Federal prosecutors are
bringing felony charges against an adult woman who signed up
for a MySpace account under a false name in order to harass and
torment a teenage girl, who later committed suicide, based on
violating the terms of service of the website after they
couldn't find a crime to charge the woman under.
"'Hard cases make bad law' is an axiom in the legal
world," said Mark Rasch, managing director of
enterprise-services firm FTI Consulting and a former U.S.
prosecutor. "This is a case where people have seen bad
conduct and have said there must be something we can do, but if
prosecution of this case is successful, every pseudonym and every
minor violation of the terms of service becomes a computer
crime."
The alleged details of this case (well documented, search around) are such that it is very apparent that this was not "minor violation." If those details are true they go to part of the heart of what terms of service are for.
Would a jury throw the book at someone for a "minor violation" -- some technical but silly transgression? I have my doubts. Will a jury want to throw the book in this case? I won't be surprised.
A larger Technocratic question, in my view, is why in in the name of everything good any sane engineer would feed fuel to the Web 2.0 garbage that potentiated this situation. It is socially irresponsible, technically goofy, get-rich-quick engineering that set up the stage for this particular drama.
The social networking sites have marketed very heavily to kids and quite successfully become a dominant part of the social scene for many teens. In the name of generating marketing data for advertisers, the sites market for and get young people to be far more personally revealing on these sites than they ought to be. The sites create ample opportunity for predatory behavior, as is alleged in this case.
There is no case for "but on balance, they're good" here. What good they do could easily have been achieved in far more responsible ways.
There is not technological advance in these sites: they are a (flawed by design) repackaging of decades old technologies. Their main economic contributions have been entirely marketing hacks that come at the cost for a rational prudence regarding the on-line presence (especially of youth).
They absolutely created, by design, the conditions in which the alleged abuse of the child took place. To be sure, if the alleged facts are true that would imply that the (by age) adult being charged is the proximate cause. Nevertheless, the form and function, and the marketing of the site itself constitute, in my opinion, an attractive nuisance.
And, in that view, absolutely "Web 2.0" is to blame -- for the site is a paradigm of Web 2.0.
I agree completely with your sentiments about the so-called "web 2.0"...complete agreement
I would not, however, go as far as you do when you say "absolutely 'web 2.0 is to blame". The woman who manipulated the girl is to blame. She was being irresponsible and unscrupulous and her behavior may very well have been illegal.
The fact that this happened via Myspace is important, but we must remember it was only the channel for the harmful communication. The woman could have done similar things via phone or snail mail in theory. I think it is important to recognize that 'the internet' isn't the root cause of this bad behavior, and failing to do so causes misconceptions in the general public about 'the dangers of the internet'.
That said, the functionality and usage of Myspace was definitely a major FACILITATOR of the negative behavior the woman was engaging in. In that context I can see where you are comming from. For me the immaturity and ignorance of the woman who did this is the root problem, with the 'web 2.0' issues you discuss being a close second.
The problem isn't people speaking too freely, it's people listening too freely. Inevitably, the internet opens many communication pathways that weren't there before - that's what it's for. People have to learn to ignore noise in the channel and filter out the bad voices. The only alternatve is to uninvent the internet. It's simply not possible to muzzle all the bad speech out there.
Myspace was the "facilitator" only in the same way that roads "facilitate" bank robbery by allowing robbers to escape at high speed. You might as well blame the ISPs, the power companies, etc.
Well, as we all know (c.f. Jesse James) bank robberies are mainly facilitated by the fact that that's where they keep all the money.
I think that there's a better analogy than roads facilitating bank robberies.
Do you know what "side shows" are? This is where teens gather with tricked out cars, have a (usually illegal) party, drag race, do donuts, stay up till all hours, etc. It's not all that unusual for violence to break out.
Suppose the owner of a large parking lot began tolerating side shows on his property. I don't mean getting permits, controlling the gate, etc. Just letting them happen while, incidentally, his vending machines on the property are raking in cash with each one. After some complaints he puts up a "No Side Shows" sign but that's all -- and he installs 2 more vending machines and fills in some potholes.
