Interesting article. My take on it is somewhat different than the slant
the article takes. Certainly there are privacy issues, but there is
something else rather positive for *Bay users going on as I see it.
*Bay is a little like the wild west, a big, wide open place with a lot
of money flying around and lots of potential ways to try to get hold of
some of it illegitimately. So this new guy from tradidional law
enforcement comes on board. He looks around and sees a couple of things:
limited budget and resources vs. seemingly unlimited and persistant 'bad
guys' and a whole lot of rather traditional scams being played out in a
new venue. He also sees that crimes that would be handled by the public
sector law enforcers for bricks and mortar businesses are not being
handled by them on the net.
So what does he do? He goes on a conscious campaign to recruit
traditional law enforcers to help police his virtual commercial world.
After all, there is real merchandise being traded for real money by real
people who have knowable addresses in the real world. And fraud is
fraud, and theft is theft, etc. How many stories on this list alone have
we heard about money or merchandise lost and the difficulty of
determining which venue has jurisdiction and getting them interested,
etc. etc.? So the cops go into a pawn shop to get the address of the
guy who pawned your camera. Think they need a warrant to get the guy's
address? That's what this guy is offering. He wants to bridge the gap
and help law enforcement adapt to the internet. So what's he going to do
at their convention, tell them it's a tough job, but they should
perservere? Or tell them how easy it will be and how anxious the natives
are to help them do their job?
Sure, we need to be alert to abuses of our privacy. On the other hand,
we have just had threads about obviously fraudulent behavior where
*Bay's limited powers, like banning members, clearly don't work. Sounds
like this guy is no dummy and may 'clean up Dodge'.
Moose
tOM Trottier wrote:
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030707&s=engle----
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