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tony286 · 10-02-2007, 12:05 PM

http://www.forbes.com/technology/200...nymity-tech-cx
_0927anonymityland.html

Anonymity & the Net
Victoria Murphy Barret 10.15.07, 12:00 AM ET

On Halloween last year, 18-year-old Nicole Catsouras had the urge to go out. She had just started college but her father had confiscated her car keys earlier that day, after a spat. So she sneaked out of the house, grabbed the keys to her dad's Porsche 911 convertible and sped off. Fifteen minutes later Nikki lost control of the car and crashed into a freeway tollbooth at what witnesses said was 100 miles per hour.

She died instantly. The pain of her parents and her three younger sisters continues, deepened by a malicious, masked mob on the Internet. Gruesome police photos of the carnage, her mangled remains still in the driver's seat, showed up online at Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ), Yahoo (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ), News Corp. (nyse: NWS - news - people )'s Photobucket and at more than 1,500 other outposts. In chat rooms and on fetishistic car-crash forums, anonymous assailants called Nikki a "spoiled rich girl" who "deserved it."

One post urged cohorts to harass her family, providing the Catsourases' home address in Ladera Ranch, Calif. On MySpace, one member calling himself "Hell Fire" posted the morbid photos laced with his own jeering commentary. Another put up a new Nikki profile with a ghastly closeup: "What's left of my brain here: As you can see, there wasn't much." When a high school friend uploaded a touching memorial on YouTube, ghouls flooded the page with images of the accident scene.

A month after his daughter died, Christos Catsouras, a real estate agent, clicked on an e-mail from a Web sitwhee, hoping for a sales lead. Instead it read: "Whoooooooooo I am here daddy." It came from an anonymous Yahoo account: Im Alive[sic]. He quit his job to avoid the Net and now works as an office manager at much lower pay. "Have these people ever loved? Have they ever cared?" he asks. "If they had, they wouldn't be doing this to us." Lesli Catsouras had avoided the photos for months, but in February she ran a Google search for an article on their daughter's death--and one click later was horrified to see one. "I've spent 41 years seeing good in the world. Now I see the bad," she says.

The Catsourases have filed a $20 million lawsuit in Orange County Superior Court against the California Highway Patrol, which admits a staffer wrongfully leaked the photos. The CHP says it has taken "appropriate disciplinary measures" but won't provide the details--because, it says, this would violate employee privacy.

As for the Catsourases' privacy, they couldn't find anyone else to sue. They struggled to wipe the painful photos from the Web--and they were all but ignored. Dozens of pleading e-mails to Google and MySpace went unanswered, the family says (MySpace insists it replied; Google has no record). Tracking down the anonymous haters proved to be all but impossible. One relative spent a month of 13-hour days lobbying chat rooms, but each time one site took down a photo it emerged elsewhere. Some obligingly removed a picture--then added a link to other sites where onliners could see it.

"Nobody seemed to think it was a big deal, except for us," Lesli says. "These people knew anonymity was their salvation."

Anonymity was built into the Internet's design from the days of its progenitor (Arpanet) in the 1960s. Since then it has become a hallowed birthright synonymous with digital freedom--from oppressive dictators, criminal corporations and book-burning crazies, from judgmental neighbors who abhor a person's sexual preferences or religious beliefs. (A FORBES writer turned anonymity into a game in the parody site the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, until he was outed in August by the New York Times.)

Question this right of Net anonymity and you risk an unmitigated thrashing (anonymously, of course). So maybe we are asking for trouble when we dare to say that Internet anonymity is out of control. Today the Net still protects the abused and the disenfranchised, people who go online for help because they can do so in secret. But it also shields creeps, criminals and pedophiles. It emboldens the mean-spirited and offers them a huge audience for spewing hatred and libel. Caustic cowards are free to one-up one another in invective and vitriol--haters who would tone it down if they had to identify themselves.

A backlash has begun, and it could gain support in Congress and in the courts unless the Internet industry itself finds new fixes. In Pasadena, Calif. a federal appeals court in May reinstated a lawsuit that could make Roommates.com liable for want ads that mention gender and sexual orientation preferences. In Connecticut two women at Yale are suing the AutoAdmit chat board in district court. They want the identity of "Stanfordtroll," who started a mean discussion thread ("Stupid Bitch to Attend Yale Law") saying that one of the women would be sodomized, had herpes, had a lesbian affair with the admissions dean and had botched admissions tests. Another unknown poster wrote of the second student: "I hope she gets raped and dies." One of the plaintiffs says it prevented her from getting jobs.

Meanwhile, attorneys general in all 50 states have allied to push MySpace to begin verifying members' ages. This, after Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal got the site to turn over names of 29,000 sex offenders who had signed up. "Those are the dumb ones who used their real names. Who knows how many falsify their information?" he says. "The Web has a real libertarian mind-set. Individual freedom should be prized and protected so long as no one is harmed. But the question is: What happens when there is harm?"

His answer: a bit less freedom.

