Slashdot Mirror
Yale Students' Lawsuit Unmasks Anonymous Trolls
palegray.net writes "Two female Yale law school students have used the courts to ascertain the identities of otherwise anonymous posters to an Internet forum, with the intent of prosecuting them for hateful remarks left on the boards. At a minimum, the posters' future legal careers are certainly jeopardized by these events. While I'm not certainly not supporting or encouraging hateful speech online, these controversial actions hold potentially far-reaching consequences for Internet privacy policy and free speech." According to the linked Wired Law article, "The women themselves have gone silent, and their lawyers — two of whom are now themselves being sued — are not talking to the press."
....is serious business.
A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking
I don't feel comfortable posting a comment.
This is not a free speech issue - the posters made threatening and offensive comments, inlcuding suggesting that they would assault/rape the female students.
These comments would not be tolerated in any other setting so why should they be tolerated online?
Hateful speech is not illegal. False claims that substantially harm a person ARE illegal under slander/libel law. This law applies whether the comments are online or on the playground.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
TFA makes it sound like these women are all upset because some asshat on the internet made a comment about how some women should be raped. Now, granted, that's an asshole thing to say, but if that's all that is going on here, they have no reasonable grounds to be suing. It's someone's right to be an asshole, for better or for worse.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Women named Jill and Hillary should be raped.
What now?
This is a pretty straightforward bit of libel...Even on the internets you have to be careful if you're explicitly slandering someone by name.
Illegal is illegal, and if these monkeys were dumb enough to put up all this crap under handles that they accessed from their homes, then they're screwed, and it's hard to see how they ought not be.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
So why didn't the Forum Moderators delete the offending threads after being alerted? They should be the ones being sued...
This will almost certainly keep them out of the state Bar for a long period of time if not indefinitely. Even legally protected speech can be grounds for denial of bar membership.
Hmmmm?
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
with context and also with audience.
I have never agreed with hate speech laws as most of the time they are used to intimidate. They are used to govern and direct conversations. There is everything offensive with some speech but speech itself should not be prosecuted unless it can linked to actions taken afterward that can be proven to have not have occurred without the speech.
While the words show are inflammatory and I do think the people who wrote them need to be accountable I don't think jail time or direct monetary fines are allowed. They will have accountability and that is the penalty itself.
So, the biggest problem is that it is a moving target and essentially serves little purpose other than to assign some form of guilt. Too many times it is used to intimidate and as such any such case must be held to highest standards otherwise we all get trampled.
I mean, how long before speaking out against a candidate or elected official automatically nets you fines or jail time?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I scanned through the article, and saw no indications that it was or wasn't. Or are the courts being sexiest again and siding with the complainants because they are female?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Internet privacy policy
Expect none
Free Speech
Slander and libel are illegal
Just about covers those two concerns.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Slashdot sucks and all it's users deserve to be raped. Before you mod me flamebait, consider the implications of such an action. Ordinarily, on the internet, people are able to ignore the trolls. And we've all seen how many times non-troll comments get modded troll for reasons only apparent to the moderator. Although this comment is clearly flamebait, there are other cases where it isn't so black-and-white. I think this kind of decision by the court could allow abuse by anyone who wants to supress speech critical of them. I could see Apple's lawyers trying to use this as precedent to unmask people complaining about their iPhone development policies, for example.
This sort of "speech" should not be tolerated anywhere. Womens' rights and their safety is far more important than the "right" for misogynists to remain anonymous. Allowing them to remain anonymous is a tacit acceptance of allowing hateful speech and the fostering of anti-women attitudes (at the school and in society as a whole). The concrete harm done to these women (and women in general) trumps the abstract "harm" to the troglodytes who posted the messages.
So these women are complaining that they lost employment because somebody named "HitlerHitlerHitler" said they had herpes?
1) Who the hell are these employers, and does ANYONE work for them? Would anyone want to?
2) I wouldn't hire these women on the basis that they are throwing hissy-fits over meaningless posts on the interwebs. If they're gonna sue over that, they'll sue over any and every little IRL slight, real or imagined.
Bitches
and lawyers...
The government can not get the ids of people who post on Slashdot can they? ... *shiver* ...
I shouldn't have posted.
Did Yale only recently start admitting women to law school? How do they know they weren't talking about two other women named "Jill and Hillary"? If the women are specifically named on the website, why are their names withheld now?
Anybody have any insight?
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
> a reply claiming "she has herpes."
That's per se libel so long as it counts as a "loathsome disease" and identifies a specific person. Which is, per my understanding, the case here.
I thought these were law school students? They're screwed. They have no defense if they can prove who made comments like that.
Gee..that sounds like hip-hop!
Has anyone else been perusing these postings hoping for something meaningful to come from an AC here?
And of course, as usual, I'm still waiting. Just an observation, that's all...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
An illustration of what happens when the government has you scared to do whats right, how far the government will go to protect bad people, and how much people really don't care.
Since when is a *hateful* remark a crime?
Sure you cant claim false facts about a person, or threaten them, but just being hateful?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Defamation allows you to sue for money, or a court order to stop/remediate the wrongful statements -- but it is not a crime (in the U.S.), and hence is not "illegal."
Some actions allow you to sue for money AND are illegal, such as punching someone in the nose. That's battery (a crime) AND an act that allows you to sue the perpetrator for money.
Using that logic I can make any speech illegal and exposed to retribution. Either Free Speech is an absolute right, or it is no right at all -- there is surprisingly little gray area in -between.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Even before Autoadmit was around and he was in HS and college. Talk about someone who should be sodomized. If you can get the stick out of the way first.
