Slashdot Mirror
Journalists Can't Hide News From the Internet
Hugh Pickens writes "Robert Niles at the Online Journalism Review discusses the issues surrounding the recent tragedy involving a MySpace user. A newspaper reporting on the story didn't name the woman, citing concerns for her teen daughter. Bloggers went nuts, and soon uncovered the woman's personal information. Niles writes: 'The lessons for journalists? First, we can't restrict access to information anymore. The crowd will work together to find whatever we withhold ... Second, I wonder if that the decision to withhold the other mother's name didn't help enflame the audience, by frustrating it and provoking it to do the work of discovering her identity.'"
Whether this was a real story or not, that woman did no one any harm; if she did Megan any harm, that's for law enforcement to deal with, not the rest of us.
By digging up her personal information - for which no one had any real, legitimate use - much less posting it online - these bloggers have negligently put this entire family's safety at serious risk.
Yes, information wants to be free blah blah blah - wait until the media puts the unwanted spotlight on you for some minor b.s. (that most of us don't even care to read about) and some Jezebel-esque nutball digs up your personal information - including where you live - and puts it out there for any unbalanced, easily enraged headcase to come dot your forehead with a 9mm shell. Or maybe they'll stalk and kidnap your kid instead.
These bloggers ought to have their information put out there by law enforcement - as convicted criminals. Aiding and abetting, for starters, then implied terroristic threats.
Here's the kicker, folks: when you put up the personal information of one person in the house, you put everyone ELSE there, at risk. Even their neighbors.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Seriously. Where does the news come from in the first place? US, the citizens of the world. You think you're going to be able to hide something? Only if you're deep in government connections, pal!
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
The real lesson is that you should never, ever give out personal information anywhere on the internet. Mailing list emails get archived, forum posts just as much and social networks aren't as hermetic as Joe Sixpack seems to think they are.
There should be no sympathy for those who pose as fictitious characters only to create malice and havoc in others lives, whether it's online or in real life. I'm unsure if this woman will have charges brought upon her, but it wouldn't be unreasonable, imo. The simple fact she even did this shows that she's not even mature enough to have kids. Unfortunately, she'll probably plead "insanity" and get away with it.
Never monkey with another monkey's monkey.
...that in a big enough group, there'll always be some asshats to publish anything. Even if you can't stop them, why help them?
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
And hiding information that can be found just makes people want to discover it. What right does another person have to this information that I don't? I doubt people were angry, just curious.
What about "outing" alleged criminals? Long before a person is convicted of cleared of robbery/rape/murder/etc. charges, their name and picture (from which the rest of their personal information can be easily found) are in the public eye for all to see and judge, whether they are in any way guilty or not. A public record is as good as a criminal one.
IMO all arrest records should be sealed until a conviction is reached, and should be erased and destroyed upon acquittal.
When someone posts your address online over an alleged crime or slight, and you're the one whose tires are slashed or who has to confront a crazed gunman breaking down your door, you'll understand.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Outing alleged criminals is downright crazy. I've had to rethink my views on outing spammers because of that.
You're right, of course - arrest records should be sealed until a verdict is reached, and then destroyed upon acquittal. I wonder what religious rightist or corporate statist argument that runs up against?
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
If we want information to be free, people using this freedom, in ways, that we can't agree with, is the price to pay. I am not sure, when the point is reached, when I am willing to sacrifice freedom, for other values. "Freiheit ist immer Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" -- Rosa Luxemburg
The development of the internet has changed the way information flows in that traditional media no longer controls what information is being communicated en masse. This is the revolution of the internet which web 2.0 contributes to a great deal (as witnessed by the Digg's controversial attempt to suppress HD DVD encyrption key stories). We, the Slashdot community, all know this and have known this for a long while. However, Robert Niles who has now seen the power of the web first hand writes that because "information can be attained and disseminated, it should be disseminated"? First of all, welcome to last decade Mr. Niles, web 2.0 has been with us for a long time. Second of all, just because information can be disseminated doesn't mean it should. Journalists still have ethics to contend with. You may argue that the news service had no reason to protect the deranged mother who made up a fake alias to attack a poor child, but that's far and away a much different argument from saying that because information can be attained and disseminated, it should be disseminated. Journalistic ethics are important, and web 2.0 or no web 2.0, they are here to stay.
but were you just trying to rap? I'm just wondering, cos it was all free-flow style without any "periods."
Never monkey with another monkey's monkey.
I completely agree with you that people shouldn't dig up this information. They should respect others' right to privacy. If the woman did something wrong, it's up to the police to deal with it, not a mob (not even a virtual one). The problem is that these bloggers are usually people who don't agree with or understand the position that even those who commit moral "faux-pas" (for a lack of a better term - since I honestly don't know if the woman's actions constituted a crime) have these rights to privacy. They either a) don't understand that revealing this information will expose the subject(s) in question to huge risks; or b) WANT the subject(s) in question to be exposed to huge risks.
So while I agree with your position, I don't think it's a realistic one. If there's someone stupid enough to pretend to be a teenage boy in order to grief an emotionally unstable teenage girl, there's someone stupid enough to uncover that person's identity.
Tie a rock to them and toss them in the water. If they float, they're a witch. If they sink, they're not a witch. Repeat as necessary.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
"enflame the audience, by frustrating it and provoking it to do the work of discovering her identity. That frustration may have helped amplify the negative feelings toward this woman..." So the people who found the woman's name released her information because 1) They think she is a bitch or 2) They are upset with the reporter for not releasing the woman's name to begin with. My money is on #1. To the extent #2 is a factor, it would be washed out by the vastly greater number of people who weren't angry enough to actually track down the woman or follow up on the story at al
I find very little credulity in the "You can't hide the truth from us" self-righteousness espoused by many of the bloggers involved in this. They merely saw what they could gain from the situation, not what was ethically or morally right.
Cringeworthy. But sadly, amongst many niceties, what I've come to expect from the "blogosphere" (cringeworthy name, in itself). Self-righteous vitriol and hyperbole seem far too common. "We're the new journalists, your ways are outdated." Bleh. In the rush to try to be the next big thing, seems "stopping and thinking" is an impediment to "first to publish/be pinged/trackbacked/make the Top 100 on Technorati/get on as many blogrolls as possible".
Don't worry, in 10 years time when the blogging generation is attempting to climb the ladder, we will have untold piles of dirt on them from their emo highschool years.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
they are just a collection of prepubicsent minded morons.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
The public's right to know what government is up to and free speech.
...welcome our omniscient overlords.
Grammar Nazi
and there is fuzziness about guilt here, the perpetrator is known and fixed
the local da was not going to press charges
with all the heat, they say now they are going to review the case
given that, the victim's parents decided to go public, against the advice of their lawyers, for exactly this effect: wide public knowledge and shaming of the perpetrator, and to warn people about what kind of mainpulations can go on
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Here's a more novel idea... Don't even print the things that don't need to be printed. Anytime Myspace in particular or the Internet in general can be connected to a crime || suicide || nuclear war the press goes nuts with the idea. There is no story here other than a girl committed suicide, like hundreds of other troubled teens. Yes, it's a horrible phenomenon, but it's no story in itself. The journalist could have written about the suicide phenomenon (which goes back as far as history does) but that's not interesting. Myspace-assisted suicide apparently is.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
More information from a less hysterical view (compared to the bloggers' accounts) is available at http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/11/17/internet.suicide.ap/index.html. There's also a video clip including an interview with Megan's parents.
This is a pretty messed up situation. The woman mentioned in the article summary is the mother of an ex-friend of Megan (the girl that committed suicide), and posed as a boy ("Josh") on MySpace trying to keep tabs on what Megan was saying about her daughter (Megan's ex-friend).
Whether the woman created the "Josh" account is not up for debate-- it's from the police report*. Likewise, whether she pretended to be interested in the 14-year-old girl is not debatable. What is debatable is whether she was the person logged in to the "Josh" account when the taunting messages were sent, especially given three people from her family posed as "Josh", and were complicit in the deceit. Complicating matters, Megan's mother said the Wrong Thing At The Wrong Time to Megan, by the mother's account, minutes before the suicide. (It's abundantly clear she will never forgive herself for this.)
As I said, it's pretty messed up. Were the mainstream media right in concealing the identity of the woman? I'm not so sure. It seems to me that too many times identities have been concealed, preventing true community backlash against perpetrators. It's clear the woman was at least partially culpable-- she didn't accidentally make the Josh character fall in love with Megan. On the other hand, the local community is already shunning the woman and her family, so is Internet Outrage really accomplishing any more?
* Unintentionally leaked by CNN, and transcribed by a blogger using frame capture.
The sick part is when the Jezebels celebrate the whatever harm befalls the accused, "got what was coming to her," etc.
the local da was not going to press charges
with all the heat, they say now they are going to review the case
and there is no fuzziness about guilt here, the perpetrator is known and fixed
given that, the victim's parents decided to go public, against the advice of their lawyers, for exactly this effect: wide public knowledge and shaming of the perpetrator, and to warn people about what kind of mainpulations can go on
what's cringewothy about any of that? you talk about ethics and morals, when what was ethically and morally wrong was the perp getting away with this heinous crime, and no punishment in sight... until the blogosphere went nuts. so it was a good thing that the internet went nuts over the story, not cringeworthy
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The only people who read the blogs are the bloggers. Not even their moms read them, although they always say they do.
In the past reporters have been part of the 'information elite'. They have taken the job of finding out all the details they can, and then taken on the responsibility of deciding how much of that the masses get to hear. They are now just seeing that position, that control, being removed. Now they are seeing that people don't like to have half the story.
If they don't think it's right to tell all of the story, don't tell any of it. If it's OK for Joe Reporter to dig in and know all the details, why not everyone else?. They don't have to publish, they don't have to draw attention to it, but then you don't win awards by doing that, you don't get to be the person with the inside line, do you?.
Welcome to the internet, the great leveller.
That is a serious depressing story. Playing with someone like that is awful. I feel the fact the Drews were not going to be punished in any way to be sort of unjust but I'm sort of uncertain of this mob mentality is really how to go about it. Sure public shamming and the economic and social ruin of their lives seems about right but what happens when someone takes it a step further? It's so mixed up.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Well I guess I'm a terrible person for doing this then:
A J Maxwell
3013 Avenue G
Birmingham, AL 35218-2410
(205) 785-2680
All of the above is legit info.
What a brilliant idea -- let's give the police the power to arrest people, throw them into jail pending trial, and not tell anybody.
