Snop Snitchin' Stop Lyin'

NYT:

"There are three 'rats of the week' on the home page of whosarat.com, a Web site devoted to exposing the identities of witnesses cooperating with the government. The site posts their names and mug shots, along with court documents detailing what they have agreed to do in exchange for lenient sentences.

Last week, for instance, the site featured a Florida man who agreed in September to plead guilty to cocaine possession but not gun charges in exchange for his commitment to work 'in an undercover role to contact and negotiate with sources of controlled substances.' The site says it has identified 4,300 informers and 400 undercover agents, many of them from documents obtained from court files available on the Internet."

We should get used to this. It's open-source war at its finest--the overwhelming advantage of the police nullified by an online network that exploits the enemy's weakest point. Finding people to inform is hard enough without this kind of scrutiny, but unless the police find a solution to this problem they'll find that their informer pool will dry up very quickly. Rotting in a jail cell will quickly become preferable to being a foot soldier in the drug war when you're exposed in such a fashion.