Unethical Websites

Ethics Hero Vs. Unethical Website and Scammer: Marc Randazza Takes Aim At The Contemptible “Is Anybody Down” and “The Takedown Lawyer”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Go get em, Marc!

First Amendment lawyer Marc Randazza is a genuine Ethics Hero. I speak from personal experience: when a cyber-bully was trying to use a threatened libel lawsuit to force me to remove a posted opinion he didn’t like, Marc (thoughtfully referred by Ken at Popehat), generously offered his time and advice…and Marc does this all the time. Right now he has a different mission: exposing a revolting cyberscam and hounding the perpetrators into retreat. His target is the website “Is Anybody Down,” and a more disgusting web enterprise would be hard to imagine, and its parasitic creation, the “Takedown Lawyer.”

I’ll let Marc explain why he has “Is Anybody Down” on his hit list:

“Here’s their business plan:

  • Step one: Register the domain name “isanybodydown.com”
  • Step two: Get ahold of nude photos of people who never consented to having their photos published.
  • Step three:Publish them, along with their names, home towns, and links to their facebook profiles.

So now how do you “profit?” Well, openly saying “I’ll take down the photo for $250,” would probably create some legal issues for you. So, instead, you create a fake lawyer persona and say “I am an internet lawyer, named David Blade, III, and I’ll get your pics down for $250.” Continue reading →

Unethical Website of the Month: Third Tier Reality

/ Jack Marshall / 119 Comments

Mr. Furious, of the Mystery Men

Third Tier Reality is one of many blogs recently founded by disappointed law graduates who somehow labored under the misconception that a law school degree guaranteed that they would get 6 figure offers from big law firms and then live the life of Denny Crane until they could retire to a Caribbean island at the age of 55. A depressing number of these deluded souls managed to get themselves in hock up to their eyeballs, and when the recession hit and law firms cut back, felt first, like fools, second, angry and desperate, and third, that it was everyone else’s fault. Thus was born the “law school scam” conspiracy theory. Third Tier Reality, like the others of its breed, maintains that law schools intentionally misled scores of trusting students to pay their obscenely high tuitions,  knowing that they were pumping out more lawyers than the legal market would bear.

To the extent that the site tries to educate would-be law students that there is no guaranteed gravy-train at the end of three years of law school, the website is, at worst, harmless. “My goal is to inform potential law school students and applicants of the ugly realities of attending law school,” he writes. His message: Do not seek a law degree unless…

“(1) YOU GET INTO A TOP 8 LAW SCHOOL; (2) YOU GET A FULL-TUITION SCHOLARSHIP TO ATTEND; (3) YOU HAVE EMPLOYMENT AS AN ATTORNEY SECURED THROUGH A RELATIVE OR CLOSE FRIEND; OR (4) YOU ARE FULLY AWARE BEFOREHAND THAT YOUR HUGE INVESTMENT IN TIME, ENERGY, AND MONEY DOES NOT, IN ANY WAY, GUARANTEE A JOB AS AN ATTORNEY OR IN THE LEGAL INDUSTRY.”

That’s all good advice, though it presumes that more people get law degrees under the delusion alluded to in (4) than I believe is true. Nobody ever told me that a law degree guaranteed a high-paying job as an attorney, and if we understood that decades ago when law was booming, I don’t see where the confusion set in. I worked in the administration of Georgetown Law Center, and that school never made such a representation. In addition, Third Tier Reality goes further, as its brethren blogs do, to insist that a law degree from less than a “First Tier” school is actually an impediment in the job market. I hate to kick this particular hornets nest again, but this is a self-serving rationalization for failure. Continue reading →

Unethical Website of the Month: Opinion-NYTimes.Com

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Yes, it is also an extremely well-done unethical website, a clone of the New York Times editorial pages, even featuring links to the real Times.

It is, however, a web hoax that presents a defense of Wikileaks, itself an unethical position, under the by-line of a real person, former Times editor Bill Keller, who didn’t write it, in order to mislead and fool people. One of those fooled was Times technology editor Nick Bilton, who passed on the link on Twitter. Keller eventually used a tweet to expose the hoax.

What a riot.

Hoaxes like this are constitutionally protected, but they are the news and commentary equivalent of the scene in “The Naked Gun” in which Leslie Nielsen throws  ten baseballs into the air as a catcher is trying to catch a foul pop-fly. They are information vandalism, and until the media and the public stops regarding them as newsworthy or funny, they will proliferate, and some will cause tangible harm

The technical term for the purveyors of web hoaxes like this is “assholes.” Once that is agreed upon, unequivocal and clear, we might have a chance of discouraging them.

Update: I had just finished writing the post when I  learned that Wikileaks itself has taken responsibility for the hoax. You see? The technical term was accurate.