10-02-2007, 12:05 PM
tony286 lurker Industry Role: Join Date: Aug 2002 Location: atlanta Posts: 57,021	Hiding Behind The Net a great article http://www.forbes.com/technology/200...nymity-tech-cx _0927anonymityland.html Anonymity & the Net Victoria Murphy Barret 10.15.07, 12:00 AM ET On Halloween last year, 18-year-old Nicole Catsouras had the urge to go out. She had just started college but her father had confiscated her car keys earlier that day, after a spat. So she sneaked out of the house, grabbed the keys to her dad's Porsche 911 convertible and sped off. Fifteen minutes later Nikki lost control of the car and crashed into a freeway tollbooth at what witnesses said was 100 miles per hour. She died instantly. The pain of her parents and her three younger sisters continues, deepened by a malicious, masked mob on the Internet. Gruesome police photos of the carnage, her mangled remains still in the driver's seat, showed up online at Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ), Yahoo (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ), News Corp. (nyse: NWS - news - people )'s Photobucket and at more than 1,500 other outposts. In chat rooms and on fetishistic car-crash forums, anonymous assailants called Nikki a "spoiled rich girl" who "deserved it." One post urged cohorts to harass her family, providing the Catsourases' home address in Ladera Ranch, Calif. On MySpace, one member calling himself "Hell Fire" posted the morbid photos laced with his own jeering commentary. Another put up a new Nikki profile with a ghastly closeup: "What's left of my brain here: As you can see, there wasn't much." When a high school friend uploaded a touching memorial on YouTube, ghouls flooded the page with images of the accident scene. A month after his daughter died, Christos Catsouras, a real estate agent, clicked on an e-mail from a Web sitwhee, hoping for a sales lead. Instead it read: "Whoooooooooo I am here daddy." It came from an anonymous Yahoo account: Im Alive[sic]. He quit his job to avoid the Net and now works as an office manager at much lower pay. "Have these people ever loved? Have they ever cared?" he asks. "If they had, they wouldn't be doing this to us." Lesli Catsouras had avoided the photos for months, but in February she ran a Google search for an article on their daughter's death--and one click later was horrified to see one. "I've spent 41 years seeing good in the world. Now I see the bad," she says. The Catsourases have filed a $20 million lawsuit in Orange County Superior Court against the California Highway Patrol, which admits a staffer wrongfully leaked the photos. The CHP says it has taken "appropriate disciplinary measures" but won't provide the details--because, it says, this would violate employee privacy. As for the Catsourases' privacy, they couldn't find anyone else to sue. They struggled to wipe the painful photos from the Web--and they were all but ignored. Dozens of pleading e-mails to Google and MySpace went unanswered, the family says (MySpace insists it replied; Google has no record). Tracking down the anonymous haters proved to be all but impossible. One relative spent a month of 13-hour days lobbying chat rooms, but each time one site took down a photo it emerged elsewhere. Some obligingly removed a picture--then added a link to other sites where onliners could see it. "Nobody seemed to think it was a big deal, except for us," Lesli says. "These people knew anonymity was their salvation." Anonymity was built into the Internet's design from the days of its progenitor (Arpanet) in the 1960s. Since then it has become a hallowed birthright synonymous with digital freedom--from oppressive dictators, criminal corporations and book-burning crazies, from judgmental neighbors who abhor a person's sexual preferences or religious beliefs. (A FORBES writer turned anonymity into a game in the parody site the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, until he was outed in August by the New York Times.) Question this right of Net anonymity and you risk an unmitigated thrashing (anonymously, of course). So maybe we are asking for trouble when we dare to say that Internet anonymity is out of control. Today the Net still protects the abused and the disenfranchised, people who go online for help because they can do so in secret. But it also shields creeps, criminals and pedophiles. It emboldens the mean-spirited and offers them a huge audience for spewing hatred and libel. Caustic cowards are free to one-up one another in invective and vitriol--haters who would tone it down if they had to identify themselves. A backlash has begun, and it could gain support in Congress and in the courts unless the Internet industry itself finds new fixes. In Pasadena, Calif. a federal appeals court in May reinstated a lawsuit that could make Roommates.com liable for want ads that mention gender and sexual orientation preferences. In Connecticut two women at Yale are suing the AutoAdmit chat board in district court. They want the identity of "Stanfordtroll," who started a mean discussion thread ("Stupid Bitch to Attend Yale Law") saying that one of the women would be sodomized, had herpes, had a lesbian affair with the admissions dean and had botched admissions tests. Another unknown poster wrote of the second student: "I hope she gets raped and dies." One of the plaintiffs says it prevented her from getting jobs. Meanwhile, attorneys general in all 50 states have allied to push MySpace to begin verifying members' ages. This, after Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal got the site to turn over names of 29,000 sex offenders who had signed up. "Those are the dumb ones who used their real names. Who knows how many falsify their information?" he says. "The Web has a real libertarian mind-set. Individual freedom should be prized and protected so long as no one is harmed. But the question is: What happens when there is harm?" His answer: a bit less freedom. Last edited by tony299; 10-02-2007 at 12:07 PM..