Slashdot Mirror
Woman Indicted In MySpace Suicide Case
longacre writes "The Associated Press is reporting an indictment has been handed down in the sad case of Megan Meier, the girl who committed suicide after receiving upsetting MySpace messages from someone she perceived to be her boyfriend. It was later determined the boy, Josh Evans, was a fictitious identity created by a neighbor of Meier's family. Lori Drew, of a St. Louis suburb, has been charged with 'one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization to get information used to inflict emotional distress on the girl.' Interestingly, despite the alleged crime having occurred strictly in Missouri, the case was investigated by the FBI's St. Louis and Los Angeles field offices, and the trial will be held in Los Angeles, home of MySpace's servers. Wired is running a related story about the potentially 'scary' precedent this case could set."
I think this is automatic when you violate the Terms of Service, which she did by providing false identification when she signed up as this alter ego. Basically, you accessed a system, in this case myspace, which is protect (although minimally) and did so without proper authorization (in the form of your proper identity).
I'm not sure I'm saying it properly, but it seems to me that this is going beyond calling somebody nasty names into an entirely new game. The case apparently centers on the manipulation of a minor through cold-blooded deceit and willful misrepresentation. It's the difference between beating somebody up during a fight and torturing a helpless prisoner.
I'm not sure a law covering something like this wouldn't wind up being a cure worse than the disease. However, if this woman actually did what she's alleged to have done, she's a sadist at least and probably a sociopath. People like her wind up getting caught with dead people chained in their basement.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
It's not as fucked up as you seem to think. I can call myself George Bush & even get credit cards under that name - so long as I am not engaging in fraud. If I try to get a credit card using the name George Bush & the Shrub's SSN, I get hammered with extra crimes listed. Using a pseudonym isn't a crime, using one to commit another crime is.
In this case, a service was provided - the account - in exchange for demographic information used to drive marketing. By screwing with the demographic info, she defrauded the company - reducing the effectiveness of the marketing & increasing their expenses while reducing their return. It's basic fraud, obtaining services under false pretenses - I'm not sure why they are using hacking laws instead of fraud/wirefraud ones.
I was thinking more likely manslaughter. I think it would be hard to argue for murder when the two people in question had no physical connection. Did they even meet in meatspace? The again, either way it would set an interesting precident. Could bullies at a school be tried for murder if the subject ends up killing themselves. Certainly they are more at fault of a suicide than some person on the internet could ever be. If you don't like a relationship with someone on the internet, you could just not talk to them. If it's someone at school, it's hard to go a day without seeing that person.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I do believe suicide is a type of homicide. But it is Megan who is guilty of it, not the woman. Being mean to someone is not homicide, regardless of the outcome.
This is the kind of thing for which tort law was designed. That, or Megan's parents could take action outside of the law.
In any case, there is no reason for criminal charges to be filed.
So what's the difference here?
The difference is that the post office doesn't make you press a button on the mailbox to show you agree with a "terms of use" form lacquered to the side of the box, and there are no laws that pressing a physical button obligates you to abide by any terms. There are laws about what constitutes postal fraud, but random postal services companies don't get to set them up and have them be treated as legally binding on people who just push a button.
There's a whole bunch of bad laws that have built up around computers and online services, and this is an example of why they're bad... because this case has the potential for establishing a whole new world of opportunities for lawyers and prosecutors to hurt people who are far less culpable than Lori Drew, while providing no real handle to deal with serious abuse.
I have run into cases online where people who have deliberately engaged in long-term wide-scale bullying on the Internet. Some of them are well known and well respected members of the research community, people at major institutions who have written standard textbooks. Others are merely online personalities who restrict themselves to attacking people on political or religious grounds. Their victims have in some cases lost their jobs, and there have been rumors of suicides.
These are not naive people playing a cruel joke on someone they know, there's no connection between them and their victims, they may not even be in the same country as their targets, and they feel no remorse for their actions... they've played the same game over and over again, and even boasted about it where they feel safe to do so.
And no amount of playing games with EULAs will stop them. All it will do is create more opportunities for abusive prosecutions and lawsuits.
You know, there is something called "emotional distress", which exactly describes the fact that someone is not able to look for help. And especially teenagers often have problems to go to their parents for help, because puberty is exactly the phase in life where you have to learn to get independent from your parents.
And a 13 year old girl is no adult. She is not fully able to make a concious decision between life and dead. That's something she has to learn first. You can even show with frontal lobe scans that people younger than ~20 years are not able to make those decisions conciously. (This is why trying teenager as adults for murder is quite questionable from a medical point of view. Teenagers are no adults, even when they get delinquent. Period.)
