Eavesdropping

Took the family out to eat to Carrabbas the other night. Must've been senior citizen night, well okay, maybe it's just the fact that this is central Florida and our town is overrun with snowbirds in the winter, but the place was packed with many people over the age of 65. While I was waiting for our food I couldn't help but overhear the two couples sitting near by.

"Have you heard about this blogging thing?" man 1

"Oh yes. I think I've heard about that." man 2

"Well, these bloggers are taking over the internet. I mean, after these news stories you can now email your comments (isn't it cute he thinks an instant comment is an email?) about the story and you don't even have to put your name. All of these bloggers are making comments and there were 93 comments after this story. And no one leaves their names. They are doing it anonymously. I think that is unethical. And you should see the language they use. F with three asterisks as if we don't know what that means." man 1

Okay you fellow bloggers out there. STOP emailing your comments about news stories and doing it anonymously. I mean, really, what's the worst that could happen to you if you were to put your name and location to a real comment being left? How about this:
Internet Service Providers (ISPs), email, web pages, websites, search engines, images, listservs, Instant Chat Relay (IRCs) are all cyberstalking tools. As Internet usage increased, it is not known if people realize what online stalking was or if it was recognized as a crime. One of the most famous cases that brought cyberstalking into the public’s eye was the Jayne Hitchcock incident. Her story brought cyberstalking to the attention of lawmakers and she and others helped rewrite state stalking laws. Her harassment begin online via discussion groups and emails and then lead to physical stalking of her and her family in the real world.

Another example of a victim was Cynthia Armistead of Atlanta, Georgia. She and her daughter began receiving threatening and obscene messages and phone calls from her stalker in 1996. He posted phony advertisements on the USENET offering her services as a prostitute and provided her address and phone number. She moved and changed her address. Then she was stalked physically. Her stalker continued to email her. Finally he was caught and brought to trial. The stalker could not be prosecuted because Georgia had no laws regarding cyberstalking, but the stalker, Richard Hillyard, was charged with the “traditional” stalking laws and found not guilty.

In 1998 Dwayne Comfort, a former USD student, sent over 100 threatening, harassing, terrorizing and sexually explicit emails to five different victims. He used personal information about them and intimidated them to the point of obsession. He was able to avoid detection for 10 months. Also in that same year, Richard Machado emailed “death threat” messages to 59 students, mostly Asian Americans attending the University of California. Machado threatened, "to find and kill every one of you personally.” He was convicted on a civil rights charge and sentenced to a year in prison with time served. Machado was also expelled for poor academic performance. At the trial, he testified he had sent the messages out of boredom and to provoke a response. He denied any intention to follow up on his threats. His case was the first civil rights charge for crime committed on a computer.

It was New Hampshire in the late 1990s. Liam Youens fell in love with his fellow eighth grader Amy Boyer and obsessed her from afar and online. She had no idea she was being stalked. Liam stalked her for two years and created a website dedicated to her. He chronicled his daily obsession about her and published it on the website, as well as the ways he would kill her. Liam obtained Amy’s social security number via an online database, found her place of employment, and as she was getting into her car, he shot her in the head and then killed himself. Because of this incident, and the easy accessibility to obtain social security numbers, the U.S. legislation passed the Social Security Number Protection Act of 2000. (The Social Security Number Privacy and Identity Theft Prevention Act of 2003 was introduced in the 2003 legislation to prevent misuse and identity theft of these account numbers.) It is now a civil and criminal offense to sell or purchase a number except for legitimate purposes. The online database brokers were also found liable for their role in Amy’s death. The New Hampshire Supreme Court has held that information brokers and private investigators can be liable for the harms caused by selling personal information.

About this time, then-Vice President Al Gore realized there was a rise in online stalking and commissioned the U.S. Justice Department Report on Cyberstalking. From the 1999 study, it was reported that more than 1 in 12 women (8.2 million) will be stalked or have been stalked, and 50% of the cases will not be reported. Stalking victims are usually between the ages of 18-26, and stalkers usually have a prior criminal history or a personality disorder. Cyberstalkers now may be younger, more intelligent and better educated than other criminals. They are described as fairly lonely, isolated, highly intelligent, impulsive, cunning, resourceful, understand how to be anonymous, and know computers. They love cyberspace because there are no face-to-face meetings.

Anonymity has another trait that is important in cyberstalking: pseudonymity. The Internet and ISPs allow users to create a fake name as their identity. One can fake gender, age, race and physical appearance. It is up to the user to decide how to control personal information that is released on the Internet. Another reason to use cyberspace is real-time vs. virtual time communications. Email users are more blunt and direct in their communications and less concerned with what possible impact their speech or chosen words may have on another person. Email has no body language, no tone of voice, and no facial expressions. Most often people do not realize that emails are not private and that email systems can create a compete record of transactions. And what about cookies? Cookies or data text files are stored on a user’s hard drive. When visiting certain sites, one can track the habits of the users by accessing the cookies. Most surfers do not know how their information is gathered and used. Now many commercial and non-profit websites will tell the user what they do with the collected cookies. But this information is not in “plain sight” and one has to hunt for the policy.

On the Internet, cyberstalkers can sometimes reach an anonymous identity by using a tool called Anonymizer or MixMaster. Using one of these applications can wipe out someone’s electronic identification information and reallocate it to an anonymous ID. These re-mailers can also use public key cryptography so there is a complete privacy for the user. By chaining together a few of these re-mailers, the user can create a complicated trail for law enforcement and others to track. There are several individuals and groups who would like to call for a prohibition of these re-mailers. But the First Amendment and privacy issues play a part in why these applications are still available to the public. Free speech can be facilitated by anonymous online usage, which allows human rights activities, political and religious speeches and whistleblowers to engage in confidential communications (Wallace, 1999). For example, Anonymizer was used in 1999 to launch the Kosovo Privacy Project to provide free and confidential web browsing and email to people in that region. Other Internet tools that are utilized to taunt their cyber victims include: spoofing (forging headers), spamming, sniffing, chat rooms, and news groups (Wall, 2001, p. 147). for the full story click here

I know of other stories and couldn't help but chuckle to myself listening in on the conversation and thinking, "wow, how times have a changed. Used to be you would never write a letter to the editor of your local paper anonymously, you would be proud to put your name, and maybe you received a rebuke or nasty phone call about it from someone who disagreed, but in today's world, people have gone LOCO and will hunt you down and kill you for not agreeing."