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Facts: Yahoo!

Source and Graphic: Care 2 Make a Difference

 

 

Unethical Website of the Month: The Ethical Psychic Project

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Here’s all you need to know about “The Ethical Psychic Project” and the website that supposedly advances it. One of the ethical topics covered in the ethical forum section is “Animal Communication”:

“Our animal friends need help, too! Ask one of our Psychic Animal Communicators to connect with your pet, either on the Earthly plane or crossed over!”

Sounds ethical to me! I was surprised not to see other topics of similar ethical weight and credibility,  like “Want to win in at the slot machines?” and “Ever wonder what Joe Biden will say next?”

There appears to be nothing whatsoever ethical about the The Ethical Psychic Project, except that a bunch of people who decided they couldn’t make enough money selling phony deeds to imaginary uranium mines thought that the word “ethical” might suck in some marks. Oh, there’s an ethics code on the site, all right. This psychics code is considerably worse than the last one I wrote about, and that won no prizes. This one is funnier, though, because with a little tweaking, it could just as well serve an ethics code for Superman or Green Lantern, or the Good Witch of the North. It contains such self-validating blather as: Continue reading →

Unethical Website of the Month: “Make Presidents’ Day Super”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The degradation of America’s values continues in seductive and incremental ways.

Take the online petition “Make Presidents’ Day Super,” described as…

“A plan to move Presidents’ Day to the Monday after the Super Bowl. For football. For hangovers. For America.”

The proposal is unethical in many ways, beginning with its dishonest presentation.  “We the people, in order to form a more perfect holiday, seek to take what should be one of our most patriotic holidays and actually give it more meaning, make it more American,” the argument begins. Make it “more American”? How, exactly, does moving a holiday that already minimizes the national recognition of the birthday of George Washington by making it a floating annual date to manufacture a three-day weekend make that holiday “more American”? Continue reading →

The Third Annual Ethics Alarms Awards: The Worst of Ethics 2011 (Part 1)

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Yes, it was Joe Paterno's year, all right.

Welcome to the Third  Annual Ethics Alarms Awards, recognizing the Best and Worst of ethics in 2011!

This is the first installment of the Worst; Part 2 is here. And the Best is here. 

2011 prompted more than 1000 posts, and even then I barely scratched the surface of all the ethical dilemmas and unethical conduct swirling around us. If you have other choices for the various distinctions here and in the subsequent Awards posts, please make them known.

Here are my selections:

Unethical Community of the Year:  Huachuca City, Arizona. Leading the way among American communities that believe, in their hysteria, that former sex offenders who have served their sentences are nonetheless fair game for persecution and the denial of basic rights as citizens and human beings, Huachuca County passed an ordinance that bans registered sex offenders from the use of all public facilities, including parks, school and libraries.  Runner-up: Obion County, Tennessee. Last year, Ethics Alarms gave the county runner-up status as “Unethical Community of the Year” for sending its volunteer fire department to watch a man’s house burn down because he had failed to pay a $75.00 fee. In 2011, it did it again. I swear: if Obion County hasn’t come up with a better system and this happens again in 2012, Obion County will get the title no matter what some other unethical community does.

Most Warped Ethical Values: The Penn State students who protested the firing of football coach Joe Paterno, because, you know, he was such a great football coach that a little thing like allowing a predatory child molester to run amuck on campus shouldn’t be blown all out of proportion. Runner-up: Ron Paul supporters.

Unethical Website of the Year: Lovely-Faces, the anti-Facebook stunt pulled by Paolo Cirio, a media artist, and Alessandro Ludovico, media critic and editor-in- chief of Neural magazine, to show how inadequate Facebook’s privacy controls were. To do it, they stole 250,000 Facebook member profiles and organized them into a new dating site—without the members’ permission. The site embodied “the worst of ethical thinking: taking the identities of others for their own purposes (a Golden Rule breach), using other human beings to advance their own agenda (a Kantian no-no) and asserting that their ends justify abusing 250,000 Facebook users, which is irresponsible utilitarianism.” Continue reading →

Unethical Website: NewtGingrich.com…But Not In The Way You Think

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Ah, Dick, what might have been! If only your burglars had broken into Gingrich headquarters!

The pro-Democratic super PAC “American Bridge” bought the domain name http://www.NewtGingrich.com and now uses it to redirect anyone who reaches the site to various Web sites that highlight the ex-Speaker’s many failings, perceived flaws, or the attacks of critics. Among the places it hijacks users to are Freddie Mac’s Web site (a reference to Newt’s high-paid duty as “a historian”), Tiffany’s (where Newt infamously had a rather large bill, as if that has any significance whatsoever except to class-bashers), information about Greek cruises ( as Newt abandoned his campaign earlier this year for a cruise, while his staff labored away), or to the ad Gingrich filmed  with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in favor of addressing climate change (because being open-minded about climate change isn’t permitted in the GOP).