I had an ad online looking for a roomate. My ex, who knew the site I posted on, crafted up a fake persona on the roommate site, and answered my ad. As the room was taken, she then proceeded to chat me up using the fake identity and the knowledge of my personal interests etc.
After stringing it along for awhile, she indicated that she "wouldn't be moving so soon after all", but invited me to a fairly cool party in a city several hours away (Victoria).
I was suspicious, though I didn't suspect my ex , but rather thought that perhaps some friends that I knew to be in Victoria were planning a joke. I was bored, so I decided to check it out. I half-expected to arrive and find all my buddies waiting for a big "surprise", and half expected that perhaps there was a real party. Turned out the address itself was bogus (darn you mapquest, you said it existed) and a waste of time.
So then I traced the IP's on the email back to the wireless of the local college, which gave me some suspicions of the sender. I managed to determine that the password on the sender's hotmail account was my ex's birthday.
So my point? Well, it's pretty freaky to know that somebody will go to *that* much trouble to mess with you, even when you're an adult. As a techie type of guy, I've regularly met friends from both online and off, but it's put a pretty big damper on my trust of those online. It's one thing to know that when you meet a person they might be a little exaggerated in personal details, and another to realize you've befriended somebody who's just a troll created to get into your head.
My story ended (I hope), when I talked to the police. They weren't actually able to do much about the whole internet thing (though it seems like stalking to me), but they were able to deal with the fact that she was calling me about 15-20x in an hour, and often masking her phone # from my call display. The threat of criminal harassment charges and deportation (she was a student from overseas) tuned her down a bit, and I moved from that city not that long after.
This girl's story ended when she got too attached to her stalker, and was given a directive to end her own life. Was she too impressionable? Perhaps. It seems like it's fairly easily a case of stalking/harassment to me. Throw in the age and I'm sure that other things crop up.
As mentioned elsewhere, if this were an adult male and a young woman, they'd most likely have gone after this even more heavily.
I don't agree with trumped-up charges, but what happens when there are many things that are a half-fit, but don't quite match the modern world? The problem is that laws don't always keep up with technology, and unfortunately the technology is not well understood (which leads to vague and easily abused laws). Perhaps there needs to be a meter that distinguishes minor online "harassment" such a posting insults on usenet from creating a fake identity to target and damage a specific person.
Nowadays I think that the best meter for that is still the same as before. A judge, and/or a jury. Unfortunately, they're both (especially a jury) still influenced strongly by emotion and doublespeak, but the justice system is still one of our best ways of making a strong impression about what is not acceptable in today's society.
I'm an adult, I can deal with this shit. A 13-year-old girl, already an outcast, could use a little help or protection.
it may help prevent vigilante justice...
If it were my kid it happened to and the law said tough darts, that woman would not be coming home for dinner.
Only if your motivation for the layoff was to wreck your employee's life. Which is not the motivation behind layoffs, it's to keep the business a going concern by reducing overhead.
A more apt comparison would be the boss who makes an employee's life a living hell, driving him to quit, then actively prevents him from getting a new job, leading to the scenario you described. In that case, I'd think there probably would be civil remedies to the former employee's survivors.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
You say that as a joke, but she if she was as fucked in the head as everyone is saying, then let me ask a few questions:
1.) Why was she on the internet unsupervised?
2.) If she had such debilitating depression, was she seeing a therepist?
3.) If it had been a "real" boy would this have even made the local news?
There is a war going on for your mind.
And you also wrote: It seems that the majority (all? apart from mine) of posts here have assumed she's guilty already. It seems to me that people just want the courts to decide if she is guilty.
And the moral of the story is, chicks is bitches... all of my female friends tell me there is no such thing as a "nice girl." All my friends that were in sororities fought more with their "sisters" than they did with girls from other houses.
I had my problems with guys, but we'd just slug it out until someone gave up, then we'd be cool again. Girls, on the other hand, are all about sneaking around behind people's backs, rumors, gossip, backstabbing and "death from a thousand wounds" type shit.
The fact a "boy" was doing that shit should have told her, either he was fake or gay. Guys don't do that shit.
The only thing that surprises me about this is that you'd think a 50 year old woman would have something better to do than beat up on a teenager. Then again, I do remember reading Sleeping Beauty in one of my folklore classes, and as a child... this is more or less the same thing.
"The woman deserves what is coming, and I will laugh happily every time I hear her family has suffered misfortune - losing their business, pulling their daughter from school and hopefully soon being forced from the community. She acted without remorse and deserves to suffer consequences."