When this came around the first time, I was not at all surprised he was involved.
Doe I was alerted in the summer to an AutoAdmit comment thread entitled "Stupid Bitch to Attend Law School."
Well her actions pretty much proved that comment's "Stupid Bitch" part.
I mean, people hate lawyers on the intarwebs...coupled with lack of 'respect' for women...this could cause a critical mass of internet angst that will be released as attacks on the women, their lawyers, and who knows who else.
Blar.
No one has commented that the posters were made by other Yale students, and, well, shouldn't we expect members of the highest institutions to be a bit more mature and a lot less mysogynistic? They posted some pretty rough stuff, doesn't that kind of speech belong to the lowest strata of society and not in Yale?
Oh wait, Bush went to Yale, along with the most powerful men in American history.
So much for my assumptions of Yale accepting the cream of the crop in both their academic performance and adherence to fundamental human decency.
I'm so naive.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
"you're an evil bitch and i hate you"
perfectly legal
"there's a fire in this theatre! (snicker)"
not legal
whatever was said, if it resembles the latter rather than the former, then there is nothing wrong with what the women did, and the trolls should be found, prosecuted, disbarred, etc.
that the case got this far, it is probably the latter. because if what was said resembles the former, they would have never have been able to get this far legally
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You're an idiot. Slander, libel, and threats are illegal. Sounds like all three were present in the postings. No civilized person would think that these things shouldn't be illegal. And if they are legalized, it should be e.g. their father/brother/boyfriend/husband's right to mercilessly savage the person who did it. So OK - let's make all speech of any sort legal. Let's also revoke rights of protection from physical reprisal from the speaker in cases of threats, libel, or slander.
Are you KIDDING ME?
I mean, can you go to a police officer and tell him: this person wrote, in that public wall set up for public expression purposes, hatefull things about me. He said my cnt was drying off and my children would grow fungus because i do not take care of them. And he didnt even sign it!
I know the police officer would have a laugh. I mean yea, there is libel, slander, but a public forum that allows anonymous people to post, is a place where the girls or any idiot should be able to write WHATEVER THE FUCK they want.
YES, i think even insulting other people or refering in BAD ways to their mother, anonymously.
If that sort of thing bothers you, you shouldnt be allowed to breathe in a democracy.
Your freedom to write whatever the fuck you want comes at the cost of other people excercising the exact very same freedom.
Just cause an AC is a potty mouth, they shouldnt be liable for anything criminal related to what they WRITE.
Jesus, please, get all this wankers off the internet before they turn it into their lovingly misserable family playground.
The net is virgin territory, lets NOT commit here the same mistakes we have in meatspace.
NO SIG
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Some one mod me down, so I can sue. But about the article, this seams like a case were some one had a fit about what some idiot wrote in the internet and then let it get WAY out of hand.
I'm sorry, but, women are different from men. If a women yells at a man, the man thinks, 9/10 out of ten, "I shouldn't have to listen to this crap, because I could totally kick your rear end until you do the dishes". If a man yells at a woman, its much more threatening. Even my 3 year old son knows this. If my wife yells at me, he just tunes it out. But if I yell back, or even raise my voice, it scares him. So, its like, all a man can really do is to eat the stress, accept that the heart attack is inevitable, and move on. The inverse is to have a society, well, like Iran.
So, yeah, let's bring up the silly "think of the women and children" argument, because, we have to. We can't pretend that everyone is equally capable of self defense and have a wild west mentality on the internet because not everyone is. Until men are angels, there has to be law and order to protect women on the internet, just as surely as there must be police to escort women to cars after hours at the office.
It's just right.
This is my sig.
Fuck you, Lawyers.
Love, AC.
"I will pay anyone 100 dollars to rape either of those girls" is quite a bit different than "If they were raped, it would not bother me at all" as far as intent goes.
I might have missed it, but didn't see where there was overwhelming indication that the intent was to incite violence. Granted, hate speech is a somewhat subjective issue, but at the rating this situation gives speech, most of /b/ is in big trouble, not to mention countless others.
I don't believe that trolls express themselves well, but the first amendment is not limited only to the eloquent. "They should be raped" and "just die now please" are not far apart, and context has a lot to do with the meaning... semantically speaking. What body is going to decide what exactly is hate speech on the Internet? How will they determine exactly when to break privacy practices based on that?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Mod parent up!
Saying "X has herpes" sounds like a factual misrepresentation and not just a matter of opinion. It would probably be considered "slander per se" in many jurisdictions as well.
It's never safe to judge the merits of a case from what is reported online or in newspapers, but if the right facts are there and can be proven, the "opinion" defense might not be all that promising.
Dear Sir, We almost have your identity. Sincerely, Nosy Lawyers
www.purevolume.com/martyd
I mean, one more article repeating the free speech made by the trolls is nothing when google cache exist.
It's dishonest.
Blar.
...please be careful with phrases like "womens' rights to not feel threatened."
No one has the right to not feel threatened. Under most circumstances you have the right to not be harmed, and under some circumstances you have the right to not be threatened. But there is a lot of jurisprudence about "true threats" that suggests a threat must be credible (among other things) before you have a right to silence someone or claim damages against them.
I don't know the context of this "threat", not having read the forum in question, but what do these women do when someone says "Fuck you" to them at a party or driving a car? Do they go running for a lawyer? In both cases, the threat would be much more credible than some anonymous net poster.