The justice system needs transparency in a free and democratic society. What you're proposing has been done by all of the most oppressive regeimes in history as a way of making people "disappear". And while publishing an innocent persons arrest in a public manner may damage their public image, it's also a way to ensure that said person gets the best possible opportunity to defend themselves within the community. People who are secretly jailed never do.
Yaz.
when i saw this video on cnn i thought the disclaimer was a little shallow. if they were really worried about protecting the womans identity they wouldnt have shown the reporter knocking at the door. as it wasnt the rest of the world who they should have worried about knowing her identity but rather the community. anyone in that community could have easily drove down the street of the victim and singled out the house they saw on cnn.
http://digg.com/world_news/Adults_drive_14_year_old_to_suicide_by_harassing_her_on_MySpace?t=10557557#c10557557
I'll just repost my comment here, just in case it's not obvious that those posts were done by me: Right...
Ask me about repetitive DNA
the family of the teenager that killed herself kept it quiet for a long time, and, against the advice of their lawyer, decided to go public with it. and they went public with it only when the local decided not to press charges
the press and the blogs went apeshit. and rightfully so: this vile perp was not going to be charged with anything
now, because of all of this heat, the da is reviewing their decision not to press charges
so if people don't want street justice, mob justice, and all of this extrajudicial outrage, then courts of law must register justice
the error was not pressing charges on the woman who perpetrated this vile crime. if charges were pressed against her, none of this online hoopla would have ever happened
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The woman, the offending mother, was fraudulently using a social networking site. Through the act of pretending to be someone else, she suffered a mighty and terrible retribution. For someone participating in this chicanery, what better revenge then to have themselves outed? Now the real trial commences; through her on the mercy of firey internet, and if she burns shes a witch.
I have to think that it depends on what the woman actually did. If she was being a complete prick, who cares? Fuck her. Does anyone know the details?
The Farewell Tour II
Dude, I don't get it with these bloggers dude. All they ever do is blog. Who would possibly want to do that? That's a bunch of hogwash.
What disturbs me the most isn't that there are random assholes on MySpace (or the Internet, for that matter) taunting people (I don't like it, but assume this -- 30 milliseconds on any FPS multiplayer server desensitizes you to that). Nor that a girl committed suicide (which is sad). Nor is it that some wacko blogger decided to post public information in an act of vigilante blog-justice (which is indeed very strange and unsettling). It's the implications of the comments on the jezebel blog. The comments on the other linked sites in the article are similar. It is clear these people (do they represent a typical American cross section?), have this attitude like: "if its on the internet it must be true exactly how it is printed. I want blood NOW!" No critical thinking. No common sense. No reality testing. Just pure reactionary tooth-and-claw emotion. It is the worst sort of groupthink one can imagine (wait, sounds a little like another popular internet forum I know about...oh, nevermind). A couple examples. One blogger writes "I'm not a vengeful person when it comes to my own life, so it always surprises me that my first instinct when I hear of these things happening to others is to plot murder." Oh really? Good to know. How about "If there was a loving God, so many people would be sterile. The parents playing 'Josh' [the fake MySpace account] are a good example." It actually makes slashdot seem like a pretty reasonable, organized, dare I say, civil place. Its a mad, mad, mad, mad world.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
Amen. This whole thing has been one crazy witch hunt. The girl who committed suicide was suffering depression already, and seems to not have gotten proper treatment for it. The parents (negligent of their daughter's at-risk behavior) can't deal with their grief, and want to blame a bunch of other people.
If your kid is so depressed that she'll kill herself with no other provocation but a flamewar online, YOU have a problem and YOU need to get your kid clinical help, not try take it out on the whole Internet after the fact. This is no more justified than when they blame Ozzy Ozborne when somebody kills themselves after listening to one of his songs.
Let's face it, information is not harmful in itself. Of course information can be used as a tool to do harm to others. Just like guns don't kill people, information does not kill people. I would think that if the accused had a daughter a of legal age, then this story wouldn't be quite so controversial. But negative stories are always posted on the news about people, especially in the States.
Yes crowds can be dangerous. People can be dangerous, but keeping something that obviously has a large public interest a secret is wrong (and unrealistic). Sometimes you just got to let the chips fall where they may and find out what type of society we live in. I think this is a time when the school and social workers can really have an impact on the students of Megan's school now that this story is out in the open. It's now time for the Leaders in the community to shine.
I do have a lot of sympathy for your sentiments. I myself was stalked in the past. It never got very far because I nipped it in the bud (changed phone numbers, moved, warned my family not to reveal my address to ANYBODY). Yep, that's one of the reasons I don't use my real name (although I could be easily profiled here). I takes my chances between freedom (of expression) and paranoia. But people just need to deal with reality. Shit happens. If this family needs to move then they should move. And yes, at least the accused family now knows the full story too.
I'm just very sorry this incident even happened.
Now, if internet bloggers managed to prevent the Bush regime from manipulating the US into attacking Iran in the same way that they got the US into Iraq, that would be something to be proud of.
Hell, it would be great if they could just get the mainstream media to stop referring to Denis Kucinich as some sort of crazy extremist because he's advocating what most of the US citizenry wants...
Really? When a murder conviction can take years to prosecute, I don't see how you can avoid the publicity without gag orders that would encourage corruption by allowing the prosecutors to drop cases they don't feel like pursuing.
Unless the mainstream news networks are willing to commit to full discloser, don't report the story.
My my, you sure seem eager to convict and sentence this woman, and not just the woman but her entire family.
Odd that if the RIAA wants to publish the names of people downloading, naming and shaming, people are against it, but in this case naming and shaming is a good thing. Why not bring out the tar and feathers. Hell why even bother with police at all, I got a rope right here and that tree looks sturdy enough.
This woman is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Mob mentality is a serious issue, say this womans daughter now commits suicide, and come after YOU. Do you want all your personal info out there, to be judged by the mob?
The reason the police and the press don't always publish everything is bloody simple.
First off, it is to keep a bad situation from becoming even worse.
But even more important, it is to keep information from becoming common knowledge to aid the investigation. The less details of the case are known to the general public the more likely a suspect can be pinned down on having knowledge they couldn't have unless they were involved.
By publishing for instance what was said right before the suicide, the woman in question can no longer be indentified as the person who sent it if she shows knowledge of what had been said. Before she could only have known what was in the messages if she had seen them, when they were sent. Now, she can just claim she read it somewhere.
But the most important thing here is, innocent until proven guilty. It is frightening how soon this is forgotten on slashdot just because this is a story about bloggers. IF a blogger was similarly convicted by the mob slashdot would be in a uproar.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
HELP SAVE YOUR COUNTRY! REPORT SUSPECTED INFORMATION SPREADERS TODAY!
I'm sure we'll be much better off when spreading information earns a death sentence.
Also, you seem to have about as much understanding of the internet as the "series of tubes" guy. If spreading this information becomes illegal, people will just start posting it anonymously. Spreading information anonymously is easy on the internet. Making this activity illegal would accomplish nothing.
it's a shame you weren't forcibly sterilized before you got the chance to reproduce
Not for the details involved but for the slashdot reaction. a lot seem to be in support of the naming and shaming.
That is nice, would they be just as supportive when the RIAA deciced to publish their names for illegal filesharing and they get expelled from their schools, told to leave their jobs, asked to resign from their clubs?
There is a reason we put the law into the hands of the legal system and have deciced that lynchings are wrong. The simple problem is that of where does it end.
Say that this woman's daughter now commits suicide, is it then right for her family to publish the bloggers personal details? Publicly try them on the internet?
Innocent until proven guilty, presumption of innocence, trial by jury. My how quickly these ideals seem to be forgotten when blogging is involved. Note that when it is the other way around and some blogger gets exposed "slashdot" has shown an almost fanatical support for the sancitiy of privacy.
A few months ago slashdot had a story about internet driven vigilantism in South-Korea where this kind of naming and shaming is claimed to be far more common, the odd thing was that then the general attitude seemed to be that this was an extremely bad idea.
So how come that some slashdotters now support it? Is it the magic of the word blog? The idea that the MAN was outwitted, freedom by all means and damn the consequences?
Should the dutch teens who stole items from an online game be named and shamed? Should the blogger who published this info have every part of his private life put on the web for all to see?
Since this is a suicide where the whole community failed, why aren't they all being named and shamed. Why not print a list of all the people involved, everyone that could have talked to the girl, made friends with her, and publish them under the headline, "where were you!".
Some people seem to think that blogs are a magical something, they are not. They used to exist before, they were called pamphlets and people with enough motivation would write them and print and distribute them and say in them what they wanted in the name of "The truth".
They were back then the perfect tool to incite the mob. It is on paper, therefore it must be true, lets lynch them.
A few years ago in england a woman's house was attacked because the mob thought she was a pedofile. The evidence was clear as day, she had a sign on her door that said so "Pediatrician".
Consider this, if this woman is guilty of the suicide, then is any suicide that follows the publishing by the blogger the guilt of the blogger? What if the blogger is outed and kills himself? Where does it end?
The community taking the law in their own hand, it sounds tempting and sometimes seems to be the only solution but it never works. The law often fails us, but we should then change the law, not simply ignore it.
But think of this, do you really want there to be law that puts people to blaim if they said the wrong thing to a person who commits suicide? Better not mod me down, it might make me commit suicide.
Should society decide who needs to be punished? I would dearly love to name and shame every drunk driver out there, everyone who ever hurt someone in an "accident" that could easily have been avoided.
Before you support naming and shaming, ask yourselve wether someone else might not have you on their list.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
There's nothing wrong with shaming people for killing a kid, or contributing to the death of that kid.
Or have you and the other million assholes on here defending the perpetrator's privacy either,
- forgotten that a child's life was lost and several families destroyed because of this one woman's decisions, actions and words, -or-
- not read enough to see that the woman was identified and stated as much in a police report readily available to the press, -or-
- not read enough to realize that the family has now gone public because this happened 13 months ago and law enforcement has said no charges can/will be brought, meaning no one's going to hold these folks accountable if their community doesn't.
I'm guessing probably all three.Just for the record:
news reports: http://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?s=UBbGpkKGpbc
police report: http://bluemerle.blogspot.com/2007/11/lori-drew-cnn-capture-police-report.html
Is ANYBODY going to stop and ask the obvious question? Megan was talking about suicide before. Megan was diagnosed with depression and was taking medication for it. Megan should have had closer supervision. Megan was even allowed to join MySpace when she was too young (disregarding MySpace's TOS).
