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Unethical Website of the Month August 2004
Who's a Rat?
One of the pre-requisites for running an unethical web site is a plausible rationale for the sire's existence that seems harmless, if not downright noble. For example, term paper mills claim that that they make their product available for "research purposes." Sites that market nasty practical jokes or insulting mail are promoting "humor," not revenge. Thus Who's a Rat (www.whosarat.com) claims that it exists to "assist attorneys and criminal defendants with few resources." But it is abundantly clear that the site exists for more sinister objectives: to foil legitimate law enforcement efforts, to facilitate illegal drug trafficking and use, and perhaps even to promote retribution against the individuals the site designates as "rats": police informers and agents.
The new site allows users around the country to post local, state and federal agents' and informants' names, pictures and related information, including age, location, race and occupation; agencies he or she works for; facts that raise credibility issues; past illegal activity and criminal records, if applicable; and most ominous of all, photograph. Unquestionably, much of this information is valuable to defense attorneys defending individuals charged with drug offenses. Also unquestionably, most of the website's information that is useful is also readily available to attorneys through normal investigation and discovery without putting it on the World Wide Web for the enlightenment of potentially violent felons. The material could have been gathered for a lawyers-only database. It certainly could have omitted photographs.
And it certainly could have been entitled something other than "Who's a Rat." We can debate the ethical status of police informants, but agents are only "rats" to law-breakers, and these seem to be the intended beneficiaries of the web site.
Its founder, Sean Bucci, has his cover story down pat. ""Every month, nearly 100,000 Americans are arrested on drug charges," Bucci told a reporter from E Releases."What's more, there are over 2 million people in jail in this country because the government dedicates most of its resources to the 'drug war' - yet drugs are more readily available and cheaper than ever. Although Who's A Rat was created to assist individuals involved in any criminal matter, we expect it will be particularly helpful to those with drug charges against them."
The disingenuousness of Bucci's speech is breathtaking. First of all, people aren't in jail "because the government dedicates most of its resources to the 'drug war'" (most of its resources???); they are in jail because they chose to break the law. This argument, the support beam of the drug legalization proponents' brief, is backwards, upside down and cock-eyed. Let's see: you know an activity is illegal, you know it is illegal because society has determined that having a high proportion of its population habitually on consciousness-altering and performance-impairing drugs is harmful in dozens of ways, you know others have been imprisoned for violating the resulting anti-drug laws, and you break the laws anyway. This is the government's fault?? Nonsense and double nonsense. It is far more logical to say that it is the fault of characters like Bucci, who foster the impression that drug use should be allowed to spread unimpeded, and that drug-users are persecuted model citizens. And gee, Steve, I don't know that drugs are "more readily available and cheaper than ever": when I was attending Harvard, I would have just had to go upstairs to another dorm room. You've obviously been shopping.
By exposing the identities of agents and informants in sufficient detail to make them targets, Who's a Rat is dangerous, and may well find itself in serious trouble when a "rat" is exterminated by one of Bucci's site visitors. Even without that risk, the site clearly aims to undermine undercover law enforcement and permit all those drug-users Bucci thinks are compelled to break the law to do so with abandon. This, of course, is supposed to make life better for all of us.
Who's a rat? The operators of this web site can answer the question by looking in the mirror. This is an unethical web site and a dangerous one.