Infuriate left and right
The Washington law professor mentioned in this article, should be familiar to /. users from a previous work of his: "'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy"
and AOL, WebTV, grandma.....
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
I would submit that you are the new poster child for the pussification of America.
You have a right to free speech but there is no right to "not be offended". If I make comments that are not appreciated by everyone (these comments for example) I have excersized my right to speek in a public forum. I now have a responsibility to allow others to respond. Some of those responses will likely be offensive to me but I have accepted that I might not like what I hear when I spoke in public. Threats of physical violence must be credible threats before they break any laws. If someone says "I'll bash your head in!" the only way to determine that the threat is credible is after the bash my head in or are caught outside my house with a brick in hand repeating the threat. I think this steps over the bounds of free speech. The best response would have been for the moderator to terminate the accounts of the offenders (if they had accounts) and to delete the comments from the forum if they did not meet the standards of the forum.
I swear I didn't know it was loaded...
The fallacy is the perception that there can anonymity on the Internet. Earlier this year, a woman was accused of violating Federal law by using a fake MySpace name. If you make false and injurious comments, it really does not matter if you try to hide behind a fake user name.
Statesman
Interestingly, in most of Europe that would be just what they would be doing to you under "incitement to violence" statues. Which mostly were enacted due to fascists' actions, since they were famous for making such statements - and acting on them.
I'm aging rapidly, I bought a new game and had no idea if my machine was good for it.
I think the blame here is going in the wrong direction.
Blame the posters? Idle threats and childish insults have a longer history than the intarweb. How can anyone think that the internet should be open to everyone - even the irresponsible - and somehow not contain irresponsible material?
If the article is correct, and these girls suffered because of the online information about them, then wouldn't the people to punish be those who acted on incorrect / inappropriate information? Seriously, what employer denies someone a job because someone called the applicant a bitch online?
Professional decisions made based on personal information found online shouldn't be ok. Not that that's any more enforceable than preventing children from calling each other names. If you want to blame someone for irresponsibility blame the person who was supposed to be responsible - not someone who is clearly just spouting off.
-- "Oh. This guy again."
I'm not certainly not encouraging even half-way hateful speech half as much as I use it myself, but I'd certainly sport it against half of you slashdotters more than half as often as you deserve.
The funny thing is, now their names will be very visible linked to how they sued some anonymous people on the internet.
I think they'll have problems getting jobs as ditch-diggers now, because what employer would want to hire someone that would sue someone else over insults?
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Now there is no such thing as anonymous coward... you will still be coward, but now you are a known one.
I'm all for free speech, but allowing someone to say something that affects my career and livelihood is not cool. If I was convinced that a forum posting was going to cost me my job and career, I would sue too. That is real damages being inflicted to me. It would be better if employers would take everything on the internet with a grain of salt, but for some reason, no one does that.
With respect, I disagree. Law firms, particularly "prestigious" corporate firms, are notoriously risk-averse and likely would not hire someone who had "achieved" net notoriety, no matter how smart or otherwise qualified. I would assume that most potential hires are vetted at the least through a google search, if not a more detailed Lexis investigation.
If you were a blue chip firm, would you take the risk of hiring one of these women? Imagine your multi-million dollar client does a search on your new associate's name -- even just looking for phone number -- and comes up with a sordid sex story instead. Wow.... there's a real risk that you have just damaged the relationship with that client. Just as one example -- look at the Department of Justice's search on potential attorney hires. Now the DOJ was illegally considering political affiliation, not net fame, but the principle is the same: defamatory net stories would likely have prohibited these women from being considered.
That big firms are risk averse is hardly surprising. In fact, risk-aversion/paranoia is what -- in theory anyway -- is what makes an $x00 an hour lawyer worth paying for.
Note: this is also why I left a wanna-be big firm after a couple years. Who wants to work in an environment like that? But certaintly these women have the right to experience the hell of Big Firm life for themselves, and should not have had their careers permanently damaged because of a couple of idiots decided to slander them for fun.
A lot of criminals think the Internet is a place to commit crimes anonymously. More proof that this is not the case. Now get the rest of the persons who hide behind fake free-speech arguments while they do whatever the fek they want to anyone.
There is not right to anonymous speech. Only free speech. That means you can speak your mind. liable , slander and threats are not protected speech.
needs to be sodomized.
Repeatedly.
If you leave a bomb anonymously we'd all want you tracked.
Both hate speech and the bomb are an attack. So why not, freedom of speech shouldn't really enter into it unless what is said is true.
So if they posted something true as a judge that would be my requirement. Show me that it is a lie in which case I'll pass the order to bring them to be held accountable. Otherwise if it is truth well pants you can't sue over the truth (can you?)
Besides when was it freedom of anonymous speech?
Holy cow, somebody needs to emphasize that a valid defamation claim needs to show actual harm. Not harm in the sense that 'boo-hoo, somebody said bad words about me'. Harm in the sense that the writer's words caused damage to the subject's character. Or caused them to suffer an economic loss.
All we have here is some allegation that law firms selecting among the most sought-after candidates are 1) going to use google; 2) believe writing that has every indicia of unreliability like anonymity, exaggeration, etc; and 3) make a hiring decision based on it. There's just no freaking way.
You don't get to sue because you don't like it, you only get to sue if it actually caused you actual harm. Suggesting that the hiring committee of the most prestigious law firms in the country would pay any attention to that kind of garbage is specious.
