Snitch of the Week: 9/3 - 9/9 (Facebook)

(If you've ever seen this, you need to go outside)

Facebook done went and snitched on everybody this week.
The site that enables millions of losers to stalk people they never had the courage to talk to in high school or college added a new feature called News Feeds that show you updates to all your friends' pages.

The feature actually saves a lot of time. It lets you see what your friends have changed without having to pretend that you care enough to look at their pages. (Please check out my photos!!!)

It does give some extraneous information but it doesn't show anything you couldn't have found out about anybody on your friend list anyway.

Yet over-privileged twenty-something year old college students flipped out and started protesting the changes like something important happened.
This Wikipedia story is here and of course it is locked because people feel the need to vandalize encyclopedia articles to express their anger... or something.

Do people realize that Facebook is a site where people voluntarily list their screen names, places of employment, phone numbers, relationship status, political beliefs, pictures of themselves vomiting on each other and their god damn addresses?

I think I saw someone list their menstrual cycle on there once.

People put all this information out there but then complain that Facebook is "stalkerish." Maybe people should stop putting their life on the web if they don't want people to read about their life on the web.
And if you don't want certain people reading your shit then maybe you shouldn't go around adding people as your friends that aren't your friends.

Employers are already screening people based on their profiles and the Alphabet Boys (FBI, CIA, NSA, HLS, etc...) would have a field day compiling information on you that they don't already have from your FAFSA records.

The previous generation already fucked up by using up all of the Social Security and giving us Iraqi war debt to pay off until we die, but it seems the only shit that will get this generation riled up is a new feature on Facebook.

Cry about Facebook spying on you while George Bush and Alberto Gonzales read your e-mail and listen to you call your grandma. Only 47% of college age students voted in the last election anyway, I guess the rest were too busy poking strangers.

For calling out everyone trying to get ass on the Facebook as well as the stupidity of this generation the The Facebook is the Snitch of the Week.

Snitch of the Week: 7/23- 7/29

This is relatively old by now but it's worth knowing.
There is something called a bump key that allows any scrub to open 90% of locks quickly.



As someone who has, uh, opened locks for friends, I might look into this a little more, for purely investigative purposes of course.

Shady Europeans, for your exposure of this faulty security technique, you are the Snitch of the Week.

Snitch of the Week: 7/16- 7/22

(The truth?! You can't handle the truth!
What else do you say at a military trial?)

Ehren Watada is the first commissioned officer to publicly refuse deployment to the war in Iraq. He caught the 9-11 bug like many others woh volunteered after the attacks and even paid $800 on a test to prove to the military that his asthma wasn't serious.

But unlike most soldiers, he can read or at least decided to exercise his ability to read, and after researching International Law and the history of Iraq, as well as articles by scholars and governmental and non-governmental agencies about the pretext and build-up of the war he decided he didn't want to die so Halliburton's stock could go up.
Not to mention soldiers coming home told him they may have committed war crimes while in Iraq.
Whoops.

He told his commanding officer that he wasn't going and he volunteered for the war in Afghanistan instead and the Army refused. The Army then offered him a staff position away from combat to keep him quiet but he didn't take it.
He has been formally charged with contempt towards President Bush, conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman, and missing movement for which he may get 7 years.

Peep his site here and his Wikipedia page here.

Ehren Watada, for your inquisitive nature and gulliness in the face of military prison you are the Snitch of the Week.

Snitch of the Week: 7/9 - 7/15

When people say rap music makes black people stupid, they aren't just being dramatic.

Terrence Jones, a dumb jig from Brooklyn, was so intent on proving how real his coke raps were that he incriminated himself and his whole criminal enterprise in his lyrics and his album notes.

• Terrence "Big Chef" Jones and 20 others were arrested last week, bringing an end to a 16-month narcotics investigation of the Bushwick Houses, called "Operation Bushwhack". Big Chef referred to himself as "the 500-gram cooker" and the "bag twister" in his lyrics, and listed the names of his drug-dealing crew in the liner notes of his CD.
  
  "It's like the confessions of a rap star/drug dealer," Inspector Steven Powers of the Brooklyn North Narcotics Unit told The NY Daily News. "We looked at it and said, 'Wow, he's giving a lot of details about his life".

Peep the article.


MF Doom has a song called "Rapp Snitches Knishes" with a chorus that goes

"Rapp snitches, tellin' all they business
sit in the court and be they own star witness
do you see the perpetrator?, Yeah im right here
fuck around get the whole label sent up for years"


MF Doom is almost as prescient as Dave Chappelle's Tupac skit.