You know who killed Megan? Megan's FECKLESS, CALLOUS, SELF-CENTERED PARENTS, who now want to fan the flames of mob frenzy to carry out this vendetta against everybody on MySpace who had contact with their kid. You have a suicidal kid who has depression and you let her get wrapped up in online drama, AND who described herself in her own profile as "neglected". WHAT THE FUCK WAS SHE DOING ALONE WITH ENOUGH TIME TO HANG HERSELF?
Yeah, blame the Internet. Or blame violent video games, Goth music, or classic novels. Anybody but yourself. I would be inclined to say the family who taunted Megan online was guilty of mischief at the most, but now that the facts are in the open I'm starting to think there's a lot more to this story than Megan's parents are telling.
Are we perhaps suffering a guilty conscience and looking for victims to transfer our guilt to? There is now no doubt of it.
That law enforcement didn't do anything is no excuse for vigilantism. If law enforcement doesn't do their job, you protest about law enforcement, not about someone you suspect of having done something wrong.
The US government puts people at risk all the time by publishing the names and addresses of people deemed to be "sex offenders" (I use this term lightly for the US, because of all the FUD and extremist politics).
Ahh... The old "someone else does it too" defense. I suppose this means you think it's ok to murder too, since some states have the death penalty.
Yes crowds can be dangerous. People can be dangerous, but keeping something that obviously has a large public interest a secret is wrong (and unrealistic). Sometimes you just got to let the chips fall where they may and find out what type of society we live in.
Lynch mobs rarely do research. There's plenty of examples where media has been directly responsible in causing attacks on people by publishing names and addresses or pictures which people could have easily found for themselves, but the kind of people who go out and do that kind of crap are not usually the same kind of people that put in the effort to find out their identities.
There IS a huge difference between making information available and making it easily accessible or pushing it in peoples faces.
Personally I don't want a society where people do the equivalent of shaking a red cloth in front of a bull regularly in the name of "public interest" - it's at best tasteless, and at worst dangerous. I strongly believe that anyone doing this should be equally responsible for any illegal act carried out as a result - hopefully that would be a deterrent.
Funny, isn't it? When the government does anything that might even potentially reduce people's privacy at all (even just putting cameras in public places), there's an outcry. But when bloggers deliberately and wantonly violate people's privacy by revealing their personal information online, suddenly it's like that's just fine.
Either we want privacy or we don't -- and if we want privacy, we must object to any violation of it, whether by the state or by bloggers.
I don't think the opinion of the OP was that no-one should be told of the identity of an arrested person, merely that the media should not divulge the identity of said person, unless they are found guilty. Don't forget that in the court of public opinion, an accusation is as good as a conviction.
There's a large difference between the name being possible to find by going to the right places, and having it plastered all over the place. What is the purpose? The only purpose I can see of posting their identity is that people hope that "someone" is going to do something with that information.
That's at best disgusting and makes people who does it scum in my eyes.
If law enforcement isn't doing their job, then you protest against law enforcement, you don't take enforcement into your own hands.
It's not the fact that Megan committed suicide. It's the fact that the accused was being (what is called in todays popular culture) a Child Predator. And she is (or at least was getting away with it). Pretending to be a minor and engaging in sexual conversation with a child is (as far as I know) against the law in the US. Playing a mind-fuck with a child in general I would suspect as being child abuse (psychological abuse). If this contributed to the suicide, then all the more weight to the accuser being punished (extrajudicially or not).
Blaming the victim seems pretty sick IMHO.
Whether this story was real or not?!
What, you think the two grieving parents that have been appearing on television this week to talk about their dead daughter who was driven to suicide by a grown woman with a fake myspace account are making the entire thing up?! Look, I'm as cynical as the next person, but that's completely ridiculous.
Also, I agree that it's dangerous territory to go around putting someone's information online, period. Especially if they aren't convicted of any crimes. However, can you necessarily blame people? The police state that it isn't a crime to drive someone to suicide through systematic mental manipulation and torture, but a large segment of society seems to feel otherwise. That this person should not be able to hide behind "well, I didn't physically wrap the belt around her neck" and they're frustrated and angry.
Additionally, if this grown woman who was posing as a child in order to flirt with a thirteen year old girl was a MAN -- "his" information would have been made PUBLIC. Immediately. By law enforcement and the media.
I find it most absurd that you suggest people should be convicted of "aiding and abetting" for putting information out there about someone who did much more than merely "aid and abet" in pushing a little girl to suicide.
When it comes right down to it, I think the viewpoint of most sane people is that YES this woman and her family should be held accountable for their sadistic actions and YES it's wrong to put their information out there publicly.
Read the story, and note who filed a police report. They put themselves on the public record a long time ago.
3 things about computers: they're alive, they're self-aware, and they hate your guts.
Um . . . wouldn't the person's lawyer know about it? And, if they were held without their due process, wouldn't said lawyer then go public with your situation and information to help you out?
Not having your private information open to the public is not the same as being disappeared by the stasi.
If law enforcement isn't doing their job, then you protest against law enforcement, you don't take enforcement into your own hands.
how do you protest against law enforcement? Yhe whole purpose of this recent publicity was precisely to push law enforcement into action by stoking public outrage.
the world is not a court of law. "Innocent until proven guilty" is a legal standard, not a moral one. There is no question about this woman's actions, or her identity. There are no significant facts in dispute, only legal and moral culpability. And yes, individuals and communities do have the right to judge moral culpability for themselves, with or without your permission.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
It's no defense. I'm just merely pointing out the hypocrisy in people. I am against murder and the death penalty. Yep, I'm against playing mind-fuck games with children as well. You can glean no sympathy from me. Lynch mobs rarely do research. There's plenty of examples where media has been directly responsible in causing attacks on people by publishing names and addresses or pictures which people could have easily found for themselves, but the kind of people who go out and do that kind of crap are not usually the same kind of people that put in the effort to find out their identities. Examples? I see none. "directly responsible"? Just as people here don't seem to think the accused is directly responsible for the victim's suicide, I am not surprised that people here would claim that the people who are MERELY making this information available ARE DIRECTLY RESPONSIBLE for the actions of COMPLETE STRANGERS. Once again, I must say I am against lynch mobs. I too am also against sicko parents who lie, and manipulate children. There is NO hypocrisy on my part. If Americans can't handle the truth then they should start changing their behavior. As for your lynch mob hypothesis, we just have to wait and see what happens. I really don't see a lynch mob scenario unfolding here. Public embarrassment, yes. Lynch mob, well that's a bit of a stretch. A psychopath in the scenario I can see. But psychopaths don't need news stories to stalk or kill somebody. It just gives them an excuse. One cannot do anything about psychopaths in the first place, except that hope that they eventually get put into jail. There IS a huge difference between making information available and making it easily accessible or pushing it in peoples faces. Yes this is true, but highly irrelevant to this discussion. If people don't want to read the news then they shouldn't. Personally I don't want a society where people do the equivalent of shaking a red cloth in front of a bull regularly in the name of "public interest" - it's at best tasteless, and at worst dangerous. That's a bit of a metaphor. If you mean that you are against appeals to emotion, then I am too. I strongly believe that anyone doing this should be equally responsible for any illegal act carried out as a result - hopefully that would be a deterrent. Again I smell hypocrisy. The same people who tend to argue against publishing bad behavior are the same ones who tend to excuse this bad behavior. In this discussion at least I here a lot of people blaming the victim, and yet stating it is wrong to even make public that this incident even occurred. That is highly unfair to both the victim and her family. However fair or not this may be, news is usually not pleasant. I don't remember people complaining when Jean Bonet Ramsey's parents were publicly accused of murder. But I do expect hypocrisy from people.
He was not proposing that the police "not tell anybody" -- only that the decision to release the information about an arrest be up to the accused at least as long as the accused had not been found guilty.
The NCIC, as just one example, is full of partial records that indicate arrest and even indictment but not acquittal.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Does the term "vigilante justice" say something to you?
There's a reason we have a justice system. It's in place to avoid something like this. Just because you think someone did something, no matter how sure you are, doesn't make that person a criminal. More over, how should I verify whether what you claim is true?
If a judge does not imprison someone, there is a reason for that. Judges don't go "Oh well, I don't feel like it today, let's let 'im go free". Yes, there are cases where the evidence is not strong enough to warrant a conviction. But that usually means that, yes, the evidence didn't suffice. Just because YOU say I killed your kid doesn't mean it is so.
What she did was morally wrong. But it simply is no crime. And because they think it should be a crime they start to publish her on the internet.
Am I the only one who thinks that they're in the wrong here?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You're confusing two entirely separate things - what you're talking about is when no one is allowed to tell anyone. Just because you have the right to anonymity, doesn't mean you're prevented from telling people if you want to.
Be Ready for the Children of the Usenet Ghost !
..I bet names would've been published and someone would've come up with a prosection. They just didn't try hard enough.
Women can now literaly shoot someone in the back and walk free - see Mary Winkler.
I'm glad I don't live in the US.
And this makes them different from 90% of the journalists exactly how?
This is the most compelling story In my view that marks the the schism between 2 generations. I will call it the web generation vs. the Gen-Xers. Being a generation X I wasn't even aware of the term "sock puppet". We just live in a different context. As far as the Drew Family. In a few hours the will have their own Wikipedia home to move in.
http://hitsusa.com/blog/317/megan-meier-suicide/
- these are not the droids you are looking for -
We do not seem to have much of a problem with false arrests; the only problems I know of are the usual ones of the prosecution sometimes going "gung ho" (wanting to convict SOMEBODY no matter what, to save face) and occasional abuse of the "Police can put somebody in detention for 24 hour before pressing charges". Overall, it seems to work fine, and the hiding of identity from media publication seems to only be positive.
Eivind.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
Oh? Trying to psychologically manipulate and hurt a 13 year old girl is not harmful? I'm pretty sure that if it was a 40 year old man pretty to be a young teen boy instead of a woman then their would be charges laid.
I agree, and in particular, I'm curious about sources referring to flirtation. If this is true, then I wonder why this isn't illegal under child abuse laws? As you say, if it was a 40 year old man, he'd be locked up as a pedophile. (I wonder if impersonating a teenager to talk to another child is also illegal, at least in some places?)
The key problem here is that it was an adult and a child. What worries me is people calling for knee-jerk reactions to bring in new laws that would also cover behaviour between two adults (there, such behaviour might be wrong, but I'm not sure it should be illegal, unless it's covered by existing harrassment laws).
