Gang Digitization

nnbnbHello all the fine ppls out there. Ping is back in business after a long vacation.

And what I see is that site is doing fine cisco lab is undergoing the beta testing and then i see lot of members contributing to make site's content more into tresure chest. That shows a pink picture of site's future.

Congretulation on the achivements of the site to the owner and whole management and some key members and last but not least the members community without their support it would not had been possible.

Now on article which i find very unusual but an eye opener on how much the computer affects the human life (Even life of a gang or mob)

Got it from www.zone-h.org/content/view/13834/30/
So here it goes:

A new trend is involving most notorious street gangs in the United States: 18th Street, Crips, Bloods, MS-13 and many other gangs that usually arouse fights in the streets of New York, San Francisco or Miami are now marking out their cyber territory by getting Web-savvy, showcasing or illegal exploits, and honouring killed and jailed members by posting pictures and statements on the Internet to pay respect to their memory.

As Associated Press revealed, those “web bangers” are posting potentially incriminating pictures of members holding guns, as well as messages taunting other gangs and boasts of illegal exploits on personal web sites and social networking sites.

For these organizations, the cyber space is a no-rules area, where they can act without constrains scorning on law by showing themselves and their criminal commitment openly.



“I’m just being real and I ain’t got nothing to hide” said Kristopher Kasper Flowers, 30, a professed member of the 18th Street gang whose webpage – “Kasper’s corner” is linked to the main website of 18th Street gang.

But this is an ambivalent story: on the one hand the web represents a zone where these gangs can perpetrate crimes and hide them, on the other, their digital activities can be traced and studied.

So, Gangs’ website could represent a mirror showing how members act, move, think, and they could be used as a model to understand how to cull intelligence on gang membership, rivalries, territory and lingo , as George W. Knox, the director of the National Gang Crime Research Centre pointed out.

He then gets on saying “ In order to understand any subculture, be it al-Qaeda, witches, devil worshippers or gangs, you have to be able to know their own language”.

And in this case the language that must be known is html…

Sometime this analysis isn’t too much complicated, and it leads to a rapid solution of the case, as it happened for the guy arrested by Chicago police. The teenager was accused of spraying his gang nickname on a church by tracing the moniker to his Myspace.com account. His online profile included his address, photo and real name.

Or in the case of two teens charged with beating a boy into coma could be tried as adults for prosecutors showed photographs of the two from Myspace.com. In the images, they flashed the hand signs of a local gang.

The most important thing when carrying out this kind of investigations, is to learn how to read between the lines on gang websites and blogs, because Gang identifiers, such as tattoos, graffiti tags, colors and clothing often are embedded in each site.

As it happened in any organization using the web to make propaganda, these gangs are likely to be using the Internet to recruit new members, who can be influenced by the secret handshakes, clothing and slang of gangs cultures.

Street gangs posting messages online, are completely different from crackers and defacers because their awareness of Internet means is quite elementary. But they are generating a new kind of cyber crime, that actually doesn’t provoke huge damages on other websites –they don’t attack or look for leaks- but it could turn out to be as dangerous as the others, because as Zone-H keeps stating, Information is power.

The problem is how this power is used?


Any Comments or Just Dropped your Jaw???? :!:

Cheers..

~Pranav