I'm no elitist backpacker, but hip-hop used to be a force for good.
Dallas Penn can tell you more about that in what may be the best blog post of the year.
Black people aren't even trying to stay out of jail anymore.

Terrence "Big Chef" Jones, for your incredible stupidity and self-incrimination, you are the Snitch of the Week.

Snitch of the Week: 7/2 - 7/8

(I'm sure several Sopranos actors are on this list)

A lot of the today's notion of snitching has its origins in the mob world, since they were the first to popularize the so-called honor code and then publicly Start Snitching on each other to save their own asses.

A few weeks ago the Times dropped a little article about how the entire mafia is basically a wrap due to snitches.

Italians Start Snitching (NY Times)

To all the Italian-Americans out there who are dropping dimes on each other and keeping stereotypes alive, you are the Snitch of the Week.

Snitch of the Week: 6/25 - 7/1

(Cheney's coming ...)

After the NY Times along with the Wall Street Journal and L.A. Times outed the Bush administration's program of international bank surveillance people went crazy.

"Their editor should be executed for treason!"
"The NY Times supports terrorism!"

That was just some of the commentary that was flying around.

I guess I can understand it.

The media has slept through most of the Bush administration, so it's a quite a surprise when a newspaper actually publishes something worth a damn.
real l
"What? Real news?!"

But all the programs that people are complaining about and crying treason over are known about by anyone who has even a Muslim cousin somewhere on their mama's side.

Terrorists know not to use the phone to plan out their next bombing or send money from their bank account to the Jihad Bank of Arabia.

In Showtime's miniseries Sleeper Cell, a terrorist stoned one of his own followers to death for discussing plans on the phone. Even fake terrorists know the deal.

And some real life Muslims don't even donate to mosques because they ain't trying to be tracked like that.

All these newspapers did was fill in some of the details on these programs for anyone that doesn't know what's really popping out there.

But you know what they say,

"Either you're with us or against us."

Bill Keller and company, for going forwarding and publishing your "treasonous" articles you are the Snitch of the Week.

Snitch of the Week: 6/18 - 6/24

(White people with computers don't play)

Everyone knows about the chick who stole the Sidekick by now.

For those who don't, a white girl left her Sidekick in a taxi, (NY taxis are hot right now) and some Rican chick ended up with it.

Apparently this chick missed the incident last year where Paris Hilton's Sidekick got hacked, because if she was up on it she would know that Sidekicks save all of their information on T-Mobile's website.

But she didn't and entered her AIM SN and password into the phone as well as a few pics for good measure.

Since all this information was available to the rightful owner, she asked her friend to try and get it back for her.

He asked nicely, he asked not so nicely and then he got her arrested.
The long and winding road of how he got the phone back is below.

- How Not To Steal a Sidekick (Original site)
- Tale of a Lost Cellphone (NY Times story)

The real issue in this story is the power of the Internet. This new wave of public e-shaming is something I can get behind. Too often people skirt out of common human decency because of a sense of entitlement or anonymity.

Peep what the chick said when he asked for the phone back initially,

• I immediately contacted the AOL name: Sashacristal8905 and requested that the Sidekick be returned. I was immediately told that my “white ass” didnÂ’t deserve it back. That she was not a “white bitch” (my friend who is a blonde white girl had pics on the phone this person had obviously seen) stupid enough to return a phone she found. After lots of threats, she said she and her boy would wait for me at:
  
  Sashacristal8905: i got ball this is my adress 108 20 37 av corona come n do it iam give u the sidekick so I can hit you wit it
  

But that shit is coming to an end.
After posting her pictures and AIM SN, people who followed the story found her address, MySpace page and some people even knew her brother's military details and got him in trouble for threatening Evan.

This reminds me of the infamous Dog Poop Girl from South Korea.
A South Korean girl's dog shat on the floor of a subway car and she refused to clean it. Someone took a pic of her with a camera phone and posted it on a popular Korean site. Soon she was identified and all her personal information was posted as well.
It got so bad she had to drop out of her university.

Anyone can see the slippery slope here, but so far I like how these mobs are being used.

People who show the type of disrespect it takes to try and sell a stolen phone back to its owner or let their dog shit in the middle of a subway car deserve the harassment they get. Especially when 99% of the time the police won't do shit but throw a report on the bottom of a pile.