It's not an "either/or" situation. We aren't choosing between complete transparency vs. no transparency whatsoever.
The goal is a fair and structured hearing, and punishment or acquittal based on the laws, decided by a jury & judge as impartial as possible.
With no transparency, the police can ignore the laws, and you might never see a jury at all.
With complete transparency, any "interesting" crime will be first judged by the public, based on third and fourth-hand information with no legal repercussions for errors (it's not *perjury* when the local rag prints gossip and rumors that are dead wrong), and the jury will be tainted by exposure to this mess, and the accused will be punished by the public even if acquitted by the legal system.
Think the public has no real power to exact punishment? You don't even need vigilante gunmen, though that can happen. No laws need be broken, though they might be. But "the public" includes your boss (soon-to-be former boss?), your neighbors (and their kids), the checkout person at the grocery store, your mailman, the guys at the bar, the technician from the phone company, the plumber, the teenagers at the mall, the pizza delivery guy, everyone. If your face is all over the web, if your home address and home phone are all over the web... well, first of all, they'll be all over the web for the rest of your life, because this stuff doesn't go away. Secondly, most people won't even say anything (they'll just stare after you as you leave), but you come into contact with hundreds of people... some of them will probably do something. Some people will actively seek you out to punish you, because vigilante justice is awfully tempting... I'll bet that's already happening with this family.
With the "power of the internet", now they don't just need to worry about getting snubbed by the people on their street. They have to worry what percentage of the, say, 2 million people who've seen their address and phone number will actively contact them. 0.01 percent? Mom, there's 200 people at the door. They want to talk to you and dad. Are my numbers too low?
So yeah, we need a balance.
This story is horrible and sad, and I want everyone to read it and realize that the online world is real, and in some ways it's more dangerous than the offline world. You can do things you'd never be cruel enough to do to someone's face, and cruelty has real consequences.
But I don't want to know where this family lives.
WOW! ... Do you even know the background of this story?
That while Megan was driven to suicide by this woman and her accomplice (and it was malicious), YOU ADVOCATE laws against people who identify the woman.
What this woman and her accomplice did is, by your projection, lawful. To report who this woman and her accomplice is, unlawful.
AND THEN to sum it all up in classic "Rush Limbaugh" speak, you post:
"Here's the kicker, folks: when you put up the personal information of one person in the house, you put everyone ELSE there, at risk. Even their neighbors."
Personally, you're in no position to lecture anybody.
Most people would conclude that this woman and her accomplice, themselves adults and parents, who abused a neighbors child to the point of suicide over some heinous adolescent vendetta, should have fully considered the ramifications of their actions and the resulting risk to themselves and those around them. They have brought this upon themselves and they bear the responsibility.
To not identify these people leaves the rest of the community at risk, yet this is what you advocate. That in some form of twisted
logic, you jump to blame the community should anything happen to these abusers for their outing.
Perhaps these people need to be locked up for their own protection then. We do that for child molesters. Is this not all of that plus a little more? And should society not put signs on their doors for life should they be convicted?
Like Rush Limbaugh you spew little but intellectual filth with vile intent. A such, your contemptuous post is beneath dignity. Please feel free to crawl back under your slimy rock and stay there.
The problem then becomes police coercion. "Do you want us to contact your attorney?" (while holding a baton and rubber hose). Arrest records should be public, but be automatically sealed if the accused is acquitted or after a certain number of years for misdemenours.
-b.
It is a very sad case,
... ect.
Take a look at this
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/926746/myspace_suicide_the_story_of_megan_meier/
It doesn't identify the person who created this "josh" and manipulated this young girl. I also don't think you can call her fat by any stretch of the imagination.
If you go by the Law probably there is no actual crime committed, but it is very very wrong. If it had been down to the childs peers perhaps its understandable children do immature hurtful things, most people here of all places know this, some will admit to themselves to being the bully to going along with the crowd and participating.
Being both victims and perpetrators, we see both sides, most of us by now should have the maturity to at least feel some remorse for what we did as children as well as regret for what we endured as children too.
But thats just it , these are things which pretty much ended with childhood, although sadly it still occurs in adult hood. At least we are of an age where we can remove ourselves from the bullys or do something positive.
It was an adult who crafted this assault on a young girl, planned it and carried out the attack, it wasn't spur of the moment it was carried out over six weeks in the cruelest way building up megans trust and love in josh and then destroying her emotionally. It's worse than the bully's taunts at school, the beatings, gossiping and bile. At least you know where you stand with your enemy's.
For most of us it doesn't matter who carried out this assault, although I think most of us will be sickened by it. For the people in that community it is important the Law isn't going to punish this woman but would you associate with her? support her business? She shows no regret, will not answer or attempt to do any kind of restitution even after the childs death she pretends to be a friend of the family, she has the family looking after a christmas present for her own family, which gets destroyed when they find out the truth, and her reaction is to call the police and have them arrested for criminal damage!
Is it any wonder that people are outraged at this womans gall. That the law appears powerless to act. It's disgusting. Unfortunately she isn't alone we all know people like this and we compromise our own beliefs associating with them. Worse still is that we know we bully too, to a greater or lesser extent, we don't object when we see others doing this.
We can't make a difference in this case but we can in our own lives, perhaps we might go a little easier on the shop assistant at best buy who reads the side of the box to us
How do you feel about your own behavior, do you think you might want to change some aspects?
It'd be wrong if this woman was assaulted or her property vandalized, however until she takes some responsibility for her actions acknowledges her part in this childs death at least some regret! I see no problem with her peers ostracizing her.
I personaly find that the line between "promoting free press", a healty curiousity and outright voyeurism is blurred among the current generations. I am 32 right now. In the beginning of the web i had pointless naive dreams of telling about me. Luckily I did not do it. I used to read Harry Potter series (but stopped at some point) and i interpreted "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" in a slightly different sense as it may have been origianlly meant. The diary appearing there seemed to me very much like an allefoy to the "online friends" or "virtual friends" in social networks on the web. The warning in the book about talking to things of which you can not see the head seemed very timely to me back then (in 1999 social networks where maybe small, but ICQ clearly existed). Sadly now it is not only considered to be normal to tell personal thing about you, but, to some extend, expected in a certain generation, which means that today's 20year old got a quite different or no message of warning from this book, and we, respectively their parents failed miserably at pointing it out to them. I am, for sure nobody who is seeing the net "mainly as a danger" or "social networks" to be harmful to children. Teach them how to use it - not in the technological sense, but for their life - and everybody will be fine. Funnily this would involve that you sit doen with your 5 year old child and find online friends together with it. You can prevent bad things from happening by guiding your child, and when it is old and experienced enough it can go alone (like riding a bicycle in the traffic).
So what is so special about this case? The special thing is that an adult abused the net to harm a child. So yes, it was important to report it in the media to point out that not only bad pedophiles (adresses regularly publishe, probably soon having to be tatooed and wearing neon-brite clothing all the day or something like that), but just normal parent who, themselves not thinking about what it means, can abuse the net. And now we come to an interesting question - should we behave like "mux" in the german movie "muxmaeuschenstill" and try to uncover not only the fact about this "immoral behaviour", but also expose the ones involved in a kind af medieval punishment (and it is nothing else) to the public? I remember the witch-hunt on slashdot on an idiotic teenager who stole a mobile phone. Or should we not leave persecuting "crimes" to the police? Is it in the right scale of response to randomly "hunt down" people and expose them?
My feeling is that bloggers, while pretending to be journalists and IMHO without doubt doing good and important work, sometimes lack the professional ethics of the journalists (some of the yellow press also does...). One of the rules is: Unless the person has already an exposed position (e.g. monarch, politician, company leader, pope, etc), do not publish their identity. You do this to prevent them from beeing hunted sown in the whole country and beeing findable in the archives. No doubt, the local teenagers in the social community probably, to some extend figured the thing out already. Still, without the identity revealed to a broader public, you can just move where nobody knows you. Having to move to flee something like this is - depending on what you did and how strongly you are connected to your hometown - already a quite severe punishment. But now, thanks to the bloggers, not only the local community knwos, but everybody, including a possible future employer will find this using google. So he will no need to be interested in social networks, he does not need to be interested in suicides to teens, he just does a standard procedure and he will finde something for which no sentence in front of a court was spoken. The same applies to the teenage daugther. I imagine that when i meet somebody on the net and i would like to find out who he is, if this thing pops up, i might prefer to stay away from him. If this does still go under "Justice for Megan Maier" as one blog openly admits it remains to be seem. T
A number of Wikipedia users were "outed" by the website Perverted Justice (PEEJ). Not one of the users was what they said it was, and it named a few users (including myself) as supporters of child molesters. Eventually, PEEJ retracted the statements, but only very reluctantly.
The problems here are that:
a. What happens when the bloggers get it wrong? Let's say they accidentally type in the neighbour's address. Some poor bastard who had nothing do with the issue gets targeted.
b. The bloggers are by and large anonymous also. It's sheer hypocrisy for them to hide behind a blog pseudonym and publish someone else's details.
c. There is a reason we don't have martial law. Vigilantism is never a good move, mistakes are made, it bypasses due process and the right to a fair trial, innocent people are hurt. That's why Western democracies have the legal system they do: sure, it ain't perfect, but I'd rather us have a legal system that let uninformed bloggers pass judgement and mete out punishment.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Oops. That last "that" should be a "than". One little letter... totally changes what I meant. Doh!
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Hell, I first found out about it last week on the front page of Encyclopedia Dramatica. But that what was Last Thursday. Then I saw it mentioned on Drudge yesterday. Now she's just another An Hero, and I don't want to waste my time figuring out which ED page it was.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
My thinking is less focused on the idiot "adult" who did this scam as it is on her parents.
Megan did not survive long enough to reproduce. Fault? Blame Darwin or Megan's parents. Take your pick. Or, perhaps parents in general nowadays.
Let me explain. Megan had problems and felt bad about herself? Why? (actual question, not a setup) She was beautiful. Where were her parents? How in the fcuk could a beautiful girl like that grow up not believing, *knowing* she has value.
I tell you waht (sic), when I felt bad about myself going through puberty, and kids do, I was *corrected* by my parents. Corrected as in almost short of discipline in a way. I was corrected for not thinking. That was followed by a very understanding and thoughtful teaching by my parents. They did what they were supposed too do and taught me self respect, correct body image (with what I had to work with) with proportional value in what a pimple actually means in the grand scheme of things. What an adult should be thinking.