Her family will be lucky if she isn't found dead in an alley.
One of the reasons this crime is so shocking is that, not too long ago, the consequences would have involved death at the hands of the dead girl's family. I don't know whether to be sad or glad at the fact that this hasn't happened yet.
I'm reminded of a story a coworker tells of an uncle of his who was a preacher. He was the consummate Southern gentleman (as is my coworker), but tells the story of a parishioner of his. It was well known that her husband was a drunkard and beat her regularly, and after a long time she came to the pastor for advise (note - NOT the law). These were the instructions he gave her:
1) When he goes out Saturday night, get a bedsheet and wet it until soaking. Wait.
2) When he comes home, wait until he passes out and then wrap him as tightly as she can in the sheet. This will immobilize him.
3) Beat him. He will wake up and threaten you - beat him until unconscious. He will plead with you - keep beating him. If he tries to get out of the sheet, beat him until he stops. Beat him until he swears never to touch alcohol again or raise his hand in anger, and you believe it - if he sounds insincere, keep beating.
4) If you get scared or are unsure of what you are doing, call me and I'll come over and pray with you for the guidance to do what you need to do.
Apparently, it worked - next Sunday they showed up in church, her looking tired and him meek and covered in bruises, but by all reports he never drank or hit her again. Which raises the question - if we can take care of ourselves and our families with some help from our community, why does the State wish to stop that?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Dangerous DANGEROUS precedent to make yourself feel better about a depressed kid doing the inevitable Maybe. If it was a bank account or an eBay account and not a MySpace account I'm sure people may feel differently. In the former cases it is not so much the violation of the "terms of service" that causes the harm, but what exactly the violation is and how it effects people.
Perhaps this woman should be charged with 'child abuse', as "Child abuse is the physical, psychological or sexual maltreatment of children." (Ref. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_abuse). If this woman (or more likely if it was a man) was sexually enticing this girl then 'child abuse' charges would likely be filed. It is sad when people put such little emphasis on psychological abuse (of other people, and especially children) though I've always found much hypocrisy when it happens to themselves.
She was 13... what 13 year old girl (or boy for that matter) doesn't have emotional issues?
That's the problem with politically correct euphemisms; they are inaccurate, often to the point of fiction. By "emotional issues" he means "batshit crazy".
All thirteen year olds have emotional issues, but nobody kills themselves unless they're batshit crazy, even if they are an emotionally unstable 13.
The sad thing is, there are some very effective drugs and other therapies these days to treat those particular form of batshit craziness, but our society sees mental illnesses not as treatable diseases but as some sort of moral deficiency. The crazy person doesn't want to be crazy any more than a cancer patient wants cancer, but he or she is just as powerless to "just get over it" as a cancer patient is.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
The question that I would like to ask is, if the allegations made against her are indeed true, is Lori Drew is fit to be a parent?
And I've stated: It seems to me that people just want the courts to decide if she is guilty. The point is that people (in my opinion) are not assuming she is guilty, but rather want justice for an apparent crime that has 'allegedly' happened. In other words I believe that people would rather have the woman brought before the courts to have a fair trial of her guilt or innocence. Merely wanting a person charged with a crime does not necessarily imply prejudice (but wanting that person charged and convicted without a fair trial would).
Regards,
UTW
If this 'scary' thing really does attach, would it be THAT great a legal leap to say that buying gold (against such a game's TOS) is likewise hacking, in the same manner?
Seems like it to me.
Because, like it or not, the woman in your example was no better beating her husband than he was beating her. It may have worked, but more often than not, it doesn't.
The larger truth is that, if the husband is coming drunk all the time and beating his wife, he is a no-account man and he probably does deserve to be killed.
This is my sig.
But Wired's main complaint seems to be this: That sets a potentially troubling precedent, given that terms-of-service agreements sometimes contain onerous provisions, and are rarely read by users. I agree with them that equating a TOS violation with "hacking" might be a stretch, but it is already well established case law that unreasonable, illegal, or outrageous terms in a contract cannot be enforced. And a TOS agreement is, essentially, a contract between you and the service provider. So we aren't all suddenly going to be charged as felons because the
If you dig a little further you will see that the woman in question is becoming famous in her town... and so is her husband.
I suspect they'll be financially ruined for what they did. No one will buy a house from him (he's a realtor) and her advertising newsletter won't get ads--or readers.
She's squirming now like most criminals trying to find some explanation she can live with for the evil she did. Everybody needs to be the hero in their life story... and it sounds like she'll be a hero (in her own mind)--but a poor one.