Evan Guttman, for your display of Internet mob justice and public shaming you are the Snitch of the Week.

Snitch of the Week: 6/11 -6/17

(The streets are watching...)

A few weeks ago, Kenny Alexis, an insane homeless black man went around stabbing people over the course of 13 hours in NYC until he was apprehended.

As things go with insane homeless people, there was no real reason for the attacks and his pattern of stabbing was pretty erratic.

After he was caught, one of his relatives, who was interviewed and refused to give his name, said he doubted Alexis was responsible for the bloodshed.

• "How do you know he wasn't trying to defend himself?" the man asked. "Why do you want to know about Kenny?
  
  "Is Kenny a star?"
  

As Dallas Penn has noted, Haitian people are the gulliest of them all.
Only they can use a stabbing as a stepping stone to TV work.

I knew I was justified in my lack of charity to panhandlers and increased suspicion when homeless people come around.
You never know where your donations are going. That $0.50 you give could be helping someone buy their next knife.

As it goes a few taxi drivers who saw him stab one of the victims called the police and followed him for several blocks until he was arrested.

To the anonymous crime-fighting (and possibly Arab) taxi drivers who helped catch this fool, you are the Snitch of the Week.

Snitch of the Week: 6/4 - 6/10

(Snitch of the Year?)

So much high quality snitching last week.
I have to give props to the two runner-ups for Snitch of the Week.


Runner-up 1:

- Jason Grimely who admitted that baseball players are still banging needles to get big, "Latin players had boxes of drugs" and almost wore a wire to get Barry Bonds.

Dallas Penn beat me at my own game and wrote about this already.


Runner-up 2:

- Documents from the National Archive revealed this week that the CIA hid the locations of Nazi war criminals (from Israel) after WWII.
There were so obsessed with winning the Cold War they used ex-Nazis (if you can ever really be an ex-Nazi) as spies and hid anyone, inculding Adolf Eichmann, that they thought could drop the dime on their undercover anti-communist efforts in West Germany.

No wonder the U.S. government was trying to reclassify the National Archives earlier this year. They don't want the 3 people who read to be up on this shit.

Remember, this is the same CIA that recently failed to keep its European torture prisons a secret, and lost a long running civil war to Islamists connected to Al-Qeada that actually ended up making them more powerful. If we retried My Lai, then why not the Bay of Pigs?

Can anyone tell me why we have a C.I.A. exactly?
Sounds like Syriana was pretty accurate.

Normally shit like that would be Snitch of the Week but there were bigger things popped off last week.


- We got Zarqawi, not because of the brilliance of our intelligence agencies, but because somebody snitched.

According to one version of events, Ziad Khalaf Raja al-Karbouly or Bob, as he is commonly known, dropped the beans on a man that frequently met with Zarqawi and then the U.S. connected the dots and dropped the bomb.

You can determine if he snitched to try to get the $25 million in reward money or had wires applied to his crotch to help his verbal skills.

On the other hand, The NY Times says that someone who is uncaptured and still in Al Qaeda dropped the dime.

You can decide which snitch really made it happen, but it's just good to know that the Start Snitching movement has gone international.
To all the Muslims who gave up the goose, you are the Snitch of the Week.

Snitch of the Week: 5/28 - 6/3

(It wasn't me...)

This really isn't anything new.
Anytime news of a cover-up breaks, there are always going to be more details that leak out over time.

The newest example is that the BBC uncovered some video evidence that shows Iraqi bodies from the Haditha massacre with visible gunshot wounds.
The U.S. reports initially claimed the Iraqis were killed when a building collapsed.

Riiight...
Let's see how high up the ladder they go on this one...

Good work BBC.
You are the Snitch of the Week.

Snitch of the Week: 5/21 - 5/27

(My Lai II)

I probably forgot about this story with all the other pleasantries coming out of Iraq, but it is pretty much confirmed that American soldiers are snapping and intentionally killing civilians in Iraq.

A group of marines lost it and killed about two dozen villagers after one of their men was taken out by a roadside bomb.
In a place where animals carcasses have IEDs planted in them, there isn't always a clearly labeled terrorist to take your anger out on.
So I guess they found other ways to relieve the anger.

• The criminal investigation has been seeking to establish whether or not the marines killed civilians in cold blood. A 10-year-old girl told The Times of London this weekend that US soldiers deliberately shot and killed almost her entire family as she lay hiding in the corner. Iman Hassan described how she heard the dying groans of her grandfather, mother, father, two uncles and a young cousin.