It is unfathomable to me that what someone said could bring a person to suicide. And, I blame Megan's parents. Megan, at 13, was on psychotic drugs? WTF!? Sure, the "adult" who perpetrated this scam needs psychiatric help but the suicide I put on her parents.
My son was only on loan to me. And I took my parenting job very seriously. It was the most important achievement I was tasked with as a human being. On a scale of 10 with parenting on top, even paying the mortgage falls in at about 2. Nothing comes before raising a child. At least for me. (Thank you Mom and Dad).
What I returned was a happy, well adjusted, contributing member of society. Someone who thankfully doesn't understand the need for plastic surgery. I guarantee there's nothing, not one thing you could say, even as a teenager, that would even bring him close to suicide. Knowing my son, I suspect you're more likely to get a polite and understanding "thank you" after rejecting him than any other response. He understands that rejection, in the long run, is a blessing. Why didn't Megan understand this? Their little snowflake is gone. And I blame them; they can blame Darwin and you can think whatever you want too. As far as I'm concerned, they fcuked up IM,NOH,O.
-[d]-
it just goes to show that bloggers aren't real journalists as they like to think.
That's a rather broad brush to be painting with, eh?
they are just a collection of prepubescent [spelling corrected] minded morons.
One might say the same about Slashdot posters, based on the moronic comments on a few...and where does that leave you?
If some controversial issue comes up, it is usually better to get ALL the information out and let people deal with it. If we live in a society where we can't trust ourselves to process information intelligently and without being irrational, then we need to try our hardest to change that society. Shooting the messenger does not solve the underlying problem.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Bloggers don't have some magical "hollywood hacker app" they use to dig up informatrion on people real time. They do what anyone with half a brain woudl do, some intelligent Google searching.
All these bloggers did was aggregate a bunch of personal info on the woman that was already public ally available. If you outlaw what they did, then you'd have to outlaw Google as well.
Once again the axiom comes home to roost - if you don't want personal data about you on the web, don't put it there - ever. Don't let companies who you do business with put it thee either. If you do it will be there FOREVER, you can't remove it.
I agree, to an extent. However, bloggers aren't exactly known for thoroughly checking out sources or even having a full grasp of the issue. The ability to sue for defamation or libel doesn't help the person who is killed from wrongful vigilantism due to being "outed" incorrectly. Nor does it help someone who is accused of something terrible - often mud sticks and will negatively affect that individuals life. That's why papers are cautious about printing certain details. There are often terrible consequences for getting things wrong.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Ummm... you want arrest records sealed?
"Officer, my husband never came home from work yesterday - I want to lodge a missing person's report"
"Sorry ma'am, he's not missing."
"Then where is he?"
"Sorry ma'am, I'm not allowed to say. That information has been restricted for privacy reasons. Oh, and it looks like he never got around to consenting that you could access his private information in regards to dealing with local law enforcement."
Yeah, like that would bloody work.
Arrests are public for the good of society - so that the government can't just lock people up and not admit to it. The individual's private need is outweighed by the need to see that the government isn't abusing its authority.
Oh, wait... you're American, right?
"Software is too expensive to build cheaply"
You're right, of course - arrest records should be sealed until a verdict is reached, and then destroyed upon acquittal. I wonder what religious rightist or corporate statist argument that runs up against?
Oh please, look at how many left wingers have no problem tarring and feathering their political enemies in unison. Have you been to Kos lately?
This is my sig.
Get your priorities straightened out, there should be law against people who manipulate vulnerable individuals to the point of suicide. If these people were in my community, I'd want to know about it. If they suffer consequences as a result of their actions, they have only themselves to blame.
prepare the survey weasels.
If you are an journalist You
Is it working? In the US, I mean?
bloggers aren't exactly known for thoroughly checking out sources or even having a full grasp of the issue
Dan Rather was a blogger?
My view is that people simplify things too much (on either side of ANY argument). Reality is far more complex than most people IMHO seem to realize. Considering the fact that professional journalists often have less than a day to print a story, I wouldn't put too much credence in them either. I find professionals are often not always capital P Professional, but that often has a lot to do with pressures placed on them by management.
BTW I just visited your talk page on Wikipedia. Sorry to see you go. I've never personally followed you (or anyone) on Wikipedia. I just read the articles as my curiosity becomes aroused
regards
Dan Rather no longer works for CBS. Bad example.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
that woman did no one any harm
She masqueraded as a child, entered an online "relationship" with a real child, and drove that child to suicide. Don't be a fucking moron.
Shame is a far better regulator of behavior than the risk of being punished by the "authorities". Regardless of the risk to her (boo hoo), the world needs to know who did it and how it has ruined her, lest others think of doing something similar.
>>>>> I don't know the story but it seems me something already seen several times >>>>> many journals and journalists are very BRAVE with the WEAKS (like common peopels) and SEVANT with the POWER (especially with those that have money) >>>>> just a little (but BIG) example about Google and "its" Lunar X Prize >>>>> I've sent or posted this link >>>>> http://www.ghostnasa.com/posts/008moonprize.html >>>>> to dozens newspapers, forums and blogs but NO ONE of them have made an article or sent a mail to me, while, ALL them STILL call it the "Google" Lunar X Prize >>>>> and the same thing happens these days with this article >>>>> http://www.ghostnasa.com/posts/012arescantfly.html >>>>>
http://www.ghostnasa.com/ http://www.gaetanomarano.it/articles/articles.htm
It is working in the US, but there are places outside the US where the US government does not feel so constrained.
Group thought is rarely correct. Mob rule has been proven over and over to be incorrect because the outcome never matches the intention. It's one of the reasons you don't see direct democracy ever fully implemented and one of the flaws with free-market capitalism... individual need rarely translates to what's good for everyone.
But this is the world we live in, and our actions (or inactions) have real consequences on people. No one lives in a vacuum and you are responsible and accountable to the rest of us for how, what you do or do not do, impacts people. That is true for governments and corporations, as well as individuals... hence the need for transparency.
This woman did something horrific and she probably needs to be punished for it. But the cry for justice needs to be directed at the appropriate authorities to avoid the exact collateral damage that the article spoke of... the daughter being impacted by the mother's actions and that impact being exacerbated by the crowdsourcing effect. That's why we have these institutions and they are the ones responsible to afford that level of transparency we demand. Without them we degenerate into mob-rule and anarchy and while on the surface, there are some aspects of that approach that look appealing, nothing is left to serve the common good, and again, the original design and intent driving the need to change is not met and no one wins.
So no... crowdsourcing is not right...
And yes, it is a crime for an adult to be chatting up an underage girl, especially since she destroyed the Myspace account(obstruction,anyone?) to cover her tracks. I just hope there are logs on the dead girls pc (don't use Myspace so I have no idea if it leaves a trail or not) and if there was even a hint of sexual talk throw her ass under the jail and let her rot.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
While I appreciate you going out of your way to present your point well, you are flat-out wrong in this instance.
:(
There is a reason that minors are minors, and it is because they do not have the knowledge, life experience, perspective, what have you, to be placed in full responsibility for their lives. Who does carry that responsibility? Simple: their parents.
It doesn't matter what she felt or didn't feel, what she revealed to them or didn't reveal, it is still their ultimate responsibility to involve themselves in their daughter's life to whatever degree is required in order to ensure that she grows up to be a healthy, functional individual. I feel sorry for their loss, believe me, and the "Josh's" involved really should be getting their own heads checked, voluntarily or otherwise, but in this case one very unfortunate little girl's parents are solely to blame for this incident.
As an aside regarding whether or not to blame Darwin, I'd say yes. The same genes that were inherited and drive a girl to be so messed up as to kill herself over crappy treatment came from the exact same set of genes that produced the ineffective parenting that could have saved the girl's life. The sad part, however, is that if you really want to see humanity improve on an evolutionary basis, this kind of poor parenting that results in suicide is exactly what needs to happen in order to avoid passing on such genes.
This kind of case is exactly what causes laws, or interpretations of laws, to be changed. When the public at large is so outraged by a behavior that is so obviously immoral and leads to the death of a child, laws will be changed, or opinions will be changed in regards as to whether it can be charged now or not. Laws are in direct response to something taking place that the public doesn't want to take place. According to you if it's not already a law then we should just shut up and accept it. That's fatalistic and completely detached from the reality of a participatory society.
Someone else said it best in this thread and I'll leave the final word with him:
In Canada there is. * Characters Added To Satisfy Slashdot's Asinine Lameness Filter *
These people seem pretty guilty of culpapble homicide through defamatory libel. (Sect 222.5(c)) * Characters Added To Satisfy Slashdot's Asinine Lameness Filter *
In Canada these alleged criminals would be charged with a very serious crime with very real punishment. * Characters Added To Satisfy Slashdot's Asinine Lameness Filter *
Under Canadian law the alleged could be charged with homicide: * Characters Added To Satisfy Slashdot's Asinine Lameness Filter *
The essence of the publics' right to know is about public issues and the portion of private ones which would enable them to be better informed on the way that public policy should be formed or how to avoid somebody else's tragic mistake. Neither of those are served by finding the name of those that weren't already named in the article.
Its soft news journalism that reports on things which wouldn't be interesting had it been done by normal every day people.
In this case, I think that the bloggers in this case ought to feel really badly about having engaged in this sort of shenanigans. At this point, the woman had been reported to the sheriff's office, and there is a possible suit in the future. What they've done is managed to harm everybody involved in this that isn't already dead. Even then, I get the feeling that they would have pissed on her grave if they thought that could make a better story.
Wow, don't those lameness filters make for nice readable posts?
blame the mafia, "30 arrests, zero convictions", sound familiar? like it or not the arrest record can be used as a tool in itself (usually only in pursuing another arrest), but it is hardly the place of the public to pursue someone for their arrest record. unfortunately arrest records are simply misunderstood, often with misdemeanors they are a sign of conviction, because people don't really fight them. funnily though the more intense the case is the more likely it is the public will take interest AND the more likely it is the police arrest the wrong person. in many cases a crime hasn't ever even occurred. Accusations of child abuse often occur while parents are getting divorced.
These people seem pretty guilty of culpable homicide through defamatory libel. (Sect 222.5(c))
In Canada these alleged criminals would be charged with very serious crimes with very real punishment.