One night a knife fight breaks out and someone is killed.
What about all the other people who knew about it (like the one filing the complaint) that didn't call the police? If it is a recurring event, why aren't the police patrolling that area on Friday & Saturday night?
Sorry. It isn't his fault at all, vending machines or not. People have to take responsibility for their own actions and stop blaming others.
The police are overstretched already. This guy with the parking lot could put up a fence, or hire security, or seek permits and do it right. But, instead, he's creating a harbor for the activity and taking a profit, attempting to paint it as staying within his existing permits.
It depends on the primary use of the lot. If those activites are what it was built for, then fine.
But, if you're saying they gather there just because he has an unused lot on weekends and it is a part of some store or flea market, and then suggesting the owner pay for a fence or security -- I don't agree.
If he's doing business -- and not just some vending machines there -- that is one thing and he needs to work within the permitting/license system for the municipality. If the locals just picked that spot, and he is turning a blind eye so they have some place to gather, that is different.
As far as I'm concerned, "attractive nuisance" laws should apply to small children only. There comes a time where people have to grow up and take responsibility for their own selves. "But it was so pretty and shiny I couldn't help myself!" is NOT a valid argument.
As you mention, the technology involved with social networking is decades old. Myspace isn't much different from newsgroups, email, & IRC, just with some integration and the graphical easy-to-use UI of Web 1.0. Not much new here. This incident could have just as easily happened pre-Web 1.0, with just newsgroup postings and/or an IRC chat room. Why not put some blame on snail-mail as well? That whole pen-pal thing is ripe for abuse.
As pointed out by others, bullying and teen angst exists without social networking. I'd love to see some statistics about teen suicide, and how many have an online social networking aspect, compared with those that don't. Has teen suicide gone up since the social networking craze? Maybe it's even gone down, as now some teens have some interation with others that they might not have had otherwise. You may view these relationships as a "database table", but there is human on each end of the interactions, and it's better than no interaction at all. I think some suicide trend numbers would make your opinion look even more absurd than how I currently see it.
There is, I agree, a certain amount of similarity to newsgroups, UI, and IRC. Indeed, I wonder why the focus wasn't more on multi-media forms of those things.
The technology is very similar to those things but it's deliberately broken in various ways. Centralization and the marketing-oriented-surveillance aspects the most obvious ones.
Bullying and teen angst certainly does exist. Let's compare this to the junior high school lunchroom, though. In the school, adults posing as kids does happen, but far more rarely. There's no built-in anonymity. There's accountability all around. To be sure, kids always (it seems) have been and always (one would presume) will be sometimes rough and unfair to one another. And that seems to be part of how kids turn from kids into adults -- the spine of a functional society (mostly) gets past that by going through it from one side or the other and each generation works out their systems of negotiation and mutual recognition. This stuff is different, though. This is like the bad ol' days of AOL or Prodigy come around again. If it weren't for the fact that's it's carried out by the Officially Hip contingent of the open source industrial complex and web 2.0 political machine, it would meet with heavy resistance. Imagine if Microsoft had moved first in this space -- how would the pundits have treated it?
I don't know about the suicide stats and wouldn't want to casually limit the issue to suicide or abuse statistics one way or the other. There's no need, though. I think we can look at these operations just using adult common sense combined with a technological and business appreciation of what's going on.
Tricky business, that. It can go off track as in, say, the comic book scare. The facts of the case matter and deserve scrutiny, certainly.
Finally, regarding the debasement of words like "friend" and database tables: in literature (of all media types) you'll find ample evidence that friendship is not a singular thing. There is no "graph" in the human form. And while there may be humans on the end-points, what good does participation in this system offer? What alternatives were available but overlooked because they were harder to monetize? And please: what about the one's in the middle who are data-mining that database table? These sites are rubbish! Dangerous, manipulative, privacy-invading, cynical, rubbish.
