Where Do We Draw the Line With Online Manhunts?

In early July, a manhunt message posted on dahe.cn, a local Web portal in central China’s Henan Province, caused great concern among netizens. In the post, Zhao Guanle, a police officer in Ruyang County who was investigating several ATM fraud cases, provided a screenshot of the face of a young man who was suspected of committing the fraud and asked netizens knowing the man to help the police identify him.

The post said that the screenshot was taken from video footage of banks’ surveillance cameras that caught the man on tape when the ATM fraud cases happened.

“From the picture, I could tell the suspect was rather young. Young people like surfing on the Internet. Netizens might have seen him and could recognize him. So I decided to draw on the power of the Internet and netizens to apprehend the suspect to recover the losses of victims,” Zhao told local Henan newspapers after his manhunt post became headline news.

http://gangstalkingworld.com/Forum/YaBB.pl?num=1169433715

http://money.aol.com/wsj/general/canvas3/_a/the-snoop-next-door/2007011709340999 0001

The digital age allows critics to quickly find a fair amount of information about their targets. One day last November, at about 11:30 a.m., a blog focused on making New York streets more bike-friendly posted the license plate number of an SUV driver who allegedly accelerated from a dead stop to hit a bicycle blocking his way.

At 1:16 p.m., someone posted the registration information for the license plate, including the SUV owner’s name and address. (The editor of the blog thinks the poster got the information from someone who had access to a license-plate look-up service, available to lawyers, private investigators and police.) At 1:31 p.m., another person added the owner’s occupation, his business’s name and his title. Ten minutes later, a user posted a link to an aerial photo of the owner’s house. Within another hour, the posting also included the accused’s picture and email address.

The SUV’s owner, Ian Goldman, the chief executive of Celerant Technology Corp. in the New York City borough of Staten Island, declined to comment for this article. According to an email exchange posted on the blog, Mr. Goldman said that he had lent the vehicle in question to a relative with “an urgent medical situation” and that he was not aware of any incident. The alleged victim has decided to drop the matter since the damage to the bicycle, which he was standing next to at the time, was under $20. Last month, Aaron Naparstek, editor of the blog, says he removed Mr. Goldman’s home and email addresses from the site after receiving a “lawyerly cease and desist” email asking that the whole posting be deleted.

http://www.daedalumfilms.com/films-human-flesh-search-engine-documentary-short-part-1-of-2.php

http://www.daedalumfilms.com/films-human-flesh-search-engine-documentary-short-part-2-of-2.php

This is happening all over to one degree or another. This is not unique to China. There was an article that came out about a car that hit a bike in the US. Within 2 and a half hours they had his house, his job, his picture, his just about everything online. So this is not unique to China. This is happening all over. I will see if I can find the article again.

The Human Flesh Search Engine
Chris O’Brien, 11.21.08, 06:00 PM EST
Vigilantes are roaming Chinese cyberspace, laying the identities of perceived wrong-doers bare.
Chris O’Brien

For Wang Fei, the journey from high-flying advertising executive to jobless national hate figure began with an extramarital affair. His disgrace was absolute and immediate. Rarely is there any other outcome after one becomes a target of the “human flesh search engine.”

This is the name given to the Internet-powered manhunts that have achieved notoriety across China this year. A human flesh search engine is where thousands of volunteer cybervigilantes unite to expose the personal details of perceived evildoers and publish them on the Web.

http://feeds.tvo.org/~r/tvo/searchengine/~3/rFb1qXGF2Pc/SE_Full_20090810_800696_HumanFlesh_0x0_40k.mp3

China’s Internet vigilantes have been known to cost individuals their privacy, peace of mind, and jobs for engaging in anti-social behavior, animal cruelty, adultery or perceived slights towards China. This has led to some soul-searching about the appropriate limits of China’s free-wheeling Internet culture, with a couple of recent lawsuits pointing the way to greater regulation of netizen behavior.

Lately, though, the infamous ‘human flesh search engines’ seem to be setting their sights somewhat higher, as a string of recent high-profile cases involving officials attests.

Last month, the Communist Party secretary of Shenzhen’s marine affairs bureau was sacked after being caught on video assaulting a young girl at a restaurant. The video, which showed the drunk official boasting of his high rank after the girl’s family complained of his behavior, circulated among netizens who tracked down the identity of the man, Lin Jiaxiang, and raised calls for him to be brought to justice. (A police investigation subsequently cleared Lin of criminal charges).