Under Canadian law the alleged criminals could be charged with homicide:
(Slashdot will not accept a quote from the criminal code nicely so here is the link to a very long page that contains the quote I want)
http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/C-46/
(defamatory libel, hate speech and homicide are all covered there)
If they were Canadians I would personally ensure that they were charged with homicide.
(IP address changed for this post to defeat Slashdot's irrationally long post flood interval.)
The problem is that these bloggers are usually people who don't agree with or understand the position that even those who commit moral "faux-pas" (for a lack of a better term - since I honestly don't know if the woman's actions constituted a crime) have these rights to privacy. They either a) don't understand that revealing this information will expose the subject(s) in question to huge risks; or b) WANT the subject(s) in question to be exposed to huge risks.
It was just a "moral faux-pas"? Then what's the harm of their address being available? They won't be at any risk whatsoever if someone should happen to find their name and address on the internet.
After all, a trivial little moral faux-pas would not upset anyone to the point where they'd actually drive over to that address with a stun gun, roll of duct tape, a BernzOmatic, a power drill, a pair of dykes, a bottle of H2SO4, and a couple gallons of gasoline with the intent to exact an orgy of inhuman suffering and revenge before burning the place to the ground would it?
So I can't fathom your objection to their address being made available.
Unless you actually believe that they did something a little bit more serious than a "moral faux-pas."
These people seem pretty guilty of culpable homicide through defamatory libel. (Sect 222.5(c))
In Canada these alleged criminals would be charged with a very serious crime with very real punishment.
Under Canadian law the alleged criminals could be charged with homicide:
(Slashdot will not accept a quote from the criminal code nicely so here is the link to a very long page that contains the quote I want)
http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/C-46/
(defamatory libel, hate speech and homicide are all covered there)
If they were Canadians I would personally ensure that they were charged with homicide.
(IP address changed for this post to defeat Slashdot's irrationally long post flood interval.)
Agred, secret arrests are certainly not the answer. Responsable journalism would be a nice change of pace though. The guilty in the media until quietly forgotten about problem is a direct result of "journalism" that focuses on hype at the cost of substance. I note in most cases that when someone is suspected, their face is plastered all over the mews night after night with all sorts of "information" about them that amounts to gossip column quality. The exhonoration is generally a quick and quiet blip between weather and sports ONCE often without even a picture of them (the same picture that appeared prominantly with the caption SUSPECT under it for weeks on end).
Perhaps things would be different if they did followup about the terrible negative impact merely being a suspect had on the person, but to do that they would have to honestly report themselves as a significant contributor to that impact, so it won't happen.
Where's the report on the sincere apology (or even the perfunctory social apology) from the police? Oh, yeah, there isn't one! Not even on the level of a "pardon me" when you accidentally bump into someone. Perhaps we need a series of stories like: "Police raised by wolves, don't know how to say I'm sorry" or "Police Chief Flunks Kindergarden!" to put things into perspective for everyone.
/me wonders what it would take for this sort of thing to be considered reckless (or willful?) endangerment or similar, and get the bloggers in trouble.
* note this does not include vandalism, assault, etc.; it is simply social ostracism. People seem to be under the impression that just because the legal system hasn't punished you, that the rest of us in society have to pretend you didn't do anything and be your "bestest pal". It's simply not the case. The court of public opinion is harsh and not bound by strict rules of evidence and impartiality.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
As others have pointed out, this is a very bad idea. If officials do not have to publish arrest records then they can arrest anyone for any reason and hold them as long as they like. The reason all arrests are public is to protect citizens from government abuse. This is exactly why the secret star chambers being used to hold terrorists are such a bad idea - if the citizens let the government gt away with this for "terrorists" they will soon being trying to do it for dangerous criminals then regular criminals then you.
I this case I don't see the problem with outing an ADULT who has indirectly caused the death of a child. This person may not have committed a crime, but the public shaming should give others something to think about before they do something so stupid.
Anarchists never rule
...that doesn't mean we should.
It's an old saying, but no less truthful for it. Modern technology makes communication, data storage and research into effectively free commodities. These things can be used for many constructive purposes, but a natural side effect is a loss of privacy.
The thing is, society has adopted privacy as an accepted cultural value for good reasons. Society also typically frowns on vigilantism for good reasons. No-one is perfect, and if you tend towards a system where there is some dirt to dig up on everyone and if you choose to share it then you can bring down disproportionate consequences on anyone you don't like, then no-one is ever safe from the screwed up people.
In a way, this is no different to any other criminal behaviour. You can't systematically prevent it, any more than you can systematically prevent someone from driving their car at reckless speeds and causing an accident, or from betraying the confidence of an ex-partner they no longer get on with to her friends or new partner, or from beating up a smaller kid in school when the teachers aren't looking. But these things are all the actions of someone deeply unpleasant, and society frowns on them, tries to prevent them as much as possible, and punishes them when it can.
What is different is simply that this whole context is new. A lot of people — particularly, it must be said, a lot of young people — are enjoying a kind of freedom and collective power that previous generations have not, but they don't yet understand the responsibility that comes with that freedom. Because it's so new, it's an alien concept to the adults responsible for teaching them, and mistakes are made. (There is an obvious parallel here with big businesses getting away with things because privacy laws haven't yet caught up.)
In time, I hope this will pass, and society will come to frown on invasion of privacy and sharing information without due respect in the same way that we frown on violence or blackmail today. But I'm afraid we're going to take a few years learning some hard lessons, and there are likely to be an unfortunately large number of relatively innocent victims along the way. As with any form of growing up, the road to maturity is sometimes a painful one. At least when you get there, you usually find others have walked the same path and can forgive youthful indiscretions.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
And YOU have forgotten "freedom of speech"
If you do something which I judge to be asshole-ish behavior, I'm within my rights to say "Hey, vidarh is an asshole." I'm also well within my rights to stand up, in public, point my finger at you, in public, as say "That guy, vidarh, is an asshole." I can also say, in public, "The following are reasons why vidarh is an asshole..." Now, if the next thing I say is true, there is no problem. If I say "because he has sex with 8 year olds," then I'm in trouble, unless you actually do have sex with 8 year olds.
The parent was DEAD ON. If you want to engage in behavior so utterly repugnant that your life would be put in danger if people found out about it, don't whine when people find out about it. If you don't want people to know that you masqueraded as a teenage boy online for no reason WHAT-SO-FUCKING-EVER than to TORMENT a 13 year old girl, how about YOU DON'T FUCKING DO IT.
This is not a case of mistaken identity or false accusations. The people publishing the information have EVERY right to let the public know about what a COMPLETE and TOTAL waste of oxygen this woman is. This woman makes the smarmiest personal injury lawyer look like a saint.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Whether this was a real story or not, that woman did no one any harm; if she did Megan any harm, that's for law enforcement to deal with, not the rest of us. By digging up her personal information - for which no one had any real, legitimate use - much less posting it online - these bloggers have negligently put this entire family's safety at serious risk.
Look, the woman's daughter is a former friend of Megan Meier, and Lori Drew, who created the fake account was well aware the Megan had serious self image problems and had received treatment for depression.
Then how can you possibly claim that the woman did "noone any harm" when she wrote to Lori:
"Everybody in O'Fallon knows how you are. You are a bad person and everybody hates you. Have a shitty rest of your life. The world would be a better place without you"
Knowing what she knew, she should have known that reading this, from the cute boy that seemed to like her a lot, could have some serious consequenses for Megan.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
The closest I could come was this:
http://www.ncjrs.gov/App/Publications/AlphaList.aspx
The preoccupation with drugs in the listed publications (note a complete absence of any actual laws) completely reinforces a theory I posted on the hitusa blog:
That comment is awaiting moderation, I expect it will not be approved. This core issue with the corruption and abuse of the so-called justice system in North America cuts too close to the bone, very few people have the nerve to say it. Even when it is stated publicly that law enforcement is a sham to protect domestic drug profits for the powerful it is summarily dismissed by the public as a bizarre conspiracy theory. This case is but one example of the slippery slope of domestic drug cartel control of law and government.
It is shocking that there is no online federal authority in the United States that lists criminal law definitively. More disturbing is the preoccupation with drug use stats (read profits).
Seems like a double standard to say that we shouldn't outlaw hammers because someone could use one as a weapon, while also saying that certain types of information should be restricted because someone could use it to harass someone. It's the act that should be illegal or restricted, not the access to the information. Journalists also need to consider if a story is even worth reporting unless they have, and can/want to provide all the information. Otherwise it's just a "something happened to someone somewhere" headline. Independent of attempts to protect the sources, is a story that is incomplete one that is worth telling? Leaving details out just leads to speculation (by either the reporter or the audience), and speculation seems to go against good reporting.
When you are for profit, somehow that magically makes you eligible for a press pass, and somehow with that press pass, to normal citizens you are like some kind of god who deserves respect and cooperation. When the reality is that all this television news crap comes (as you all well know by now) from five sources, and these five sources are controlling everything the majority of people now believe. Some problems with this are many events require you to be "for profit" to even qualify for a press pass. Other events are apparently controlled by the cops, and the cops themselves give out press pass's, and yep you guessed it, if your not Corporate Media, For Profit and working for the big five your not getting a press pass.
Now why is this last thing a bad deal? Well, lets say your a non-profit, and trying to cover the republican convention, suddenly the cops throw down plastic orange fences around you and trap you in with a bunch of protesters. The guy with a press pass? He get's out, the others? They're constitutional rights are violated and they are hauled off to a horrible on the fly makeshift jail. This is actually a famous case. Or infamous day however you choose to look at it.
Free speech zones is not the United States, I served to protect against all enemies foreign and domestic. And neither were this President of the United States that wasn't even elected by the people. You don't even have the right to vote anymore and do the corporate media cover this little nasty problem? How often do have you heard these same leg crossers, and talking heads with a press pass or some crappy evening news, or good morning show talking about how electronics should not be used to count votes because logic bombs could flip the vote.
YOU DON'T EVER HEAR THEM! YOU HAVE NOT EVER HEARD THEM.
That's because this problem is blacklisted.
I hear people when referring to Journalists talk about ethics. Is it ethical edit up stories on OJ Simpson, Brit Sphere, Lacy Peterson, and now I guess the annoying Stacy Peterson, and to ignore something like say Debra Bowen and your constitutional right to vote. (alright granted they gave a half spun, dishonest coverage in 2007 that lasted for maybe one to three days and for less than 120 seconds, so get out the chart on how much (time in hours) you've heard about Paris Hilton.
