YET ANOTHER case of young boys raping a girl, or being accused of it at least.

My 13 year old is never dating or leaving my sight. Wonder what age I can get her a concealed carry or a taser or an oral dart with Narcoject or something.

Just for you then, since it legality varies by state. http://www.taser.com/images/resources-and-...atute-chart.pdf

Concealed Carry at 21 obviously

Does that count for "less than lethal" weapons like stun guns and mace?

i think he was talking about things going bang there.
but i am not sure about that or the less than lethal things.

My bad, I blurred the conceal carry into stun gun. Conceal carry laws vary way more by state too.

Well it was more of a rhetorical question really

Well, there's no harm in teaching her situational awareness at the very least. Avoiding problems is much better than dealing with them (in this instance).

You mean they're not doing that any ways? I though that's what 4chan did regardless of what the victim looked like

Comparing CNN to 4Chan? I like it!

A knife maybe? With a good stabbing point...

Teach her about blood borne pathogens if you do that.

I didn't really date till my late 20s myself. Dating is a bit too hardcore for teenagers these days maybe. It might be kind of emotionally confusing anyway till you know whats what.

Plus sex is really dangerous. You have lots of pretty hardcore STI nowadays. There are many potetial psychological impacts. Yeah, I'm not sure how I feel about young people having sex...it seems kind of imprudent.

We should give them military pattern rifles, training, and exposure to wilderness survival instead to impart responsibility and maturity instead.

The gun is good, the penis is evil, and all that....(you've seen Zardoz, right?)

Congratulations, you have just figured out the best way to make teens have unprotected sex in out-of-the-way locations: Tell them not to date (...so they only do it in secret), demonize sex (...and tell them nothing else about it), and just to be sure add that condoms don't work (...so you might just as well skip them). Humans have sex, there is nothing imprudent or weird about it.


Also teenagers have to be saved from "emotionally confusing" things? Hello-o, we are talking about puberty here, it is supposed to be confusing for everybody.

I don't think anyone should say that condoms don't work. That would be a very ignorant statement and statistically incorrect as well.

My idea would be to provide up-armored condoms...with reinforced thickness and enhanced abrasion and heat resistance! I am imagining they could be blaze orange in color. Maybe along the side it says, "safety zone".

I imagine that if you didn't end up having any sex, you could use them to protect your rifle. I guess they'd have to ship w/out water based lube in that case. Is there any mineral-oil type coating that would be safe for your wang but at the same time wouldn't obstruct your barrel? Probably unlubricated would be best, and then give those out with separate flavored lube to try and cover all contingencies.



I fully accept the conventional wisdom of "kids will do it anyway". That seems to be in the statistical evidence. But for myself, personally, I don't fully grasp that. I didn't date till my late 20s...and I had to make lots of deliberate effort and really work at it to make it happen. For me, I'm kind of amazed at how lots of people just seem to go and do it.