The amount of racist, sexist, homosexual talk is astounding. Not to mention that most female players are the brunt of about 80% of deragatory comments in most raiding guilds.
It's all in fun and jest of course, and (most) you know full well what your getting into when you join a guild that is like this.
I spend 1 minute looking at that retarded http://autoadmit.com/ forum and if you honestly could say that you don't expect to find hateful offensive remarks, either stereotypical or personal, well then.. you should have left the house more.
Presumably, the women were as anonymous as the trolls
RTFA
I had to dig up a some links just because Wired was too vague for my liking...
Past /. coverage.
AutoAdmit's forum notification of pending lawsuit.
"Whenever you do a thing, act as if all the world were watching."
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
did you forget the tag? please tell me you did.
Rape is not a fucking joke. It's a violent crime. Threatening to rape someone is just as heinous as threatening to kill them. If someone left a message on your voice mail saying that you should be murdered, you'd call the cops, they'd find the motherfucker, and he'd rightfully go to jail.
But when it's rape instead of murder, suddenly the right to free speech is more important? Sorry, no. If you threaten to rape somebody, you're a violent piece of shit and need to be dealt with by the police.
Sorry, this is a bit OT but...
So you are saying what? All women are weaker than men and less able to defend themselves, automatically?
Talk about a BS blanket statement. I know feminists who might come to blows with you just for implying that.
Heck, any number of women boxers or martial artists in general could (at least) surprise you or I in a physical confrontation.
The tone and timber of your voice scaring a 3-year old has nothing to do with whether or not your wife has trained with Rorion Gracie for 5 years. Do you think women bodybuilders or powerlifters need (or want) a 110 pound rent-a-badge walking them to their cars?
Just because some women have not taken the responsibility to learn to defend themselves does not mean that they are without fault if they choose to take a shortcut to their cars. The case is no different if you or your wife walks through a dark alley and get mugged. You both made a bad choice. Period. The question is, do either of you know how to handle yourself in that (or another possible) scenario?
"As for thinking of the children", well I have several kids ranged around 8 & 12 who can choke an adult male unconscious.
It is made all that more easy because the adults never see it coming. The element of surprise for a woman or child makes it that much more effective. Choosing to live your life thinking "it will never happen to me" does not entitle anyone to play a special "victim" card if they are ever in a confrontation. If you don't take some responsibility for your own safety then that is your choice and it has nothing to do with you being weak, strong, male, female, young or old. You are free to ask some of my adult women students for their insights. But I suggest you don't raise your voice when you do it...
assertion: a positive statement, usually made without an attempt at furnishing evidence
And YOU should do it.
The women already have been refused jobs based on the controversy generated by the trolls comments - seems like a fair ballgame to me.
I'm not sure those two are analogous. Without having reread the case, I seem to recall that the women in question did not seek out the forums in question. Their pictures were put on the board, and then the comments started flying. When they then joined the board, (again, afair) seeking to have the pictures removed, they were then subject to even harsher comments, including the rape ones.
You, on the other hand, have joined the game yourself, and aditionally you have joined the chat, which is an optional extra, of your own volition. Aditionally, while "I'm going to rape you" might be a breach of conduct on Xbox Live (I don't know if this is the case), in most fps' this is the 'norm' where you attempt to psyche out your opponent. No adult of a reasonable mind will expect the speaker to seek out your address (is this even possible through Xbox Live?) and hunt you down.
However, on this board, not only were the women's pictures posted, their names and addresses were posted, and considering the vitriol spewed forth on the boards, even I, being a VERY common sense kind of guy, would not put it beyond the assholes and idiots* on the boards to actually following through on their threats**
Of course, I'm not in any way, shape or form a lawyer or had any law training. Hell, I'm not even from the US.
* In my humble and non-medical/-psychological opinion, since I am not refering to mental retardation
** Considering the writing, the constant agitation by the other posters etc, I do not consider the comments "innocent", "joking", "ironic", "sarcastic" or even "humourous"
Just as important - the court found in favour of the plaintiffs, so obviously the judge (jury?) found the threats to be credible and the derogatory comments to be libel. If you do not like that ruling, you need to write your congressmen and tell them why. Don't email, don't fax. Send them a physical letter, preferably handwritten. At least that's what the usual comments on the subject around here advices.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
I don't think he had Jennicam in mind.
Me: How does it make you feel when your daddy yells at you mommy?
Her: It makes me a little bit happy?
Me: It makes you happy?
Her: o, not really happy, just a little bit happy... don't tell her I said that!
I think your statement about men being more intimidating than women is an overly broad generalization. In the case where the child sees themselves as competing with their mother for their father's attention, they might actually enjoy it. Now go ahead and tell me how dysfunctional my family is...
There's actually a huge grey area. Time, place and manner are frequently taken into consideration by courts, as well as the content or commerciality of the speech, and the target of the speech, and the person doing the speaking. Free speech and first amendment rights are always brought up when a city wants to restrict sex-based businesses. However, since they're seen as commercial, that speech has less value in the public forum than a debate on our government's public policy. Governments can therefore, regulate the proper time and place for obscene or inappropriate speech (no adult bookstores within 500 foot of a school or church). Also, the manner of the speech can be regulated also. Public airwaves, i.e. radio and broadcast TV can be regulated by he FCC because the airwaves are a public resource and are leased by the federal government. That's why they can require mature material to be aired after 9:00. They also used to require a set amount of material to "benefit the public good", which is why radio and TV would air church services late saturday night and Sunday mornings, and why there were so many PSAs. Those rules have since been relaxed, but the rationale is still used. Public protests, even political ones, are frequently moved to protest areas, or required to have parade permits. This is to ensure that the protests don't cause a public nuisance or hazard. The same thing goes for the infamous "fire" in a crowded theatre.
