And the victim of the false accusation should have gotten the shiftiest shyster he could have found and sued for as much money as any court could ever allow. The gravity of that specific false accusation is so much in this country that a case could be made that no teacher’s reputation could ever recover from it, and anyone making such a public false accusation, therefore, deserved to be shut down on the basis of culpable negligence.
I don’t know the guy what released these 'bots on the world. I am no expert.
But…
Have you noticed that from time to time these sort of vigilantes are involved in the activity they are investigating?
No real argument from me. They were highly negligent in the circumstance listed, and if that’s the method they use to identify their targets, it seems clear that no one should reprise a great deal of trust in them.
They claim for sex. He agreed to speak to the kid at a restaurant.
And without any care whatsoever to the fact that he didn’t do what they accused him of, his picture, his real name, his phone number, his address, and his employer were published on their site with the urging to their members to go and get him.
Why are you defending them?
The accused don’t post the ‘right of reply’ messages, the people from perverted-justice do. Those are no more verified to be true than the original logs that the perverted-justice people claim are true. Quite frankly, I don’t trust either of them not to have been altered.
To do what PJ wants or you lose your job, your family, and your community. That’s their aim, and that’s why I’m outraged. They don’t give a damn about proving anyone guilty before they are willing to put their members to destroying that person’s life, getting them fired, abandoned, or harassing them into a suicide attempt.
It amazes me that you don’t have a problem with this.
I started this conversation by disputing your claim that the tactics they engage in would give rise to a defense of entrapment, if done by law enforcement.
That’s the extent of my defense of them.
Evidence is the sine qua non of a claim made here in Great Debates. Your trust is irrelevant to me.
- Rick
Back To The OP
I call fraud. I don’t know if it’s an early april fools prank, either by the programmer, the reporter, or the magazine, or if the programmer is attempting fraud for money or publicity. But, I say it’s a scam.
The article did not describe any attempt to verify that the software did what Wightman claimed. His desire to keep the code and functions secret could be met. The magazine asks what the system requirements are. They set up an office computer to meet those (likely all that they’d have to do is free up some space on the hard drive). The computer hardware is examined to ensure that it cannot be accessed remotely (remove the modem, the ethernet card, etc). This would prevent Wightman from installing any software other than ChatNanny and allowing an accomplice to access the computer and speak in ChatNanny’s place. Wightman installs ChatNanny. He sets it to a test mode allowing a user to chat with it on the same computer it is installed on (I assume it has such a test setting. Otherwise, beta testing and troubleshooting would be nigh impossible. In the unlikely event ChatNanny has no such setting, Wightman should have no problem programming one. If he programmed a bot capable of passing a limited Turing test, he can program an offline mode with no trouble). Wightman may watch the test in order to guarantee that his software is not copied, decompiled, reverse engineered, etc. Testers would only be allowed to chat with the bot. This would allow testers to confirm that ChatNanny can use complicated grammar, respond to questions, etc. After the testers were finished, Wightman would be allowed to uninstall the software, use a clean erase program to rewrite all unused disk space with random ones and zeroes, reformat the hard drive, clean erase the drive again, or perform such procedures as he deems necessary to render his software unrecoverable. Reporters could see for themselves if ChatNanny has the language skills Wightman claims, without risk of fraud or deception. Wightman could prove his claims, without risk of having his software stolen or copied.
Instead, the article reprints “chat dialogue”. It gives no information on the conditions under which this chat took place, or even if an attempt was made to verify that it occurred at all. Is it just a chat Wightman copied between to kids in some chat room? Did Wightman just make the entire conversation up out of whole cloth, type it up as a text file and submit as proof of his claims?
Which is why I find it so highly ironic that with absolutely no evidence whatsoever that the chat logs and the right-of-reply posts are legitimate, they are automatically accepted as such.
I am brought back to a favorite anthropology professor, who had made some study of the practice of witch hunts. An interesting thing about a witch hunt is that accusation is sufficient proof for the majority of people, sufficient proof that even physical evidence of innocence cannot dispel.
That particular teacher who was wrongly accused, for example. His situation is such that he will probably never be free of taint, never be fully trusted, merely because he has been accused.
The thing that bothers me about these witch-smelling pursuivants is very simple:
Qui custodet custodes?
Nobody is, and nobody can. IIRC Terry Gilliam had once planned to film an adaptation of Moore’s groundbreaking miniseries, but it never happened. Plenty of folks though, are reading The Watchmen.
Their very existence is evidence of their legitimacy. In other words, you have a person or persons posting the logs and vouching as to the fact that they represent a true and accurate recording of the chat session.
I grant you that this is by no means irrefutable evidence, but it is evidence. It places the onus on you to show that they are untrustworthy in some way.
For example, if someone came along and claimed in his right of reply that the chat logs were altered, you’d have such evidence. Or if someone used another forum to complain that his right of reply was refused or censored after he made such a charge, that, too, would be evidence.
You cannot, however, simply speculate that the chat logs may have been altered without some sort of articulable reason for the speculation.
Now, it’s clear that the site has wrongfully accused people, posting an incorrect identification. But that’s an example of carelessness or negligence, not of the sort of wilfull malice that altering a log would show. So if you claimed that. for example, that other people were wrongly identified, you could use the previous mistakes as evidence. If you claimed that an incorrect picture was mistakenly associated with a chat log, you’d have evidence. But you have no evidence of chat logs being deliberately altered, and to claim otherwise is an example of the fallacy of argumentum ad ignorantiam.
- Rick
I don’t believe that would ever make it onto their website without them changing it. There is no proof, whatsoever, that any of the ‘logs’ they post on their site are accurate. None. I’ve already posted one quote from someone else on another website claiming that the PJ people initiate conversations, that they ‘groom’ a ‘target’ before they go for the conversation that tries to ‘bust’ him. I’ve also been a member of the site, and I’ve seen firsthand less than scrupulous tactics in some of their ‘chat conferences’ that I managed to get into. They have specifically said that they are not in any way concerned with proving that a person did what they accuse them of before they go out to ruin that person’s life. In their words, once they accuse, it’s up to the accused to prove himself innocent, but that their intimidation tactics will not stop until he admits publicly that he’s ‘guilty’ and agrees to do what they want.
They have on at least one occasion threatened someone with a baseball bat. These are not above board, honest people.
Absent empirical proof that those logs are real, I will continue to refuse to accept the truth of their claims. I will continue, no matter how long you argue with me, to state that unless they prove the logs have not been altered, that they very well could have been, and that so long as that doubt exists, there is absolutely no reason to destroy a person’s family and career on the basis of a chat log that could very easily have been altered.