A commonly held view, mostly by Japanese legislators;
Japan has a high suicide rate
Many in Japan get information from the internet prior to committing suicide
The internet is the cause of the high rate of suicide in Japan
Now with this faulty conclusion you can make some assumptions behind the motivations of the providers of this information.
Well, they obviously don't care about the destructive potential of the information they provide because all they care about is advertising revenue. Even those who provide this info without it being their primary business, like maybe a social networking site, are equally liable because they don't filter the information for 'social worth' before presenting it to corruptable youth.
The only logical conclusion that can be drawn from this is that the social networking sites need to be held to a higher standard to prevent them from corrupting the youth for purely monetary gain.
Hmm... Where to start?
Maybe with the engineers who provide the tools that cause all these suicides? Or maybe a grassroots effort to stop the predatory websites from capturing another victim?
No matter how you look at it something has to be done to solve this suicide problem though...
That would be turning something that *at most* would be a civil matter into a 'crime against humanity'. Quite telling that the State couldn't find a way to prosecute under the criminal code.
I was only pointing out the basis of your 'web 2.0 is the debil' argument.
Casual equivocation & straw men? Sure but the underlying logical fallacy is accurate.
I understand you to be comparing the business of provisioning IP service ("providing information") to what the social network companies do. That's a fine starting place. How do these even begin to compare once we get past Claude Shannon?
What I was doing is lumping you into the 'guns kill people' camp instead of the 'people kill people with guns' camp.
As others were saying, personal responsibility and all that.
As to the web 2.0 information marketing orgy — there's no such thing as a free lunch. Based on the current political environment in the States this basic fact is as far out of the collective knowledge pool as the concept of accepting responsibility for one's own actions...
I'm in the 'people kill people with guns' camp but I also have absolutely zero tolerance for people selling guns under the table at the nearby flea market and even less tolerance for the guy who used to live overlooking our apartment who, the fire department discovered coming to dowse the flames, had a large cache of ammo and automatics in perfect position to take us out -- just next to the grow lamps for his pot form. (To be fair, twas arson not the grow operation that started the fire. And I'm pro-legalization for pot, btw.)
If you're going to sell something dangerous, buck up and show some responsibility rather than construct your business so as to invite abuse by crazies. And, again, who actually needed these social networks in the first place? Haven't those engineers and capitalists got anything better to do?
Haven't those engineers and capitalists got anything better to do?
Reminds me of a story I was reading last night...
Sometime in the late '30s while the world was going to hell in a handbasket the auto engineers were busy working on the automatic transmission. People were asking how solving the trivial problem of people having to shift gears manually is important in the context of world events, weren't there more important matters to attend to?
Fast forward a few years and the Allies need something to give them an advantage with high altitude aircraft. The author of the book gets tapped by the war dept to work on the problem and comes up with the solution of the hydraulic clutch supercharger. Turns out the Germans tried and failed at this, as the military censors pointed out, but the proposal was put forth anyway.
Low and behold the automatic transmission that had been developed as a wasted effort provided to be invaluable in the application of hydraulic clutches to aircraft superchargers. The rest is, as they say, history.
Also have a story about how a researcher gave a lecture on Chinese inventions and a few days later a bomb of the same design from the presentation was mailed by none other than attendee Ted Kaczynski that applies to the 'something dangerous' argument.
By analogy the open source industrial complex may (may?!?) very well be teamed up with the intel community industrial complex in a bogus swipe at "homeland security."
Now, some may have said the automatic transmission was a waste of effort (I'd love to see the cites) but... again, your equivocations here are, uh.... ok, now, "casual" is becoming generous.
A software engineering analogy to the automatic transmission is very hard to construct with any precision but, generally, reasonable analogies in software would be closer to the invention of quicksort then they would be to social networking businesses.
(It's a cool anecdote, though, and I'm intrigued. Cites?)
As for Ted K.: Yeah, interesting. You ever read "Future Shock?"
I was going to post a link to the book but it's hosted on the site that certain bemused individuals have a problem with. Since you asked(pdf).