There's whole books written on commercial speech - what's true (100 calories per serving), what's false (microsoft eats babies) , and what's puffery (Ford trucks are the greatest). Commercial speech gets less protection because it's used to sell things - not further the public discourse.
The New York Times Supreme Court Case re: Free speech held that when a public official was being criticized, the newspaper only had to refrain from saying things that it knew or should have known were false. Other cases have said that when the defamed person wasn't a public figure (i.e. a public official, a celebrity, or a person who sought the public eye), the bar against defamation was lower than when considering defamation against a non-public figure. And simply saying "Joe has herpes" may not be libel, depending on the context. Someone doing a comedy routine making jokes about Joe who says that Joe has herpes wouldn't be libel because no one would take it seriously - there's no "defamatory sting". You say that Joe has herpes in the middle of a medial report on NPR and it's probably defamation. That's why Howard Stern always has someone laughing at everything he says, to get people to thing it's a joke. And just stating that something's an opinion doesn't remove the slander - it's what people actually think that matters.
And don't forget, the truth is always a defense to a charge of defamation - if Joe has a cold sore and I write a story about how Joe has herpes, well, too bad for Joe, because it's true that Joe has herpes.
Regarding the threats, the common law varies from state to state, but you usually need a pattern of harassment or the imminent threat of harm. Standing in front of someone with a gun saying "I'm going to kill you" would likely be threatening, whereas saying it on the internet probably wouldn't because there's no imminent threat of bodily harm. (In New York, the person actually has to make some physical motion indicating that they are about to harm you - as my Torts professor used to say "words alone are not enough").
While I'm not certainly not supporting or encouraging hateful speech online...
That's not certainly not saying that you are... or aren't. Wait...
It seems likely that they were not anonymous. The first line of the article was this quote:
Even if they used the forums anonymously (or didn't use the forums at all!), someone drug their non-anonymous reputations through the mud.
No, I am not a lawyer or a student. But I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express once! :-P
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
See, I find that interesting, because a person who threw boxes, bins of clothing, and weapons at *me* was found not guilty because he "felt threatened by me".
I was apparently guilty of being 6'3" and 280lbs. (as far as the jury was concerned) v/s someone nearly twice my age, a foot shorter, but with extensive weapons and self defense training.
You can go batshit nuts on someone, as long as you can prove you are paranoid, you will walk.
*sighs* what a county. (Yes, county, not country)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order- Ed Howdershelt Via Tass
Normally I would agree with you, but you are misinformed about what really happened (I admit the article doesn't say much).
This story has been on slashdot a few times. Here's what really happened, if I remember correctly:
- Guys posts pictures of women and comment on the forum (she's a 9! she's a 4! such a bitch i'd rape her! etc.)
- Women ask site owner to remove pictures and offending comments
- Site owner laughs at them, and informs posters that the women in question asked for the pictures to be removed
- Guys don't like it ; they literally start stalking these girls, take more pictures of them (at the gym?), and start posting threats.
- Women sue.
Read this again. These girls got stalked and threatened. I don't care if it's on the internet or elsewhere ; when someone stalks you, takes pictures, and threatens to assault and rape you, it is wrong, and these women have a case. The whole thing about it affecting their career etc was only true at the beginning (the first pictures and comments posted). This thing got a lot more serious afterwards.
Someone already has. They're called the Supreme Court.
Does the phrase, "Shouting 'fire!' in a crowded theatre," ring any bells? And what about those pesky libel and slander laws? I suppose all those statutes concerning obscenity aren't really there either?
Free Speech does not mean you get to say anything you want the way you want. It means you are free to express your opinion and ask questions. While there is no requirement for you do do those things politely, it does not mean you can do things like incite to riot, coerce through threat or lie to a court because you can and not expect to get in trouble.
This is probably the best example of the Streisand effect ever. They sued some annonymous posters for libel, which resulted the libel in question becoming exponentially more pronounced.
In hindsight, I hope they realize that they could and should have handled this differently, maybe turning the threats made over to the police and the university, maybe just handling it themselves by posting annonymous responses or maybe just ignoring it. They definately shouldn't have sued the site owner.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not blaming them for what resulted. I doubt anyone could have predicted the results. But, after you open a can of worms, the only way to recan them is to use a bigger can.
Maybe they or someone else can figure out a way to reverse the google bomb. That would be better then trying to sue their way out of their predicament.
Sure, you have the right to free speech. However, if you're using somebody else's computer system to exercise that right, then the owner of that system also has some rights, including the right to impose reasonable rules, such as requiring people to be civil and stay ontopic. The fact is, griefers like this step on other people's free speech rights. To exercise my free speech rights, I need a forum. People who fill a forum with offtopic and malicious commentary make it useless, because nobody wants to wade through all the crap.
Spam is an example of this kind of abuse of free speech rights. Don't people have a fundamental right to tell you about herbal alternatives to Viagra? But you also have a right not to listen.
