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Vocabulary > Technology > Internet > Violence
John Cole
The Scranton Times-Tribune
Cagle
26 October 2010
internet safety
/ myths
> children
http://society.guardian.co.uk/children/story/0,1074,1235016,00.html
http://society.guardian.co.uk/children/story/0,1074,1233308,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,1232506,00.html
http://society.guardian.co.uk/children/page/0,1074,759830,00.html
groom
http://www.guardian.co.uk/crime/article/0,2763,1227362,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,1147264,00.html
child pornography sites
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/17/internet.childprotection
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-05-25-firms-fight-online_x.htm
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1718252,00.html
child pornography on the internet / child internet porn
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1889780,00.html
online kid porn
USA
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-04-20-gonzales-child-porn_x.htm
internet pornography
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2010/jul/03/pornography-xxx-apple-ipad
downloading child pornography from the Internet
USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/05/us/life-sentence-for-possession-of-child-pornography-spurs-debate.html
Biggest four UK ISPs switching to 'opt-in' system for pornography
October 2011
David Cameron unveils deal with big four providers
based on report's proposals to protect children from sexual content
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/oct/11/pornography-internet-service-providers
sex websites
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/dec/19/broadband-sex-safeguard-children-vaizey
violent internet pornography
http://www.guardian.co.uk/crime/article/0,,1861750,00.html
internet
paedophiles
http://www.guardian.co.uk/child/story/0,7369,1162476,00.html
online predators
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-MySpace-Agreement.html
monitoring chidren's instant messaging habits
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/internetprivacy/2006-06-20-parent-cyber-sleuths_x.htm
cyberstalking
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/apr/08/cyberstalking-study-victims-men
people detained
or sentenced for internet-related offences
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,1136045,00.html
fear of online crime
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1890958,00.html
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1890363,00.html
identity fraud
http://money.guardian.co.uk/scamsandfraud/story/0,,1929568,00.html
organised crime
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,1229875,00.html
violent adult porn on internet
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,1558900,00.html
the trading of graphic images and transmitting of live sexual
molestation
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-03-15-child-ring_x.htm
data theft
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-06-04-data-theft_x.htm
'psychonauts'
http://www.guardian.co.uk/drugs/Story/0,2763,1492457,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/drugs/Story/0,2763,1492445,00.html
suicide websites and chatrooms
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article3254272.ece
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,1589332,00.html
gossip
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/us/small-town-gossip-moves-to-the-web-anonymous-and-vicious.html
Life
Sentence for Possession of Child Pornography
Spurs
Debate Over Severity
November 4,
2011
The New York Times
By ERICA GOODE
Does
downloading child pornography from the Internet deserve the same criminal
punishment as first-degree murder?
A circuit court judge in Florida clearly thinks so: On Thursday, he sentenced
Daniel Enrique Guevara Vilca, a 26-year-old stockroom worker whose home computer
was found to contain hundreds of pornographic images of children, to life in
prison without the possibility of parole.
But the severity of the justice meted out to Mr. Vilca, who had no previous
criminal record, has led some criminal justice experts to question whether
increasingly harsh penalties delivered in cases involving the viewing of
pornography really fit the crime. Had Mr. Vilca actually molested a child, they
note, he might well have received a lighter sentence.
“To me, a failure to distinguish between people who look at these dirty pictures
and people who commit contact offenses lacks the nuance and proportionality I
think our law demands,” said Douglas Berman, a law professor at Ohio State
University, who highlighted Mr. Vilca’s case on his blog, Sentencing and Law
Policy.
Sexual offenses involving children enrage most Americans, and lawmakers have not
hesitated to impose lengthy prison terms for offenders. In Florida, possession
of child pornography is a third-degree felony, punishable by up to five years in
prison. Mr. Vilca was charged with 454 counts of possession, each count
representing one image found on the computer.
Steve Maresca, the assistant state attorney in the case, said that in his view,
Mr. Vilca “received a sentence pursuant to the sentencing guidelines.”
“Too many people just look at this as a victimless crime, and that’s not true,”
he said. “These children are victimized, and when the images are shown over and
over again, they’re victimized over and over again.”
But Lee Hollander, Mr. Vilca’s lawyer, called the sentence ridiculous.