This hits close to home, as my sister-in-law is mentally ill and unable to properly care for herself, so she is currently living with my wife and me. And her parents absolutely do not understand that this is a real illness -- they have repeatedly told her that she just needs to "snap out of it" and pull herself together, and that she just needs to exercise some willpower and stop feeling the way she does.
And of course every time they have a conversation like this she is left in tears and feeling completely worthless, which is great for somebody that's going through some serious problems to begin with. She has repeatedly said that she wishes she had some kind of gaping wound instead, because at least then people would take it seriously.
Mental illness can be frustrating -- I'm frustrated with her myself sometimes. But I have never doubted for a second that she is truly ill, and she is taking her meds and going to therapy and everything else she needs to do in order to get better. And it's working; just not quickly enough for her parents, evidently.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
You don't understand the story. This girl was depressed and suicidal, and had attempted suicide before. She told her best friend this. Her best fiend felt slighted over something that happened, and told her mom all about it. Mom created an account belonging to a "13 year old boy" who "went to another highschool" and started e-dating her. Telling her how smart and pretty she was, how he can't wait to meet her. She got her daughter and her daughter's friends to play along, mentioning having met this fake boy over the summer and other such stories, to make sure she believed he was real, to cement what a heart-throb and a sweet caring guy he was. Then one day "he" told her he was lying for a joke, she's stupid and ugly and world would be better off if she was dead. And she killed herself.
A post above said that the mother denies it. This may be true now, but initially she confessed and boasted that she did nothing illegal. She said it doesn't matter what I said, she was crazy and would have killed herself no matter what. She has said such things as "It's done, she killed herself, let it go" and so on. She admits telling her to kill herself, she admits making this account to spy on her and "see if she was talking about my daughter behind her back". Only now that she is in trouble does she backpeddle and say she was lying about all of that, she didn't actually do it!
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
I'm thinking a charge of manslaughter would be tenable as well. The persona she created was a weapon (whether it was physical or not, it was the instrument used to do the damage) she used against the girl. The question of intent, whether she consciously attempted to get the girl to commit suicide or not, is more muddled. The motive may have been just pure sociopathic glee she was deriving from torturing the girl.
It's clear enough to any reasonable person that there was a high risk of injury or death as the result of the woman's actions, and she should have known that. At the very least, her intentional recklessness led to the forseeable death of another person. That sounds like solid basis for a charge of manslaughter.
DISCLAIMER:
I'm not a lawyer and I don't know what I'm talking about)
Good points. Unfortunately, you are confused since Lori Drew didn't send the famous "the world would be better without you" message. In fact, she didn't:
1) create the account
2) send a majority of the messages
3) "tell" her to kill herself.
All of those were done by Ashley Grills, also an adult. Incidentally, the Meier family does NOT hold her responsible.... Fascinating, isn't it?
So actually, no good points. Charging the wrong person because of public pressure is never a good thing.
At issue is not whether she's guilty, it's whether there's a law that makes her actions criminal. It's already abundantly clear that she's a bitch and society has condemned her actions. There just doesn't seem to be any good method of legal recourse against her.
(Although I suppose MySpace could sue her for breaching the terms of service and the resulting bad press for MySpace, that would be civil charges, not criminal.)
Apologies to Slashdot readers if someone else already posted the following link(s) or material, but I looked for it and related keywords over the entire thread, finding nothing. Orin S. Kerr over at The Volokh Conspiracy (a legal blog with a cool name) has posted a useful quick analysis of the matter, which I believe is more important than might appear at first glimpse. It's well worth reading in its entirety, but I'll quote a short stretch of it:
(The original post has embedded links to relevant citations).
A truly excellent pizza parlor is a delight unto the heavens. Treasure the sauce and the toppings!
...for it is not a crime to suggest how other people should live their lives (or terminate them as the case may be). Lori Drew may be a manipulative shitbag, I think that much is pretty much agreed-upon. However, she obviously did not abuse her position of authority as an adult to put a child in harm's way. She was a cruel woman pretending to be a cruel child. Good lord people, if we locked-up every human being who says something cruel that might hurt someone else's feelings, there wouldn't be many people on the street.
I wonder why nobody has suggested the depressed child's parents might be responsible for this. They were in the same house as their daughter when she committed suicide. Did they do their due diligence when it comes to not just plopping the kid down in front of a computer and letting anonymous people on the internet babysit her? Did the psychologist who was helping her (I must assume Megan was undergoing counseling because she'd attempted suicide previously) just fail to address the internet relationships and activities that she was involved in?