These motherfuckers don't deserve a press pass, they don't deserve the frequency that they broadcast on. They are dumbing you all down, and because they don't shine a light into giant constitutional snafu's, your constitutional rights have just about been destroyed by this fucking unelected unitary president who is above all laws. I am sorry friends, that is called a dictator. But CBS evening news with Katie Couric ain't gonna talk about that.
What's worse, is coverage of these candidates currently. If the candidates don't have big money they don't exist in the polls. These polls are rigged by for profit corporations.
You are paying the tax for King George in the 21st century. Although now the tax is going into Iraq, China, Saudi Arabia and other wonderful places around the world. This corruption, is into nearly every government office now. Protesters should be out in front of their network broadcast news stations. These journalists have allowed a constitutional republic to become a corporate for profit dictatorship. People who watch this shit don't even know what their constitutional rights are.
So go forth, don't support net neutrality, or public access tv, or a fairness doctrine. You can be sure that what you hear out of the Whitehouse is the opposite of the truth. A clean air act will mean 1000 times dirtier air, a clean water act will mean 1000 times dirtier water, a revamped FDA will mean more chemicals in our food, a patriot act will mean the loss of the constitution which patriots swear an oath to protect.
Things are fucked up. Bad. More than most people can even comprehend. The FCC wants more consolidation. But who runs the FCC? Where did tha
Except the public doesn't have the right to know everything that happens. That is often times cited when a journalist wants to go on a fishing expedition for embarrassing things that celebrities may have done. Which usually is that a couple are sleeping around or may be getting married really isn't something that the public has a right to know about.
I don't think the public has the right to have the government protect their secrets from other members of the public. As a member of the public, I may not have the right to know everything, but I will try to do it anyways, and try to help others do it. I think misleading the public should be a capital offense, and it should be the responsibility of every citizen to assist in ferreting out liars and putting them to death by their own hand.
And if you're in opposition, I have no problem having a biblical style rock fight to the death with you either, just on principle.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Whether this was a real story or not, that woman did no one any harm; if she did Megan any harm, that's for law enforcement to deal with, not the rest of us.
A day or two ago CNN aired news on this. This 13 year old, Megan Meier, had a page on MySpace and thourgh it she met this "boy" Josh who complimented and fawned over her for more than a month. But then suddenly "Josh" told her she should die. Being upset she tried to talk to her mother but she brushed her off so Megan went upstairs to her room. Later her mother went upstairs and found her hanging in the closet. It ended up Josh was not a teen aged boy but in fact the mother of a girl living in the same neighborhood. Asked by her parents to press charges the police said she committed no crime but to me what she did not much of a different than if she had hanged Megan herself. Having said that I also partially hold her mother responsible, as a parent she should have helped her daughter when she was asked for help.
By digging up her personal information - for which no one had any real, legitimate use - much less posting it online - these bloggers have negligently put this entire family's safety at serious risk.
I think it's very appropriate and legitimate for someone who's vicious to be identified. If the safety of their family is important to them then they should have thought of it before harming someone else. It may only of been psychological and not physical harm but it was still harm, and intentional harm at that.
Yes, information wants to be free blah blah blah - wait until the media puts the unwanted spotlight on you for some minor b.s. (that most of us don't even care to read about) and some Jezebel-esque nutball digs up your personal information - including where you live - and puts it out there for any unbalanced, easily enraged headcase to come dot your forehead with a 9mm shell. Or maybe they'll stalk and kidnap your kid instead.
Oh and this mother didn't do any of this? She did in fact do this, even if the headcase was the girl herself.
FalconShould there be a Law?
In this case, I think that the bloggers in this case ought to feel really badly about having engaged in this sort of shenanigans. At this point, the woman had been reported to the sheriff's office, and there is a possible suit in the future. What they've done is managed to harm everybody involved in this that isn't already dead. Even then, I get the feeling that they would have pissed on her grave if they thought that could make a better story.
I think it's very important to out some one as vicious as this lady was, I'm glad she was outed. If she has a problem being outed then she should have thought about that before acting so vicious.
FalconShould there be a Law?
bloggers aren't exactly known for thoroughly checking out sources or even having a full grasp of the issue.
The same thing can be said of journalists and reports, sometimes it's bloggers who correct reporters.
FalconShould there be a Law?
If there's someone stupid enough to pretend to be a teenage boy in order to grief an emotionally unstable teenage girl, there's someone stupid enough to uncover that person's identity.
It may be wrong but that's exactly what I think, and feel, about this though in previous posts I used "vicious" instead of "stupid".
FalconShould there be a Law?
I find very little credulity in the "You can't hide the truth from us" self-righteousness espoused by many of the bloggers involved in this. They merely saw what they could gain from the situation, not what was ethically or morally right.
Where did you get the info that those who outed this person only saw what they would gain? And what did they gain?
FalconShould there be a Law?
given that, the victim's parents decided to go public, against the advice of their lawyers, for exactly this effect: wide public knowledge and shaming of the perpetrator, and to warn people about what kind of mainpulations can go on
It was bloggers who revealed the responsible person NOT the parents. Or do yo have info that contradicts this?
FalconShould there be a Law?
If law enforcement doesn't do their job, you protest about law enforcement, not about someone you suspect of having done something wrong.
So you don't protest against the guilty either then? You don't let other's know when someone harms another?
FalconShould there be a Law?
How the hell is this NOT a jailable offense? If this had been a MAN at the other end of the line pretending to be a "hot young boy" wooing a 13 year old girl, HE would most certainly have been prosecuted.
How in the hell is this NOT predatory? Apparently "predator" only applies to MEN LOOKING FOR SEX.
This mother needs to be in jail. And she needs to lose custody of her girl.
No adult who would do something so twisted - so obsessive and predatory - to a young person deserves to survive.. nor does any society so hypocritical that it allows something like this to go unpunished when countless others go to jail for so much less.
I tell you waht (sic), when I felt bad about myself going through puberty, and kids do, I was *corrected* by my parents
I dont know if this makes me a bad/idiotic/disrespectful/immoral person, but the first thing I thought when I read that line was that guy* from GTA who insists on disciplining his children.
I agree that nothing comes before raising a child, but you cant control every aspect of your child's life.
How in the fcuk could a beautiful girl like that grow up not believing, *knowing* she has value.
So Beauty==Value? I am not even going to respond to this.
I tell you waht (sic), when I felt bad about myself going through puberty, and kids do.
Yeah, they do feel bad but most of them dont commit suicide.
Sure, the "adult" who perpetrated this scam needs psychiatric help but the suicide I put on her parents
Wow, this is better than the Chewbacca defense. You should have been a lawyer.
* Lazlow: "Hello, you're on the air, what's your name?"
Caller: "I wanted to talk about spanking!"
Lazlow: "Oh God...not another one...!"
Caller: "I say spanking kids is the only way to teach them right from wrong."
Lazlow: "So you think that teaching kids from an early age that violence is the solution to problems will make them valuable members of our society."
Caller: "Exactly! I knew you'd understand Lazlow! My daddy used to whoop the tar out of me. He once hit me so hard my spleen fell out of my ear. Didn't do me no harm. Look at me now, I'm the best pest-control guy in east Portland. I've killed more rats, roaches and vermin that you can imagine, and I love it. This is such a great country, I wouldn't be where I am today if my daddy hadn't beat me senseless."
We knew a teacher who was accused of something (which was completely false AFAIK), and someone slashed her tires.
d. What about when the bloggers *want* to get it wrong?
And just to note, even under martial law you get more protection than you do under vigilante law.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
This happened in UK, when a newspaper reported a pedophile but gave the wrong name. The victim was nearly beaten to death by a crowd.
"That law enforcement didn't do anything is no excuse for vigilantism. If law enforcement doesn't do their job, you protest about law enforcement, not about someone you suspect of having done something wrong."
If a company does something that is perfectly legal, but that I disagree with as being unethical, I would not be censured for posting that companies background along with opinion stated as such.
If a person does the same thing, pointing out who they are is not vigilantism, is is identification. Their activities are available for public judgement.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
"The only purpose I can see of posting their identity is that people hope that "someone" is going to do something with that information."
Why is lawbreaking your only criteria here? If you know someone did a perfectly lawful act you disagree with, you have perfectly lawful options to register your disagreement.
Boycotting the Drews business is perfectly lawful. Denying business to them based on their demonstrated ethics is perfectly lawful. Making their public record easily viewed is perfectly lawful.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Careful there. If "behaviour that leads to a depressive teenager to commit suicide" becomes a crime, we might see a lot of parents (or ex-parents, then) in jail. I wouldn't want to know how many teens didn't want to live anymore after they were forbidden to go to the only concert ever (yeah, sure) of their star. How about "Mr. Teacher, I love you so and if you don't love me back I'll hang myself"? Can the teacher then decide to go to jail for passive murder or for statutory rape?
Because, and here's the caveat, how do you word it? Create a law that would make this woman liable for the death of the teenager without creating a law that creates more problems than it solves.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Am I the only one who thinks that they're in the wrong here?
Ostracism of the guilty is not wrong.
FalconShould there be a Law?
There's a large difference between the name being possible to find by going to the right places, and having it plastered all over the place. What is the purpose? The only purpose I can see of posting their identity is that people hope that "someone" is going to do something with that information.
Have you ever heard of ostracism?
FalconShould there be a Law?
They were guilty of playing with her fucking head man -- in a despicably malicious way. She was vulnerable, and they drove her over the edge. She's now DEAD. She's lost her life, for fuck's sakes. That family is destroyed and without a daughter.
This is worse than that attempted Texas teenage cheerleader murdering mom thing.
How about if your daughter were stabbed with a knife? Would you merely call that "not nice"? They killed her, man.
You have no right to know it until it has been confirmed. It should be left to the courts to decide whether what she did was wrong, not some ill-informed lynch mob with a knee-jerk reaction to whatever tidbits the media chose to publish today. *IF* she is found guilty of wrongdoing then you have a right to know. If the court finds her innocent you have no right to know that she was even charged - that is how "innocent until proven guilty" should work.
That's true in a court of law but not true in the court of public opinion. For instance I have said, and say again here, I believe Bush is guilty of desertion when he went AWOL while in the Air National Guard. However if it ever went to court and I was on the jury I would need a lot more facts before I could vote "guilty", as it stands now I would have to vote "innocent".
FalconShould there be a Law?
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21844203/
If the people posting Lori Drew's name were killing her, or putting her in jail, you'd have a point.