“Daniel had nothing to do with the original victimization of these people; there
is no evidence that he’s ever touched anybody improperly, adult or minor; and
life in prison for looking at images, even child images, is beyond
comprehension,” he said.
Mr. Hollander said Mr. Vilca had consistently said he did not know the images
were on his computer. He refused a plea bargain of 20 years in prison, after
which the state attorney increased the charges. The sentence will be appealed,
Mr. Hollander said.
Troy K. Stabenow, an assistant federal public defender in Missouri’s Western
District, noted that most people assume that someone who looks at child
pornography is also a child molester or will become a child molester, a view
often mirrored by judges.
But a growing body of scientific research shows that this is not the case, he
said. Many passive viewers of child pornography never molest children, and not
all child molesters have a penchant for pornography.
“I’m not suggesting that someone who looks at child pornography should just
walk,” he said. “But we ought to punish people for what they do, not for our
fear.”
State and federal laws, which generally increase penalties based on the number
of pornographic images, reflect the idea that acquiring child pornography
requires extensive time and effort and thus is a measure of a defendant’s
involvement and interest. But with the rise of the Internet, it is possible to
download hundreds of images in a matter of minutes, making the size of a stash a
less than reliable indicator, Mr. Stabenow and other criminal justice experts
said. It is now a rare case that does not involve the possession of hundreds, or
even thousands, of images.
As a result, many federal judges have issued sentences lower than those called
for by federal guidelines, which add months for multiple images and other
aggravating factors. And even when such sentencing enhancements are enforced,
the sentences — which can sometimes be 18 or 20 years — are often well below
what Mr. Vilca received. The federal guidelines, for example, recommend a
minimum of 57 to 71 months in prison for possession of 600 or more images of
very young children.
Paul Cassell, a former federal judge who is now a law professor at the
University of Utah, said there was no question that “consumers of child
pornography drive the market for the production of child pornography, and
without people to consume this stuff there wouldn’t be nearly as many children
being sexually abused.”
Mr. Cassell is involved in efforts to get restitution for victims of child
pornography, and has filed a petition in one case with the Supreme Court. But he
said that while he was not familiar with Mr. Vilca’s case and did not know what
other facts might be involved, “in the abstract, a life sentence for the crime
of solely possessing child pornography would seem to be excessive.”
“A life sentence is what we give first-degree murderers,” he said, “and
possession of child pornography is not the equivalent of first-degree murder.”
Life Sentence for Possession of Child Pornography Spurs
Debate Over Severity, NYT, 4.11.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/05/us/life-sentence-for-possession-of-child-pornography-spurs-debate.html
In Small
Towns,
Gossip
Moves to the Web, and Turns Vicious
September
19, 2011
The New York Times
By A. G. SULZBERGER
MOUNTAIN
GROVE, Mo. — In the small towns nestled throughout the Ozarks, people like to
say that everybody knows everybody’s business — and if they do not, they feel
free to offer an educated guess.
One of the established places here for trading the gossip of the day is Dee’s
Place, a country diner where a dozen longtime residents gather each morning
around a table permanently reserved with a members-only sign for the “Old Farts
Club,” as they call themselves, to talk about weather, politics and, of course,
their neighbors.
But of late, more people in this hardscrabble town of 5,000 have shifted from
sharing the latest news and rumors over eggs and coffee to the Mountain Grove
Forum on a social media Web site called Topix, where they write and read
startlingly negative posts, all cloaked in anonymity, about one another.
And in Dee’s Place, people are not happy. A waitress, Pheobe Best, said that the
site had provoked fights and caused divorces. The diner’s owner, Jim Deverell,
called Topix a “cesspool of character assassination.” And hearing the
conversation, Shane James, the cook, wandered out of the kitchen tense with
anger.
His wife, Jennifer, had been the target in a post titled “freak,” he said, which
described the mother of two as, among other things, “a methed-out, doped-out
whore with AIDS.” Not a word was true, Mr. and Ms. James said, but the
consequences were real enough.
Friends and relatives stopped speaking to them. Trips to the grocery store
brought a crushing barrage of knowing glances. She wept constantly and even
considered suicide. Now, the couple has resolved to move.
“I’ll never come back to this town again,” Ms. James said in an interview at the
diner. “I just want to get the hell away from here.”