So it goes.

Initially there was an attempt to whitewash the event and claim that the marines were attacked first, but conflicting reports messed that plan up. If the military covers up the friendly fire deaths of American soldiers, of course they are going to cover up Iraqi civilian deaths.

I don't need to be a soldier to know that patrolling Iraq is hard (you can watch Baghdad ER to learn that) and that when trash cans and dead dogs start blowing up around you on your third tour or Iraq, you are probably going to want to shoot something.
And it's probably even more frustrating when one of those explosions kill your friend.
But the really reason all of this is happening is because soldiers weren't meant to police cities and countries, they are meant to invade and bounce.

These soldiers deserve whatever they get, but they didn't take a detour on vacation to end up in this situation.
But just like Abu Gharib it's easier to pick off the bottom of the food chain than look at the top and see what is really going on.

Time Magazine, for dropping the original dime on this story back in March and pushing it into a full investigation, you are the Snitch of the Week.

Snitch of the Week: 5/14 - 5/20

Spending a fair amount of my life running on tracks, lifting weights and otherwise exerting myself it was pretty relevatory to find out that lactic acid is not the evil athletic poison it was made out to be.

In fact it is our friend.

Basically a man cut a frog in half and assumed that the lactic acid in the bottom half was proof that lack of oxygen causes lactic acid build-up.
He was horribly wrong and it took over a 100 years to figure that out.

The guy who did figure it out was blackballed, hated on and threatened (well not really threatened) for challenging convention but eventually he got fools to recognize.

Sadly it will take another 30 years before the average Joe Schmo (or in the case of my gym, Jacques Diallo) realizes what's really going on here but at least the knowledge is out there.

Dr. George Brooks, for your determination you are the Snitch of the Week.

Snitch of the Week: 5/7 - 5/13

Matthew Hahn had two felonies under his belt and was in the midst of committing his third while he was robbing John Aitken's house.

While going through the possessions of the safe he had *allegedly* stolen he came across a memory card, that he realized had pictures of a grown man molesting a 2-year old child.

Disturbed by the pictures, he decided to risk his third strike by sending in the memory card to the police with John Aitken's name and address on it with a note incriminating John Aitken.

Being that he had reported his safe missing, the police called him in for 'follow-up' questions and nailed him on the child porn which lead to them finding hundred of other illegal kiddy porn pics in his house.
If you ever get called in for follow-up questioning, don't go and if you have a safe with illegal shit that gets stolen, don't report it missing.

Matthew Hahn eventually got busted on some other warrants he had pending, and is now hoping for leniency, now that the police realize that he is the one who gave up Aitken.

Granted, if you live in a three strikes state and you still go ahead and commit a third felony, you are a probably a moron that deserves to be in jail for a long time. But he could have very easily shut his mouth and dumped the safe but he risked getting tracked to bust this kiddy porn guy, Aitken.

For that, Matthew Hahn is the Snitch of the Week.

Snitch of the Week: 4/30 - 5/6

(Free Clyde Kennard!)

I caught two stories in the NY Times that had an odd parallel.

On May 3rd, one article told the story of a group of Germans in Montana in 1918, who were convicted of sedition during WWI for speaking out against American war policies and not buying war bonds and how their sentencing were commuted by the current governor.

From the article, or here if you don't have Times Select

• In one instance, a traveling wine and brandy salesman was sentenced to 7 to 20 years in prison for calling wartime food regulations a ''big joke."

Then

• ''I'm going to say what Gov. Sam Stewart should have said,'' Mr. Schweitzer said, referring to the man who signed the sedition legislation into law in 1918. ''I'm sorry, forgive me, and God bless America, because we can criticize our government.''

  Dozens of relatives of the convicted seditionists will be at the State Capitol to witness the signing of the pardons, with some traveling from as far as Florida. Marie Van Middlesworth, the 90-year-old daughter of one of those convicted, Fay Rumsey, will be coming from Medford, Ore. She was among 12 children put up for adoption when the family farm failed after her father was imprisoned.

Great, right?
Happy story about some (late-as-hell) American freedom.

On May 4th, the very next day the Times had an article about Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi, who decided not to commute the sentence of a black man, Clyde Kennard, who has falsely convicted to stop him from integrating a Mississippi college.