Anonymity is the problem here. The early Internet was a small, more-or-less cohesive community where anonymity was impossible. So they didn't bother to provide protection against misuse of anonymity. So there's no way to say, "I don't want to get any more email from that online pharmacy" or "This guy is not welcome in any forum I moderate." Eventually, we'll have some kind of ID certification system, and these problems will go away. In the meantime, nobody should claim a "right" to online anonymity — least of all, cyberbullies like this.
free speach on the internet? sure i'm all for it. what is free speach? surely not yelling fire in a crouded theatre. no more hiding behind the internet to spew hate,lible,and any other form of derision that would be actionable in the real world. go get em,and hang em high regards, mike
The public needs to know this information so they can determine if the courts acted correctly.
This smacks of the double standards given to those who cry rape, and I dislike it.
I dislike it enough, to automatically bias myself against these women. If they were so horribly wronged, they should stand up. Really.
Blar.
I noticed in my younger years that whenever I was trying to punch someone down I always felt some hate and anger at that moment. Race, religion, color or place of birth or age have nothing at all to do with it!
The point being that there are times when some really deserves your rage in this world and the last thing we need is courts getting all punitive about it.
The real answer to someone hating you is to hate them back. Who needs all this warm and fuzzy stuff that is all the fashon these days?
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Most of the time the person who is drunk and naked at a frat party isn't the one posting pictures on the internet. It would be impossible to count the number of times an ex-boyfriend post a passionate private video to an online porn site, or a passerby post a youtube video of an embarrassing moment.
Of course, people need to be careful about where and when they get drunk and stupid (never?) and who they allow to video them doing the nasty (no one,) but that doesn't make it right to post private moments, nor does it mean that the victims of that kind of invasion of privacy deserve the consequences.
If anything, I think it's a problem with our society that we are so ready to ostracize someone for being human. Most of us have done some stupid things we regret. Those that have not are either lieing or boring as hell. Few of us were caught on video doing it.
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Years ago, late '60s or early '70s, I was in the federal courthouse in Tulsa, OK. I remember seeing a sign on a door that read, "Prosecutors Will Be Violated!", and after asking around, I found out the office across the hall belonged to a a female prosecutor. At the time, it seemed to be a sophomoric joke, but I doubt that it would be tolerated today.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
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No one has the right to not feel threatened.
Funny, because the Supreme Court has held that "threats of violence are outside the First Amendment" (citation). Now, I should clarify, that's not to say you have a right to not feel threatened. You don't. But you also don't have carte blanche to threaten others.
This place is loaded with comments about a pair of bitchy law students, who couldn't handle online commentary...
The AutoAdmit controversy began even before one of the women, identified in court documents as "Jane Doe I," started classes in the fall of 2005, the lawsuit alleges. Doe I was alerted in the summer to an AutoAdmit comment thread entitled "Stupid Bitch to Attend Law School." The thread included messages such as, "I think I will sodomize her. Repeatedly" and a reply claiming "she has herpes." The second woman, Jane Doe II, was similarly attacked beginning in January 2007.
Yeah, internet has assholes on it. So what girls?
Both women tried in vain to persuade the administrators of the AutoAdmit.com site to remove the threads, according to the lawsuit. But then the story of the cyber-harassment hit the front page of The Washington Post, and the law school trolls became fodder for cable news shows. Soon after, the female law students, with help from Stanford and Yale law professors, filed the federal lawsuit in June 2007 seeking hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages.
Oh, go to the administrators asking them to make it stop. Okay, that's understandable... why the hell is this in the Washington post though?!
The Jane Doe plaintiffs contend that the postings about them became etched into the first page of search engine results on their names, costing them prestigious jobs, infecting their relationships with friends and family, and even forcing one to stop going to the gym for fear of stalkers.
Wow, Internet trolls succeed in committing libel and associating it with some fellow students in potentially damaging ways. It's on.
Why would you NOT sue these kids?
Support my political activism on Patreon.
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how real of a threat this poster really was.
People call for an end to "anonymous" slander without actually thinking through things rationally.
Jeez, I really do not know where to start on this one. This is going to turn into a rant but I hope to, by the end of it, reach somewhere sensible. Lets start with the most prominent point.
Nothing said on an online message board ( ESPECIALLY BY AN ANON.) means anything in the real world. If you say you are going to rape and murder a bunch of people on a message board it is more likely that you will not do it. You would not be posting about it, but instead be out raping and murdering except you are too much of a computer nerd to step out into the sun muchless kill someone. Certain forums will have different views on this. A forum for law students is clearly not a good place to do this as opposed to a place like off topic. That is where he made his first mistake. Law students would be the ones to take this stuff way too serious.
If the police started arresting everyone who makes a threat in a flame war half of us would be in jail. Hell I would have quite a few counts against myself. Who really means the shit they say on a message board when making a flame??
Thats just part of the "fun" you can have on the internet. Hell you do not even need to be anon, people just take shit too seriously. Once you log off, thats it. Things on an EZ board are only as real as you make them.
Once people realize that internet message boards are not to be taken seriously, they will probably increase their life spans by a few years from the stress reduction. People act as if getting flammed on the internet is going to ruin their lives, it means nothing. It means nothing to those who "get" the internet. Not everyone "gets" the internet. I thought most slashdotters understood this. But from the majority of responses they are talking about the legal implications of such threats. I see hundreds of said threats on message boards everyday followed by a LOL STFU NOOB ILL RAPE YOUR MOM AND BURN URE HOUSE DOWN. Insults continue to be thrown until the godwin rule kicks in. Everyone knows its just the internet that lets you say those dirty things. Its been going on for over a decade. Now the internet has reached critical mass and we have people like mom and dad using the internet that think every infomercial(read:flame bait) is the "real deal"
Do you honestly think he was going to rape her? I do not. These girls just got really mad that they had people bad mouthing them on an internet forum that means nothing. They most likely got rejected by some law firm because of their lack of qualifications and just convinced themselves the recruiter saw this post and took it to be truth.