In rural America, where an older, poorer and more remote population has lagged
the rest of the country in embracing the Internet, the growing use of social
media is raising familiar concerns about bullying and privacy. But in small
towns there are complications.
The same Web sites created as places for candid talk about local news and
politics are also hubs of unsubstantiated gossip, stirring widespread resentment
in communities where ties run deep, memories run long and anonymity is something
of a novel concept.
A generation ago, even after technology had advanced, many rural residents clung
to the party line telephone systems that allowed neighbors to listen in on one
another’s conversations. Now they are gravitating toward open community forums
online, said Christian Sandvig, an associate professor at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“Something about rural culture seems to make people want to have conversations
in public,” said Mr. Sandvig, who has studied the use of social media sites in
rural areas.
Topix, a site lightly trafficked in cities, enjoys a dedicated and growing
following across the Ozarks, Appalachia and much of the rural South,
establishing an unexpected niche in communities of a few hundred or few thousand
people — particularly in what Chris Tolles, Topix’s chief executive, calls “the
feud states.” One of the most heavily trafficked forums, he noted, is Pikeville,
Ky., once the staging ground for the Hatfield and McCoy rivalry.
“We’re running the Gawker for every little town in America,” Mr. Tolles said.
Whereas online negativity seems to dissipate naturally in a large city, it often
grates like steel wool in a small town where insults are not easily forgotten.
The forums have provoked censure by local governments, a number of lawsuits and,
in one case, criticism by relatives after a woman in Austin, Ind., killed
herself and her three children this year. Hours earlier she wrote on the Web
site where her divorce had been a topic of conversation, “Now it’s time to take
the pain away.”
In Hyden, Ky. (population 365), the local forum had 107 visitors at the same
time one afternoon this month. They encountered posts about the school system, a
new restaurant and local arrests, as well as the news articles and political
questions posted by Topix.
But more typical were the unsubstantiated posts that identified by name an
employee at a dentist’s office as a home wrecker with herpes, accused a gas
station attendant of being a drug dealer, and said a 13-year-old girl was
“preggo by her mommy’s man.” Many allegations were followed with promises of
retribution to whoever started the post.
“If names had been put on and tied to what has been said, there would have been
one killing after another,” said Lonnie Hendrix, Hyden’s mayor.
Topix, based in Palo Alto, Calif., is owned in part by several major newspaper
companies — Gannett, Tribune and McClatchy — but has independent editorial
control. It was initially envisioned as a hyperlocal news aggregator with
separate pages for every community in the country. But most of its growth was in
small cities and towns, and local commenters wanted to shift the conversation to
more traditional gossip.
Mr. Tolles acknowledged the biggest problem at the site is “keeping the
conversation on the rails.” But he defended it on free-speech grounds. He said
the comments are funny to read, make private gossip public, provide a platform
for “people who have negative things to say” and are better for business.
At one point, he said, the company tried to remove all negative posts, but it
stopped after discovering that commenters had stopped visiting the site. “This
is small-town America,” he said. “The voices these guys are hearing are of their
friends and neighbors.”
Mr. Tolles also said the site played a journalistic role, including providing a
place for whistle-blowing and candid discussion of local politics.
He noted that the Mountain Grove Forum, which had 3,700 visitors on a single day
this month, had 1,200 posts containing the word “corruption,” though it was
unclear how many of them were true. One resident used the site to rail against
local officials, helping build support for a petition-driven state audit of town
government.
Topix said it received about 125,000 posts on any given day in forums for about
5,000 cities and towns. Unlike sites like Facebook, which requires users to give
their real name, Topix users can pick different names for each post and are
identified only by geography. About 9 percent are automatically screened out by
software, based on offensive content like racial slurs; another 3 percent —
mostly threats and “obvious libel,” Mr. Tolles said — are removed after people
complain.
After a challenge from more than 30 state attorneys general, Topix stopped
charging for the expedited removal of offensive comments — which Jack Conway,
the attorney general for Kentucky, said “smacked of having to pay a fee to get
your good name back.”
Despite the screening efforts, the site is full of posts that seem to cross
lines. Topix, as an Internet forum, is immune from libel suits under federal
law, but those who post could be sued, if they are found.
