Internet Justice

Feb 16, 2009 00:24

Internet Justice

I just had to post about the sequence of events that took place over the weekend. It was a rare occasion where an awful individual online actually got nailed by denizens of the internet. This is no petty revenge story for a DDoS, this is a serious crime and the fact that justice prevailed due to anonymous computer users performing a focused investigation is unique, I think, in the internet’s short history.

A complete asshole going by the name of “Timmy” decided it would be fun to film himself beating the hell out of his defenseless cat, then post the video to YouTube. He was wearing a balaclava in the video, and he took the cat, identified as “Dusty” to the bathroom, slammed it against the wall repeatedly, then punched it over and over. The attack lasted over a minute. The cat was helpless, defenseless, cowed, in pain, and miserable.

“Timmy” posted the video on YouTube under the username glennspam1. It was up for only a few hours before YouTube deleted it and suspended the account, for obvious reasons. But in the short time it was up, it gathered 30,000 views, and had been duplicated all over the internet.

Social networking sites all over the net passed the link and links to mirrors of the video around, and the outrage was palpable.

Enter 4-chan, the sewer of the internet. Nowhere online will you ever find a more disgusting site. There is no login required to post images there. They have no morals, no respect for anything, and will post pictures of the most disturbing things imaginable. People dying in accidents, people crapping on each other, the occasional child porn (the mods delete the child porn, at least). You can imagine my surprise when I tell you that 4-chan, of all places, was as outraged as the rest of the internet.

The anonymous internet users of 4-chan, none of whom know each other, none of whom are organized in any way, managed to conduct an investigation into the video by sheer power of thousands of angry, skilled, internet users with a single purpose. Everyone tried everything they could to ascertain the identity of “Timmy”.

And they eventually succeeded. It goes like this: He posted the video under the name “glennspam1”. Searching for that username everywhere online yielded an account on a website about Haiti called “haitiwow”. This user account gave the user’s zip code, 73505, which turns out to be the zip code of Lawton, OK.

Another user concluded that “glenn” was probably either his first or last name, and set about the long task of checking up on every mention of “glenn” and Lawton he could find in google. After many many dry leads and false hits, he found the Facebook page for Kenny Glenn, who lives in Lawton, OK.

Why is this significant? Because there are photos of Kenny in and around his house on his facebook page, including a photo of him in his bedroom. The bedroom has a unique green carpet, wooden kickboard, yellow walls, and green Venetian blinds on the window. Also it has a drum set and a guitar in the corner.

In the abuse video that “Timmy” posted, there is a scene where he is speaking to the camera in front of a door which is partially open. Through the open slit of the door, you can see the green carpet, yellow walls, green Venetian blinds, The drums, and the guitar.

Kenny Glenn. Lawton, OK.

Having identified the little shit, his information was quickly disseminated throughout the internet and thousands of people called the Lawton Sherrif’s department, the kid’s school, the kid’s house. Etc. By 10pm that evening, he was placed under arrest and the cat, Dusty, was removed by Animal Control.

Here is a link to within a web suite about the incident made just today. This is a jpg that shows the incriminating images I described:

http://www.kenny-glenn.com/kenny-glenn-dusty.jpg

I’ve never seen this before. “The Internet” nailed a criminal. That makes me happy but…

Fuck you, Kenny.

-ATW
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