They're not. Their responses are, like the investigation, not within the scope of things that private citizens are prohibited from doing on their own time for their own reasons.
Note also that, given her explicit confession, I think there's a lot less concern than there might be otherwise over the possibility of a wrongful accusation...
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
1) Nowhere in everything I read was there anything listed which could be called probable cause on the accused mothers part. Nothing in all of it describes why she would even really dislike the girl in question.
The police report - without using the mother's name - states:
"(She) stated in the months leading up Meier's daughter's suicide, she instigated and monitored a 'my space' account which was created for the sole purpose of communicating with Meier's daughter.
"(She) said she, with the help of temporary employee named ------ constructed a profile of 'good looking' male on 'my space' in order to 'find out what Megan (Meier's daughter) was saying on-line' about her daughter. (She) explained the communication between the fake male profile and Megan was aimed at gaining Megan's confidence and finding out what Megan felt about her daughter and other people.
"(She) stated she, her daughter and (the temporary employee) all typed, read and monitored the communication between the fake male profile and Megan .....
FalconShould there be a Law?
The fact is, there is no FUZZY issue of guilt here - the fucking shit is clear as crystal - these adults were abusive towards a 13 yr old child w/ severe mental problems.
From the AP story:
Megan's mother, who monitored her daughter's online communications, returned home and said she was shocked at the vulgar language her own daughter was sending. She told her daughter how upset she was about it. Megan ran upstairs, and her father, Ron, tried to tell her everything would be fine. About 20 minutes later, she was found in her bedroom.
Doesn't take a fucking rocket scientist to see that the mom fucked up. If your kid has self-esteem issues and is faced with someone posting lies about her, you don't then chew her out for responding. It's like telling a rape victim, "gee, you were dressed kinda slutty." You support, not alienate or attack.
When your kid suddenly decides to run upstairs and hang herself, MAYBE, JUST MAYBE, it's because of something YOU did, right then, that pushed her over the edge?
Please help metamoderate.
Teach them how to use it - not in the technological sense, but for their life - and everybody will be fine. Funnily this would involve that you sit doen with your 5 year old child and find online friends together with it. You can prevent bad things from happening by guiding your child, and when it is old and experienced enough it can go alone
While I agree about reaching children how to use the net, I disagree you can prevent bad things, instead all you can do is teach them how to recognize and deal with the bad things they eventually will run into.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Actually, in the US gung ho prosecutors run amuck as well. In NYC you can be held for 24 hours just for the fun of it. But on a Friday night you can stay there on a minor violation like falling asleep on the subway till Monday night just to have the judge drop the charges for time served.
When you're next having a rotten month, tell someone that asks you "How are you doing?" exactly how you are doing. Watch them flounder
I know that reaction. After I became disabled when someone asked me how I was without thinking about it I'd tell them exactly how I felt and eventually people stopped asking me. So even now when asked I just say "ok" or some such most of the tyme. My brother-in-law started telling people not to ask me because I'd just say "ok". This is compeatly different than how I used to be, one lady wrote about how no matter how bad things were I could always get her to smile. There weren't many things that could get me down, now I'm almost always down.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Sealing arrest records would not accomplish your goal: for there to be conviction or acquittal, one has to stand trial. Maybe you don't know Bob got arrested on thursday, but it will be public information when he is arraigned, or at his trial.
To eliminate all these leaks, the legal criminal process would have to be secret until said black-box produced convicts--- not a good idea.
However, I do see merit in sealing arrest records until formal charges are brought. Anecdote: A few years back, at university, a buddy and I were coming back from a party and found a girl who had been attacked and raped. We tried to find out what was going on and soon called the cops. To cut this short-- The cops originally suspected us, more specifically my buddy. They were talking about "custody." Eventually the girl cleared up the events, but only several hours later. How do I explain to an employer, "yes, i was arrested for aggravated sexual assault and rape, but I didn't do it"
I agree. Clearly the woman has some sort of psychopathic disorder. People should know who she is. These people constantly do things to screw up other people's lives, and they should not get away with it.
And about things being against the law. It should be against the law for an adult to pose as a child/teenager to a real teenager/child, especially in the manner told by the story.
The problem is we're crippling the Government's power to take people in secret (already a fact of life re: Guantanamo), and giving every nutcase on Earth the power to hunt down someone that's given them a bug up their butt.
Government nazi's locking me up, bad thing.
Common nutballs hunting me down, bad thing.
Enabling both? Very very bad thing.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I'm not assuming she is guilty of causing this girl's suicide. But she has admitted to some pretty awful things. It is those awful things for which she is being, and should be, shunned.
See? Completely ignored. The public is simply unable to face the depth and evil of the deception of so-called "law enforcement". It is just too horrific to face.
Note also how the Slashdot moderation system ensures that such posts remain in obscurity. (NO I will not post as a registered user, as registered users can be gagged by moderators and unable to post at all. I always get a good laugh when slashotters whine about censorship as they practice it themselves)
And what is with this new display (I see it at work but not at home, I must have an old cookie setting at home). Is there any way to display an entire discussion in a nested view without clicking "show more" 30 to 40 time? (That can't be good for bandwidth, bit I get the feeling that Slashdot has unlimited free bandwidth)
Yeah, that surely teaches them. Mostly that society doesn't want you. And, well, if society doesn't want me, I have no moral obligation to keep it from harm, or cause no harm to it.
Ostracism only leads to more problems. People don't enjoy being shunned. When they are shunned, they will start forming a new social group, if with nobody else than with only themselves. And personally I'd be kinda scared by a mob of disgruntled, overprotective parents.
Cancel the would. I am. They put pressure on politicians to pass stupid laws.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Where's the report on the sincere apology (or even the perfunctory social apology) from the police? Oh, yeah, there isn't one! Not even on the level of a "pardon me" when you accidentally bump into someone. Perhaps we need a series of stories like: "Police raised by wolves, don't know how to say I'm sorry"
Just as well wolves don't have lawyers or the followup might be "Why we wouldn't put up with humans in our pack".
IMHO, IANAL, TINLA, etc...
If that were the case, then we would have missed out on fun like this
Priceless!
That's very informative. What is the state of bloggers in Norway? Is it just a matter of time until something like this happens there, or is the culture just not into the "scandal" thing?
Not much you can do about it if the blogger's in a country where your laws don't apply.
"If I were to ask you a hypothetical question, what would you like it to be about?"
At the very least this should slow down maniacs with Death Notes who like to play God.
I think what we need, is a lot more noise. I mean way more than we have now, even counting all the spam in your inbox. I mean, I should be able to find, with enough googling, "proof" that I (and you, and your mom, and the president) are all scientologist KKK-member pedophile wifebeating Amway sales reps. Only when there truly are a m^Hbillion monkeys really churning out tons of nonsense, will people stop and think about whether they can/should believe everything they read.
Yeah, sometimes bloggers get it wrong. People get stuff wrong all the time. And yet (dammit!) if you believe everything you read, take every chain letter seriously (and forward it, of course), etc. you can still somehow get through life, without starving to death. That needs to change.
There's more in the story, but basically these people knew they did something pretty bad. There's no law against it, and really there shouldn't be ridiculous laws to protect the thin-skinned, but what these people did was wrong and someone should raise a bit of a stink about it. I remember another story a few months back about how blogs and social networking sites have brought back something we have a deficiency of in modern life. Public shaming.
Here's the kicker, folks: when you put up the personal information of one person in the house, you put everyone ELSE there, at risk. Even their neighbors. See, they were neighbors, all of them. Thing is, not many people on the street even knew what went down surrounding the suicide. This'll probably change that. I'd sure like to know if I had neighbors who were no more grown-up or socially adjusted than their own petty teenage daughter. The whole thing is kind of ironic anyway. What we have essentially are asshole bloggers being outted by other asshole bloggers. I for one am glad they're out if for no other reason than it lends a bit of closure to an otherwise somewhat unsatisfying lifetime-worthy sap story that ate up one of my lunchtimes last week.
The difference is that a 70 year old man doing the same would be called a predictor by some.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Yeah, that surely teaches them. Mostly that society doesn't want you. And, well, if society doesn't want me, I have no moral obligation to keep it from harm, or cause no harm to it.
That's exactly what this person showed society, she was intentionally mean to this 13 year old girl. The pressure of ostracism may lead to the person being ostracized to reform, but then again it can make the person vindictive. One size does not fit all, this being so some tactics that work with some will not work with others. But as far as I'm concerned whatever happens to this person more than likely will never equal what she did.
Ostracism only leads to more problems. People don't enjoy being shunned.
This person should have thought of that before she did much worse.
I'd be kinda scared by a mob of disgruntled, overprotective parents.
So am I but some children need more protection than others. Some have abilities others don't, the same with vulnerabilities. So as I said above one size does not fit all.
FalconShould there be a Law?
It's not just money. People kill others by neglect because they have no idea what their consequences mean. A man killed another one by tossing him off a boat, not thinking that it might be hard for the latter to swim 5 miles to the next shore. "5 miles? That ain't far" was his reasoning in court. He simply had no idea what he's doing (doesn't change the verdict, 2nd degree murder is 2nd degree murder).
In a way I can see where that guy's coming from "5 miles" isn't far for some. Though not right on the coast where I grew up we could be at the beach within an hour, 1/2 hour really, and I loved swimming. We'd go to the beach and I'd get in the water and start swimming out. The only problem I had was with the drift, I had to keep an eye out on a landmark so I wouldn't drift too far along the beach. While in the army we prepared to go to the Panama Canal for Jungle Warfare training and we were tested for water worthiness, if we could stay in water without drowning and the test was we had to stay in a pool for half an hour. What a joke I thought but some in my unit had trouble staying in the water for only a few minutes. While we were there some of us spend a couple of hours swimming out into the canal, some of those ships seemed hugh.
One of the reasons I see in that is that we keep our kids sheltered until they're 18, then dump them into the world. We don't prepare our kids for the world. We keep them away from reality, keep them in Teletubbyland for as long as we can and don't show them that the world is a quite unpleasant and dog-eat-dog place.
This may be true for some parents but not for all. Unfortunately those parents who don't want to parent are pushing for the nanny state.
I'm even fairly sure that this woman didn't even have the foggiest idea what she's doing. She had no idea what she's doing to that kid. Or that it could end like that.
How do I know? I was one of those sheltered kids.
But you weren't that woman, and that woman knew the girl had psychological problems.
FalconShould there be a Law?