Peep the racism here or here,

• Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi acknowledges that Clyde Kennard suffered a grievous wrong at the hands of state officials more than 45 years ago. But he says he will not grant a posthumous pardon to Mr. Kennard, a black man who was falsely imprisoned after trying to desegregate a Mississippi college.
  
  Mr. Kennard moved home to Hattiesburg, Miss., after seven years in the Army in Germany and Korea and three years as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. He wanted to finish his education at the local college.
  

  But because that college, Mississippi Southern, was reserved for whites, state officials not only rejected Mr. Kennard's repeated applications but also plotted to kill him.

  They kept him out of college by convicting him of helping to steal $25 of chicken feed based on what the sole witness now says was perjury. The 1960 conviction drew a seven-year prison term, and Mr. Kennard died of cancer in 1963.
  

Peep the quote from the admissions director at the time,

• Mr. Lucas said pardoning Mr. Kennard might cost Mr. Barbour a few votes.
  
  ''There are some people around here still,'' Mr. Lucas said, ''who think we should be separate as races and who refuse to see the errors of our past. But I can't imagine it would be a factor in his re-election.''
  

So in one (white) instance, the ability to commute a sentence is a meaningful and symbolic sign of forgiveness and self-correction and in the other (colored) instance, a commuted sentence is a late and pointless gesture for a man who was robbed of his freedom 42 years after the first commuted sentence.

That's some ole bullshit.

For me noticing said bullshit, with the help of the NY Times, I am the Snitch of the Week.

Snitch of the Week: 4/23 - 4/29

(Shahawar Matin Siraj, dumbass or terrorist?)

Osama Eldawoody, a 50-year old Egyptian nuclear engineer who became a paid informer for the New York Police Department after 9/11; brought out some controversial aspects of the war against terror(ism) to light in this week.

From the article, or here, if you don't have Times Select,

• In July 2003, he became a paid informer for the department's Intelligence Division. He described how his police handlers dispatched him to mosques and cafes, telling him ''to keep your eyes and ears open for any radical thing.'' He told how he wrote down the license plate numbers of worshipers, talked to imams, prayed alongside other Muslims and, after each visit, reported back to his detective handler.
  
  In his opening statement, Mr. Stolar said the evidence would show that Mr. Eldawoody, who was unable to find work as an engineer and struggled, first as an ice cream vendor and cabdriver, and later in real estate and the restaurant business, became an informer for the money. He was paid nearly $100,000 by the department over the course of almost three years, Mr. Stolar said.
  
  ''We are dealing with a plot that never could have succeeded,'' he said, noting that the backpacks and the bomb were ''to be supplied by the New York City Police Department's confidential informer. So no one was ever in danger and no one was ever going to get hurt because it never could have happened.''
  
  

Shit, for $100K I'd through on my kufi and hit record.

Also,

• Shahawar Matin Siraj, a 23-year-old Pakistani immigrant, was secretly recorded over several months in 2004 declaring his hatred for America and talking about a plan to bomb the Herald Square subway station.

It is quite possible that an older Muslim coaxed a confused younger Muslim into a pre-planned plot that he only had to nod and follow along with to incriminate himself, or not.

There are witnesses that say Siraj was discussing some sort of violent attack on America before he met Eldawoody.

And peep some of his rants,

• Speaking to his driver, he derides a passing policeman: ''Hello, pig. Hi, pig. Bye, pig. Pig, you have a problem?'' Then, ''You, pig, will learn the lesson someday.'' And also sings -- apparently mimicking a song. ''Brooklyn Bridge is falling down. Falling down. Falling down. The black guys used to sing this song, remember?''

  The conversation was one of roughly a dozen played yesterday in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, where Mr. Siraj is on trial, charged with conspiring to blow up the subway station beneath Herald Square in Manhattan. They ranged from the sinister to the more fantastical.

  Among the topics: a discussion on the possibility of attacking the United States Army with nuclear weapons; killing Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, in order to damage the American economy; stealing nuclear material from reactors or, apparently, from the once top-secret base in Nevada known to U.F.O. buffs as Area 51 (although Mr. Siraj referred to it as Area 52).

Not exactly the Pledge of Allegiance there...

But I'm sure a lot of us wouldn't want our private conversations with supposed friends recorded for various reasons.

But we all know the American government wouldn't spy on its citizens without good reason right?
Ahem...

Anyway, for bringing the delicate rules of good snitching and its evil cousin, entrapment to light, Osama Eldawoody, you are the Snitch of the Week.