Now, lets say the recruiter for these lost "prestigious jobs" sees this message board. If he reads this message whole and by the end of it decides that he does not want to hire her, he has failed on several critical levels.
I would go so far as to say I would not want to work with a company that displays such ignorance in their recruiting practices. The messages are firstly anonymous, so that is a red flag 1. The content and mode of discussion is not only untrusted and one sided, but clearly not professional. Red flag 2. Claiming to sodomize someone over the internet? Clearly a flame attempt to get attention. Red flag 3.
This again ties into the fact that people actually take flames written on message boards as truth. There is a skill we all learn growing up. The exact term fails me at the moment, but that is essentially filtering out what is untrue. If you assume everything you read to be true in this world, you should have about 500 products that will give you rock hard abs in just 3 minutes a week.
The same rules apply to the internet. They claim that the internet has evolved faster than the courts can clamor to moderate and control it. I believe this not to be true. The courts are making rapid advancement where money is at stake thes
Yaaar, they'll never take me alive!
That's what Christianity says. Eternal pain and suffering for those who reject Jebus.
But then again, the delusions of the religious always get a pass in our society...
Blar.
I've been told repeatedly online that my children should have to hang out with convicted child molesters because I feel that the molesters should be kept in jail, or allowed to live a free life after servicing time, but not be subjected the weird purgatory we have now with zones they can live in and the requirement to inform neighbors that they were convicted.
So gee...maybe you should get over yourself emo! For a redneck you sure are pretty PC.
Blar.
I completely disagree. If someone on an online game threatens someone else, how can the victim be sure the offender doesn't work for their isp? I play enough online games to get threatened occasionally. No, its not just "trash talk" its a verbal threat and should be treated as a criminal act just as it would in any public place. (Meaning the police should threaten them and then leave). People need to learn to control themselves before we reach the inevitable cybernetic merger, or things are going to be truly awful out there.
But there is a lot of jurisprudence about "true threats" that suggests a threat must be credible (among other things) before you have a right to silence someone or claim damages against them.
In this case, some of the posts included the girls' names, addresses, class schedules, gym locations, and times they could usually be found there, with exhortations to follow them and rape them.
That amount of detail makes the threat credible.
The challenge with this case is really about whether the trolling in question qualifies as a true threat. Presumably, the women were as anonymous as the trolls; is it possible to issue a credible threat against someone whose identity you cannot ascertain?
Presumably, yes, but in actually, false. The girls were named by name, and I believe there were even photos posted. The fact that they are named as Jane Does in this suit does not mean that they are unknown.
Thus the danger of the false presumption - the rest of your post, though accurate as a hypothetical, is wrong in this case.
The law is exceptionally narrow as the purpose and effect is not to criminalize hatred per se, but expressions of hatred towards a group. Nothing in the Criminal Code abrogates your right to hate others or your freedom of conscience, never mind that this would be impossible. Private communication is also excluded, so the Nazi groups or what have you can gather in their living rooms and hate people all they want. Essentially one cannot post a web site, march in a rally or distribute literature with the intention of spreading hatred towards an "identifiable group." Your point is well taken, however. What is an "identifiable group"? Britney Spears fans? Podiatrists?
I'd rather we not have this law and have hatred fight for space on the public forum on its merits, as all speech should. The only real way to fight intolerance and hatred is to confront it, not hide it.
This is not about privacy. It is also not, as the submitter wants us to think, about "Freedom of Speech".
Freedom of speech is the right to say what you think if you don't thereby infringe on other people's higher valued rights (by committing libel). It's not the right to hide behind a false identity and make libelous claims.
It is also not "privacy" to go out in public, use a fake name and yell something, independent of whether it's true or not.
Privacy is the right to decide for yourself how much of the "things you don't do in public" becomes public (that's a vague definition, given).
There is no reason to protect the identity of trolls. There is a reason to protect their right to say their honest opinion, however stupid it may be -- but not their wish to make libelous claims and go unpunished.
I don't know the context of this "threat", not having read the forum in question
There's your first problem - before passing judgment, it would be good to do at least a bit of cursory research.
but what do these women do when someone says "Fuck you" to them at a party or driving a car? Do they go running for a lawyer? In both cases, the threat would be much more credible than some anonymous net poster.
And there's your second problem - in spite of admitting that you've read nothing about this, including apparently the article, you're ready to make ad hominem attacks.
On the off chance you read this, the grandparent poster was wrong - the threats were graphic and specific, listing the girls' names, photos, and class and gym schedules. That becomes a credible threat.
We (society) afford you rights and place limits on those rights, in exchange we protect you from your fellow man. Them's the rules. "God" didn't give us any rights, your rights are, in practice, what society decides your rights are. Often I disagree with society, but not in this case.
Social contract theory, eh? I guess you could make a 'realist' case for your position that you don't have any rights that 'society' doesn't choose to recognize. After all, even if you believe you have the right to do X, Y and Z what difference does it make if the rest of the world tells you that you don't, right? You do realize, I hope, that social contract theory - to a cynical mind - reduces to nothing more than might makes right.