It's a far greater concern to me, anyway, that parents dump their kids, unattended, on the internet. There were a few pretty young kids playing World of Warcraft when I was active, we had a 9-year-old boy in our guild (granted, that was just what he said, and to my knowledge none of us had met him, but he sounded young in voice communication so we didn't doubt his claims)...and while I mostly exercised restraint and watched my virtual mouth when he was around, this was a guild comprised mostly of young adults and he was exposed to a good bit of language and subject matter that most parents would freak-out over. That's one example, the internet is basically like a downtown area in a big city-- a mix of people, not all well-intentioned, businesses, red-light districts, social settings that are good for adults but not minors, and if parents don't supervise their kids' internet activities, they're endangering them.
Ms. Drew's prank was ill-considered and reprehensible. But it has been acknowledged that Megan Meier suffered from clinical depression. Suicide means it was the depression that killed her, not the MySpace hoax.
What if some other adult in Megan's life had said something mean to her, and she later committed suicide? Would that adult then have been charged? What if teasing at school had immediately proceeded her death? Would it have been treated as a death inflicted by the teaser? How many adolescents who don't suffer from clinical depression are mercilessly teased, and never commit suicide?
I know, the charges against Ms. Drew are actually for misrepresentation, hence violation of MySpace terms of service. How many of the World's Internet users are guilty of misrepresenting themselves in some way (e.g., age, gender, occupation, etc.)? And by extension, are the charges supposed to herald the end of anonymity on the Internet? Does anyone want the liberties that only anonymity can protect somehow abolished? Or intimidated away?
The big picture counts. We might be disgusted with Ms. Drew's conduct. But legally prosecuting all bad behavior comprises an attack on freedom far more problematic, and affecting us all, than this person's foolish, mean-spirited prank.
And yet, we are a country of laws. That a child was harmed may be the motivation for applying this new theory of law, but neither the law nor the theory are bound to those "special" circumstances.
You can't apply laws differently to one person or one case because you don't like what happened. Either compliance with the TOS is a condition of whether your access was authorized, or it's not. "It is, but we would only ever enforce that fact if a child was hurt" doesn't fly.
The authorities are outraged, and rightfully so. Nobody can believe that we can't find a law that applies to what allegedly happened here. (Yes, allegedly.) But stretching a loosely-related law with an unheard-of interpretation so that you can punish the woman for X when really you want to get her for Y, and then denying that logically you would have to punish otehrs who did X (but who didn't do Y), is advocating tyrany.
I prefer a country of laws, even if I sometimes have to let a scumbag go. If this woman is as evil as she's being portrayed -- and she may well be -- then she'll find her own way to justice in due course.
Not only that, but kids have said the same nasty things to each other since time began. What's next, felony prosecution of grade schoolers who bully or tease one another?? how is it different just because it's online rather than one gang yelling at another across the playground?? Does this become yet another Magic Age Of Responsibility, where if a 17 year old says "Go kill yourself, loser" it's just kids being kids, but one day later and an 18th birthday, and the same speech is a felony?? What about the considerable body of music and literature on the subject -- could it be regarded as "conducive" to suicide?
Also, suicidal people don't go for it because of what any one person says, no matter how nasty. It's a long slow process. So who do you really blame here? The parent she lives with every day, who failed to notice anything amiss? kids at school doing normal kid teasing and bullying? the fictional boyfriend? Do you blame the situation or the tipping point? Is the mean-spirited woman-next-door the culprit or the scapegoat?
This could set a precedent where trolling could eventually become illegal as "conducive to poor self-esteem" or whatever is the PC-speak at the time.
Are we really that thin-skinned and fragile as a species?? If we are, or want to be, sooner or later natural selection will have its way with us.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
That is an interesting question. High school bullies engage in behavior that, if they were adults, would be chargeable as assault and battery, harrassment, and stalking. Yet in high school they get a free pass. In my own experience, it contributed to years of fear and depression, and I certainly feel it -should- be criminal. It was chosen behavior, intended to cause harm, that did cause harm, as it's primary aim. I think that's a useful contrast to the example you offer of someone two-timing their boyfriend.
I don't know what the answer is, but it's an important question.
I was taught to respect my elders. The trouble is, it's getting harder and harder to find some.
This then comes down to intent. Did Lori Drew intend to commit a crime or other harm by violating the TOS? Lori Drew 'allegedly' created Josh Evans and sought out Megan Meier after Drew's daughter and Megan Meier had had a fight. How could this not be intended to cause emotional harm?
If this is proven in a Federal Court, then it is immediate ammunition for the Meier family to begin a Wrongful Death lawsuit against Lori Drew and her co-conspirators.