The company receives about one subpoena a day for the computer addresses of
anonymous commenters as part of law enforcement investigations or civil suits,
some of which have resulted in cash verdicts or settlements.
But at Dee’s Place, Jennifer James said she did not have enough money to pursue
a lawsuit. And even if she did, she said, it would not help.
“In a small town,” Ms. James said, “rumors stay forever.”
In Small Towns, Gossip Moves to the Web, and Turns
Vicious, NYT, 19.9.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/us/small-town-gossip-moves-to-the-web-anonymous-and-vicious.html
Private Moment Made Public, Then a Fatal Jump
September 29, 2010
The New York Times
By LISA W. FODERARO
It started with a Twitter message on Sept. 19: “Roommate asked for the room
till midnight. I went into molly’s room and turned on my webcam. I saw him
making out with a dude. Yay.”
That night, the authorities say, the Rutgers University student who sent the
message used a camera in his dormitory room to stream the roommate’s intimate
encounter live on the Internet.
And three days later, the roommate who had been surreptitiously broadcast —
Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old freshman and an accomplished violinist — jumped
from the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River in an apparent suicide.
The Sept. 22 death, details of which the authorities disclosed on Wednesday, was
the latest by a young American that followed the online posting of hurtful
material. The news came on the same day that Rutgers kicked off a two-year,
campuswide project to teach the importance of civility, with special attention
to the use and abuse of new technology.
Those who knew Mr. Clementi — on the Rutgers campus in Piscataway, N.J., at his
North Jersey high school and in a community orchestra — were anguished by the
circumstances surrounding his death, describing him as an intensely devoted
musician who was sweet and shy.
“It’s really awful, especially in New York and in the 21st century,” said Arkady
Leytush, artistic director of the Ridgewood Symphony Orchestra, where Mr.
Clementi played since his freshman year in high school. “It’s so painful. He was
very friendly and had very good potential.”
The Middlesex County prosecutor’s office said Mr. Clementi’s roommate, Dharun
Ravi, 18, of Plainsboro, N.J., and another classmate, Molly Wei, 18, of
Princeton Junction, N.J., had each been charged with two counts of invasion of
privacy for using “the camera to view and transmit a live image” of Mr.
Clementi. The most serious charges carry a maximum sentence of five years.
Mr. Ravi was charged with two additional counts of invasion of privacy for
trying a similar live feed on the Internet on Sept. 21, the day before the
suicide. A spokesman for the prosecutor’s office, James O’Neill, said the
investigation was continuing, but he declined to “speculate on additional
charges.”
Steven Goldstein, chairman of the gay rights group Garden State Equality, said
Wednesday that he considered the death a hate crime. “We are sickened that
anyone in our society, such as the students allegedly responsible for making the
surreptitious video, might consider destroying others’ lives as a sport,” he
said in a statement.
At the end of the inaugural event for the university’s “Project Civility”
campaign on Wednesday, nearly 100 demonstrators gathered outside the student
center, where the president spoke. They chanted, “Civility without safety — over
our queer bodies!”
It is unclear what Mr. Clementi’s sexual orientation was; classmates say he
mostly kept to himself. Danielle Birnbohm, a freshman who lived across the hall
from him in Davidson Hall, said that when a counselor asked how many students
had known Mr. Clementi, only 3 students out of 50 raised their hands.
But Mr. Clementi displayed a favorite quotation on his Facebook page, from the
song “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again”: “What do you get when you kiss a guy? You
get enough germs to catch pneumonia.”
And his roommate’s Twitter message makes plain that Mr. Ravi believed that Mr.
Clementi was gay.
A later message from Mr. Ravi appeared to make reference to the second attempt
to broadcast Mr. Clementi. “Anyone with iChat,” he wrote on Sept. 21, “I dare
you to video chat me between the hours of 9:30 and 12. Yes, it’s happening
again.”
Ms. Birnbohm said Mr. Ravi had said the initial broadcast was an accident — that
he viewed the encounter after dialing his own computer from another room in the
dorm. It was not immediately known how or when Mr. Clementi learned what his
roommate had done. But Ms. Birnbohm said the episode quickly became the subject
of gossip in the dormitory.
