{"id":1988,"date":"2009-08-04T23:09:04","date_gmt":"2009-08-05T07:09:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/?p=1988"},"modified":"2023-08-28T01:21:52","modified_gmt":"2023-08-28T08:21:52","slug":"while-the-state-was-otherwise-occupied","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/?p=1988","title":{"rendered":"While the State Was Otherwise Occupied\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/mocketymock.com\/\">The Woman of Interest<\/a> draws my attention to<\/p><div style=\"padding: 1em ; padding-bottom: 1em ;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.thesmokinggun.com\/archive\/years\/2009\/0803091pranknet1.html\"><q>Telephone Terrorist: Outing an Online Outlaw<\/q> from the Smoking Gun<\/a> <blockquote style=\"font-size: smaller ;\">At 4:15 AM on a recent Tuesday, on a quiet, darkened street in Windsor, Ontario, a man was wrapping up another long day tormenting and terrorizing strangers on the telephone.<br \/><br \/><span style=\"font-style: italic ;\">&#91;&#8230;&#93;<\/span><br \/><br \/>Working from a sparsely furnished two-bedroom apartment in a ramshackle building a block from the Detroit River, the man, nicknamed <q>Dex<\/q>, heads a network of so-called pranksters who have spent more than a year engaged in an orgy of criminal activity &mdash; vandalism, threats, harassment, impersonation, hacking, and other assorted felonies and misdemeanors &mdash; targeting U.S. businesses and residents.<br \/><br \/><span style=\"font-style: italic ;\">&#91;&#8230;&#93;<\/span><br \/><br \/>But a seven-week investigation by The Smoking Gun has begun to unravel <q>Dex<\/q>'s organization and chronicle the sprawl of its criminality. The TSG probe has also stripped Pranknet's leader and some of his cohorts of their anonymity, which will likely come as welcome news to the numerous law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, probing the group's activities.<br \/><br \/><span style=\"font-style: italic ;\">&#91;&#8230;&#93;<\/span><br \/><br \/>With the case now moving outside the country, <span style=\"font-style: italic ;\">&#91;Manchester, <abbr title=\"New Hampshire\">NH<\/abbr>, Detective Peter&#93;<\/span> Marr contacted federal prosecutors for guidance. However, as Marr wrote in a May 6 report, <q>It was obvious to me that the US Attorney's didn't have much interest in the case when I told them that the IP address of the suspect<\/q> was in Canada. In shutting the case, Marr noted, <q>At this time I have exhausted all leads and am closing the case due to not having the jurisdiction to continue further.<\/q><\/blockquote><\/div> That's right, folks.  The <abbr title=\"United States\">US<\/abbr> Federal government, which <em>eats<\/em> so much of the economy, wouldn't bother to expose this group; the state is too busy using its power to get <em>more<\/em> power.  Instead, a relatively small private firm identified the perps in seven weeks.","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Woman of Interest draws my attention toTelephone Terrorist: Outing an Online Outlaw from the Smoking Gun At 4:15 AM on a recent Tuesday, on a quiet, darkened street in Windsor, Ontario, a man was wrapping up another long day tormenting and terrorizing strangers on the telephone.&#91;&#8230;&#93;Working from a sparsely furnished two-bedroom apartment in a [&hellip;]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,9,104,4],"tags":[673,670,668,558,669,672,674],"class_list":["post-1988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","category-ideology-philosophy","category-news","category-public","tag-james-tyler-markle","tag-pranknet","tag-smoking-gun","tag-statism","tag-tariq-malik","tag-timothy-tomlin","tag-william-marquis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1988"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1988\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12149,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1988\/revisions\/12149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}