The Washington Post termed the stunt “clever.” Well, I no longer expect the Post to know the difference between bad ethics and applesauce. Of course the website trick is unethical, deceiving web users and misappropriating a domain that Gingrich himself, and only Gingrich, should be able to employ. Yes, it’s legal. It is still unfair, deceptive and dishonest—wrong. When Richard Nixon’s gang used dirty tricks to upset Democratic rivals in 1968, the Post condemned the conduct as proof of “Tricky Dick’s” willingness to distort the democratic process and win by schemes rather than merit. When a Democratic group uses dirty tricks on a Republican presidential candidate, however, it’s “clever.”

The Post, as well as many of the commenters on its reporting on the faux Gingrich website, embraces the concept of ethics that holds that harmful acts performed against someone it likes is unethical, while the same act taken against someone it opposes is ethical.

There is a word for this delusion.

It’s called bias.

Unethical Website of the Month: The Florida Family Association

/ Jack Marshall / 47 Comments

"Hey, wait---where are the terrorists?"

Organized bigotry is un-American, and organized bigotry under the banner of American values is misrepresentation. That’s what can be found on the Florida Family Association website here, as it simultaneously engages in several of Ethics Alarms’ most deplored conduct: bias, dishonestly accusing others of bias, bullying, boycotting, and worst of all having success at bullying and boycotting. I suppose I should add to that list making its readers stupid, because its arguments will do that too.

The Florida Family Association is offended by The Learning Channel’s latest reality show, “All-American Muslim,” which shows American citizens who happen to be Muslims pretty much living, acting and sounding like you and me, except when they are practicing their religion. I think it is, unlike most TLC series, an excellent idea. American attitudes toward  Muslims since September 11, 2001 are substantially based on ignorance, the kissing cousin of bigotry and the mother of fear. Learning more about American Muslims can only be beneficial to all, but The Florida Family Association views the program as a plot:

“The Learning Channel’s new show ‘All-American Muslim’ is propaganda clearly designed to counter legitimate and present-day concerns about many Muslims who are advancing Islamic fundamentalism and Sharia law.  The show profiles only Muslims that appear to be ordinary folks while excluding many Islamic believers whose agenda poses a clear and present danger to liberties and traditional values that the majority of Americans cherish.” Continue reading →

Unethical Website of the Month: “Occupy Black Friday” Facebook Page

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

The  intellectual, logical and ethical deficiencies of the tiresome “Occupy” movement are on full outrageous display on “Occupy Black Friday,” a Facebook page that is part of the effort to harm large retailers by interfering with holiday shopping. Naturally, as with segments of the “Occupy” groups that have advocated or engaged in violence, used anti-Semitic rhetoric, broken laws and made ridiculous statements, defenders of the movement will dismiss this as an aberration, not representative of the principles of the “Occupiers” as a whole. This is the group’s genius, or something: by being infuriatingly vague, it avoids accountability.

But an organization is accountable for the events it sets in motion, and the harm that its pretensions wreak. The idea promoted by the group’s Facebook page is for mobs of Occupiers to swarm stores during their deep discount sales today, interfering with shoppers and bringing commerce to a halt:

“The idea is simple, hit the corporations that corrupt and control American politics where it hurts, their profits. Black Friday is the one day where the mega-corporations blatantly dictate our actions, they say “shop” and we shop! Pushing their ledgers from red to black. This Black Friday, we will boycott all of the corporations that corrupt our government, and put profits before people.”

The idea is simple minded. Continue reading →

And You Thought Natalie Munroe Was An Unethical Teacher…Well, Meet Jeremy Hollinger

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Jeremy Hollinger, showing his compassion for his students' struggles

Remember Natalie Munroe, the teacher who blogged about how much she detested her high school students, calling them names like “rat-boy” and “jerkoff”? What, you may ask, could be more destructive to the necessary trust between teacher and student, or parents and the teacher to whom they entrust their student’s education, short of actual abuse?

How about a teacher ridiculing his grade school special ed students?

Believe it or not, that’s what Jeremy Hollinger, a Mobile (Ala.)County Public School teacher who handles a second grade special education class at the Eichold-Mertz Elementary School did on his Facebook page. (In news reports, that’s what he “allegedly” did, or “is accused of” doing. In fact, all the evidence is public, it is clear and unambiguous, and the bottom line is, he did it.) Most spectacularly, Hollinger posted a mocking picture of himself wearing a seizure helmet and making a goofy face. Among his charming jibes at the young and challenged children in his class were such satirical comments on their behavior as “I guess crayons are on the menu” and “Why is there shit on the floor?” Continue reading →