Mr. Clementi’s family issued a statement on Wednesday confirming the suicide and
pledging cooperation with the criminal investigation. “Tyler was a fine young
man, and a distinguished musician,” the statement read. “The family is
heartbroken beyond words.”
The Star-Ledger of Newark reported that Mr. Clementi posted a note on his
Facebook page the day of his death: “Jumping off the gw bridge sorry.” Friends
and strangers have turned the page into a memorial.
Witnesses told the police they saw a man jump off the bridge just before 9 p.m.
on Sept. 22, said Paul J. Browne, the New York Police Department’s chief
spokesman. Officers discovered a wallet there with Mr. Clementi’s
identification, Mr. Browne said.
The police said Wednesday night that they had found the body of a young man in
the Hudson north of the bridge and were trying to identify it.
Officials at Ridgewood High School, where Mr. Clementi graduated in June, last
week alerted parents of current students that his family had reported him
missing and encouraged students to take advantage of counseling at the school.
The timing of the news was almost uncanny, coinciding with the start of “Project
Civility” at Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey. Long in the planning,
the campaign will involve panel discussions, lectures, workshops and other
events to raise awareness about the importance of respect, compassion and
courtesy in everyday interactions.
Events scheduled for this fall include a workshop for students and
administrators on residential life on campus and a panel discussion titled
“Uncivil Gadgets? Changing Technologies and Civil Behavior.”
Rutgers officials would not say whether the two suspects had been suspended. But
in a statement late Wednesday, the university’s president, Richard L. McCormick,
said, “If the charges are true, these actions gravely violate the university’s
standards of decency and humanity.” At the kickoff event for the civility
campaign, Mr. McCormick made an oblique reference to the case, saying, “It is
more clear than ever that we need strongly to reassert our call for civility and
responsibility for each other.”
Mr. Ravi was freed on $25,000 bail, and Ms. Wei was released on her own
recognizance. The lawyer for Mr. Ravi, Steven D. Altman, declined to comment on
the accusations. A phone message left at the offices of Ms. Wei’s lawyer was not
returned.
Some students on the Busch campus in Piscataway seemed dazed by the turn of
events, remembering their last glimpse of Mr. Clementi. Thomas Jung, 19, shared
a music stand with Mr. Clementi in the Rutgers Symphony Orchestra.
On Wednesday afternoon, hours before Mr. Clementi’s death, the two rehearsed
works by Berlioz and Beethoven. “He loved music,” Mr. Jung said. “He was very
dedicated. I couldn’t tell if anything was wrong.”
Reporting was contributed by Al Baker, Barbara Gray, Nate Schweber and Tim
Stelloh.
Private Moment Made
Public, Then a Fatal Jump, NYT, 29.7.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/30/nyregion/30suicide.html
Verdict
in MySpace Suicide Case
November
27, 2008
The New York Times
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
LOS ANGELES
— A federal jury here issued what legal experts said was the country’s first
cyberbullying verdict Wednesday, convicting a Missouri woman of three
misdemeanor charges of computer fraud for her involvement in creating a phony
account on MySpace to trick a teenager, who later committed suicide.
The jury deadlocked on a fourth count of conspiracy against the woman, Lori
Drew, 49, and the judge, George H. Wu of Federal District Court, declared a
mistrial on that charge.
Although it was unclear how severely Ms. Drew would be punished — the jury
reduced the charges to misdemeanors from felonies, and no sentencing date was
set — the conviction was highly significant, computer fraud experts said,
because it was the first time that a federal statute designed to combat computer
crimes was used to prosecute what were essentially abuses of a user agreement on
a social networking site.
Under federal sentencing guidelines, Ms. Drew could face up to three years in
prison and $300,000 in fines, though she has no previous criminal record. Her
lawyer has asked for a new trial.
In a highly unusual move, Thomas P. O’Brien, the United States attorney in Los
Angeles, prosecuted the case himself with two subordinates after law enforcement
officials in Missouri determined Ms. Drew had broken no local laws.
Mr. O’Brien, who asserted jurisdiction on the ground that MySpace is based in
Los Angeles, where its servers are housed, said the verdict sent an
“overwhelming message” to users of the Internet.
“If you are going to attempt to annoy or go after a little girl and you’re going
to use the Internet to do so,” he said, “this office and others across the
country will hold you responsible.”