Not your typical an-cap fare, more of an old school liberal (before 'liberal' was redefined by the progressives) investigating the reasons behind the 'third attempt at human freedom' which we call the good ol' US of A. Page 246 or 244 by the pdf page numbering. The clock story is around there also. Looking it up I got a few details wrong here and there.
I wasn't trying to make a direct comparison between the automatic transmission and MySpace but a general point about the 'worth' of something being not immediately apparent. Who knows what the people who grew up around the social networking sites will do when they get an itch to try out something different.
And the Ted K. story came from an interview with the guy that wrote a biography(?) about the researcher giving the presentation who did extensive research on Chinese contributions to society. I tried to find the specific show and now fully expect a visit from the DHS because of the google search terms I used...
Would a jury throw the book at someone for a "minor violation" -- some technical but silly transgression? I have my doubts. Will a jury want to throw the book in this case? I won't be surprised.
It would get appealed and I'm sure eventually reduced to a trivial penalty.
A larger Technocratic question, in my view, is why in in the name of everything good any sane engineer would feed fuel to the Web 2.0 garbage that potentiated this situation. It is socially irresponsible, technically goofy, get-rich-quick engineering that set up the stage for this particular drama.
I don't understand what you're complaining about. Every venue that encourages socialising will inevitably also facilitate predators and scumbags who exploit and harm vulnerable people. Whether it's a bar, a flower arranging club or an online forum. Are you saying the idea of MySpace is "socially irresponsible"? It's not my cup of tea, but I don't see anything wrong in principle.
To start with a simple one, compare email and the social networks.
An email service provider who leaves an open relay or who hosts a lot of spammers gets in trouble. Contemporary standards research in email is doing a lot of work on authenticated sender email. The email reader I use has features that look for tell-tale signs of (many kinds of) forged email. I can use email without disclosing anything more than my email address. Up and down the line the engineers are working to make email a simple to understand communications tool with as few "surprises" for users as they can.
The social networks, in contrast, are adding bizarre features that only a marketer could love. They engage in what Weizenbaum observed is a "debasement of language." "Friendship" is redefined as database table. "Popularity" as a numeric score. "Identity" becomes a (soon to be portable!) data set. "Creativity" is a paint-by-numbers exercise in picking themes. Once upon a time, plenty of teens expressed themselves via the artistic expressions of others with posters on their bedroom walls and stickers inside their lockers but the social networks are built to drag this out and create billboards. "Privacy" is construed to mean "only the marketers (and back office staff) get to peak."
In the alleged facts of this case, an adult woman constructed a false profile that included a picture of a strapping teen boy yet the concept of imposing safeguards and checks -- adding accountability -- is anathema to the business models of these services.
And today's teens are growing up thinking all of that is somehow "normal."
Who needed this stuff? What what is supposed to accomplish?
You and I can probably guess about the process of invention that led to these sites. It must have started with a question like "What kind of tricked out web site will be easy to build using the LAMP stack? Something with enough bling to attract a lot of users because even if we have trouble getting revenues, investors are paying out for that."
Many people are shallow and unsophisticated, and always have been. MySpace is no different from the tons of bars, clubs and raves that you can find in any town. All those people who have the goal of just making it to Friday so they can spend their paycheck on getting plastered down at the local pub.
MySpace is just for a different generation.
The teasing, tormenting and other b.s. has been going around in schools for a very long time. You're talking about taking things like cliques and hazing and expanding them online. Remember all the hullaballoo about "cyber bullying" and bullying text messages? Same behavior, different medium.
If that girl was clinically depressed then her parents should have been monitoring her activities much closer.
Either way, it was a tragic event -- but not criminal. The accused has been and will most likely be ostracized and suffering a world of shit from all her neighbors. That level of public scorn can send a powerful message.
Is that one person decieved another and harassed them to the point of suicide. Yes, it is a miscarriage of justice to misapply laws unrelated to the actual bad act as a way punishing the guilty person.