During the five-day trial, prosecutors portrayed Ms. Drew as working in concert
with her daughter, Sarah, who was then 13, and Ashley Grills, a family friend
and employee of Ms. Drew’s magazine coupon business in Dardenne Prairie, Mo.
Testimony showed that they created a teenage boy, “Josh Evans,” as an identity
on MySpace to communicate with Sarah’s nemesis, Megan Meier, who was 13 and had
a history of depression and suicidal impulses.
After weeks of online courtship with “Josh,” Megan was distressed one afternoon
in October 2006, according to testimony at the trial, when she received an
e-mail message from him that said, “The world would be a better place without
you.”
Ms. Grills, who is now 20, testified under an immunity agreement that shortly
after that message was sent, Megan wrote back, “You’re the kind of boy a girl
would kill herself over.” Megan hanged herself that same afternoon in her
bedroom.
Although the jury appeared to reject the government’s contention that Ms. Drew
had intended to harm Megan — a notion underlying the felony charges — the
convictions signaled the 12 members’ belief that she had nonetheless violated
federal laws that prohibit gaining access to a computer without authorization.
Specifically, the jury found Ms. Drew guilty of accessing a computer without
authorization on three occasions, a reference to the fraudulent postings on
MySpace in the name of Josh Evans.
Legal and computer fraud experts said the application of the federal Computer
Fraud and Abuse Act, passed in 1986 and amended several times, appeared to be
expanding with technology and the growth of social networking on the Internet.
More typically, prosecutions under the act have involved people who hack into
computer systems.
“Keep in mind that social networking sites like MySpace did not exist until
recently,” said Nick Akerman, a New York lawyer who has written and lectured
extensively on the act. “This case will be simply another important step in the
expanded use of this statute to protect the public from computer crime.”
Other computer fraud experts said they found the verdict chilling.
“As a result of the prosecutor’s highly aggressive, if not unlawful, legal
theory,” said Matthew L. Levine, a former federal prosecutor who is a defense
lawyer in New York, “it is now a crime to ‘obtain information’ from a Web site
in violation of its terms of service. This cannot be what Congress meant when it
enacted the law, but now you have it.”
Ms. Drew, who showed little emotion during the trial, sat stone-faced as the
clerk read the jury’s verdict and left the courtroom quickly, her face red and
twisted with rage.
Her lawyer, H. Dean Steward, said outside the courthouse that he believed the
trial was grandstanding by Mr. O’Brien in an effort to keep his job, with the
coming change in the White House.
“I don’t have any satisfaction at all,” Mr. Steward said of the verdict.
Judge Wu scheduled a hearing on the request for a new trial for late December.
Since the story surrounding the suicide became public last year, Mr. O’Brien has
discussed with his staff how his feelings as a parent motivated him to bring the
charges against Ms. Drew. He alluded to those feelings on Wednesday at a news
conference.
“This was obviously a case that means a lot to me,” he said.
The case has been a collection of anomalies. Judge Wu appeared ambivalent
regarding some key issues at the trial, like whether any testimony about Megan’s
suicide would be allowed (he did allow it) and how to rule on a defense motion
to throw out the charges (he had not ruled as of Wednesday).
Judge Wu was appointed to the federal bench less than two years ago, and it is
difficult to establish his sentencing record. But Mr. Akerman, the computer
fraud expert, said jail time was common even for first-time offenders in
computer fraud cases.
“If I were her,” he said of Ms. Drew, “I would not be celebrating over the
Thanksgiving weekend.”
Tina Meier, Megan’s mother, said in a news conference after the verdict that she
hoped Ms. Drew would serve jail time, and that she felt satisfied.
“This day is not any harder than the day when I found Megan,” Ms. Meier said.
“This has never been about vengeance. This is about justice. For me it’s
absolutely worth it every single day sitting in that court hoping there was
justice.”
Verdict in MySpace Suicide Case, NYT, 27.11.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/27/us/27myspace.html
Related
computer > PC
computer >
Macintosh
phone
www
www >
Wikipedia
www > Internet
freedom / censorship
www >
WikiLeaks
www > privacy,
Facebook, Twitter, social
networking
www > file-sharing
sites
www > virus, malware,
hackers, cybersecurity, cyber theft, cyber attack
www > Google
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