No matter how badly that person deserves punishment, misapplying laws like this just make justice more arbitrary and less just. I can't believe there isn't one single law anywhere that gets at the root cause negative behavior.
But in wider scope, one must consider this: If the girl committed suicide after one login session where she just met the guilty, then the girl was probably on the edge anyway - why? what other bad acts should be investigated?
OR, if she had many sessions with the guilty, and it took a build-up of harrassment over time, where were her parents during all of this? Why weren't they checking up once or twice a week on her internet activities? Why didn't they warn the girl about internet predators? etc, etc....
Misapplication of the law in this case simply ignores what bad acts and by who actually caused the girl to suicide.
The woman lied in order to make hurtful statements to a vulnerable child, leading to her death.
I agree there is room for this ruling to be misued in the future, but what do we do about this woman? Personally, I wonder that there are not other statutes that can be used to go after her. Were someone to lie, and that lead to a monitary loss, that seems like it would be very "prosecutable". Why this is not "manslaughter" is not real clear to me.
Another thought, Al Capone was gotten off the street on Tax Evasion charges, because they could not pin any other wraps on him. Was that good or bad?
You mean "allegedly" about the factual matters, afaict. I think that the facts in the case are not yet established in court. It is tedious in the discussion threads to tread so lightly. I think it is clear from context that we're accepting the versions that have been widely reported for the purpose of discussion of a general principle. Just thought I'd make that explicit here.
I don't mean to equivocate. The more authoritative accounts seem to leave little room to dispute the reported sequence of events. Just sayin', that's all.
"Is violating a Terms of Service Agreement a criminal offense, making it a argument between the State and a person, or a civil one to be argued between the provider and user?", that is the true question for this case. Everything else that we will hear about this over the next year or two will just be emotional noise, designed to gain votes, viewers, or readers. And that is all that this is about, votes.
That is a good point. How do they have standing to even open a case on this basis?
I cant see just leaving the issue ( the particular case, maybe, but not the greater issue ) that this womans alleged ( thanks, Thomas ) actions resulted in the death of a child, and those actions were allegedly not accidental ( feeding a child something they were allergic too, accidental ).
Something I just thought of, if I yelled "fire" in a theater, and that resulted in someone losing their life in the commotion, would I not be legally responsible for that death? I am just suprised that there is not a more direct way to legaly proceed against her.
On the "this is all about votes", how so? I agree it is an emotional case.
I am probably being too cynical when stating this will be all about votes in the end. I just think that some politician will not be able to resist a $SaveTheChildren law, or that a politician is pressing a prosecutor to run this one as it is now, just for votes. There are times when we should just let wrongs go.
There is something definitely wrong about a forty-seven year old woman harassing a child in her early teens. That disagreement should have been adult to adult, then down to the children by the their respective adults. Clearly, the forty-seven year old has not left junior high school behind. I too want her punished for it, at the very least so that we do not have more similar acts in the future. But bullying has not stopped, despite regulations or laws against it, and the occasional murder-suicide committed by the victim against the bullies.
How would a law address this crime? Would it require verification of identity for online postings? Once we take away anonymity from internet postings, we lose the trolls and flamers (who we ignore, ban, or moderate away anyway) at the cost of not being able to write freely without being reviewed by an employer or any other party. Maybe the "2.0" socializing type sites will have their own special laws for identification, age separated forums, stuff like that, or maybe that would be the start of the "slippery slope". Thoughts?
When We Are All Felons
Federal prosecutors are bringing felony charges against an adult woman who signed up for a MySpace account under a false name in order to harass and torment a teenage girl, who later committed suicide, based on violating the terms of service of the website after they couldn't find a crime to charge the woman under.
"'Hard cases make bad law' is an axiom in the legal world," said Mark Rasch, managing director of enterprise-services firm FTI Consulting and a former U.S. prosecutor. "This is a case where people have seen bad conduct and have said there must be something we can do, but if prosecution of this case is successful, every pseudonym and every minor violation of the terms of service becomes a computer crime."