'Society' is able to dictate what rights its members have because 'society' is strong enough to do so. You can offer up what are essentially ad hoc moral justifications for 'society' to be able to define and deny rights but, in the end, it all comes down to power - the power of this 'society' to be able to regulate, control and enforce its wishes on those it claims authority over. Almost without exception, those acting on behalf of 'society' are really just a small collection of people (police, government officials, military, etc.) This small group may claim that it operates in the 'public interest' but who is to say that it really does? Even in a democratic society, power is very centralized and those few who wield that power can be quite difficult for ordinary citizens to hold accountable for any abuses they may make of their position.
When you say 'society' grants us rights and limits the exercise of those rights, you really mean that a small number of powerful people has chosen to tell the rest of us what we can and cannot do, in the name of 'society', and they are able to do this solely because they are strong enough to get away with it. Really, when I look at social contract theory, I wonder why social contract theorists even bother talking about the 'social contract' at all. They should just skip to the bottom line and call it 'rule of the strong' theory, because that's what it really is.
Other people will put pictures of you, drunk and naked, on THEIR web pages.
The right way to keep your reputation clean is not to try to hush up everything you do, but not to do things that reflect badly on you in the first place... duh.
I piss off bigots.
> How do you prove that John Doe made those comments and not John Doe's roommate, drunken frat brother, or someone who spoofed his MAC/IP?
The same way the RIAA does: trace it back to a computer & go with the preponderance of the evidence (not "beyond a reasonable doubt") as to who the user was. Of course, the RIAA isn't very reasonable about that, even when it can clearly be seen that someone else did it, but I hope these plaintiffs aren't like that.
In short, those sued will be looking for alibis and I reiterate my previous statement about them very, very likely being screwed unless they can credibly finger someone else as the culprit. Though if they are innocent, I sure hope they catch the assholes that did it.
In my opinion, whoever posted those things was obviously too stupid to pass to begin with, so it's just as well if they're kicked out of law school.
Here's where the hypocrisy comes in.
We know illegal felonious comments (threats of rape and murder) were allowed to remain posted on the website. We know the website administrators (including Ciolli) claim to have allowed those messages to remain posted in order to "protect" freedom of speech of the anonymous defendants. But why is freedom of speech OK in that case, but not OK when the Jane Does bring lawsuit against him? Was it because he suddenly found himself being dragged into the mix? Did he find out it was an awful thing having people making false accusations about him? Did he find out libel is NOT protected by freedom of speech after all?
He got a taste of what it's like to be libeled, slandered, and defamed in a horrid way and then suddenly changed his tune. He wanted to deny the Jane Does the freedom of speech and their freedom to bring lawsuit, but he didn't appear to be concerned about the harm caused by the messages posted by the defendants.
That's hypocrisy.
Camping on quad since 1996.
This sort of "speech" should not be tolerated anywhere. Womens' rights and their safety is far more important than the "right" for misogynists to remain anonymous. Allowing them to remain anonymous is a tacit acceptance of allowing hateful speech and the fostering of anti-women attitudes (at the school and in society as a whole). The concrete harm done to these women (and women in general) trumps the abstract "harm" to the troglodytes who posted the messages.
Women don't have - and should not have - any sort of 'right' not to be spoken ill of or insulted (excepting actual libel and slander, of course). Nobody has a right not to be offended and nobody has the right to tell others that their speech must be silenced and censored on ideological grounds in the way you're suggesting. You're making the mistake of thinking that you have the right to silence others simply because you don't like what they're saying. Your attempts to support your authoritarian position by saying that the things you're trying to keep other people from saying are 'harmful to women' just are not good enough. You can't make vague, nebulous claims of harm and then use them as justification to control other peoples actions and censor their speech. If that were permissible, then I could claim that your dogmatic, paternalistic cries for censorship were harmful to society in themselves and then I could demand that you be silenced. I'd have every bit as much justification for my calls for censorship as you have. If you can't respect other peoples right to speak - even if you don't like what they're saying - then you have no right to expect your own right to speak to be respected. If we don't all have the right to free speech, then none of us do.
This is why you have threads permanently deleted deleted after a half hour and all posters sharing the same username to prevent legal claims. Then you can have over 9000 threads about someone, they'll never never be subpoenaed because they just don't exist.
Dont be anonymous, join Anonymous.
12 angry men
"Nae Kin! Nae Quin! Nae laird! Nae master! We willna be fooled again!"
What's controversial here? People are being held accountable for the things they say. What's wrong with that?
The ability to attempt to disguise your real identity -- as most of us do here --- in no way absolves us of responsibility.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
But, if you identify the person who posted those remarks, they aren't anonymous. Why should the fact that software allows you to enter a phony name shield you from the legal repercussions of what he wrote?
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Nuts. Speech has more impact than any other behavior. If you disagree, let me send email to the next person who's looking at your resume
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Actually, yes, freedom of speech DOES and always has meant freedom from consequences.
Freedom of speech means freedom from consequences when such speech does not infringe on other rights.
For example, your right to freedom of speech is trumped by my right to think you're an asshole.
Your right to freedom of speech is trumped by my right to not get killed in a stampede of people fleeing a theater because you yell 'Fire!'
Your right to freedom of speech is trumped by my right to not have knowingly false statements maliciously spread about me, especially if those statements cause permanent harm to my reputation/income/etc.
Your right to freedom of speech does not extend to telling the Chinese state secrets.
But, your right to freedom of speech apparently DOES allow you to trump my right to freedom of speech as long as you spend more money speaking than I do.
paintball
You're a real radfem, aren't you?
In the United States, odds are that 1 in 6 women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime.
First, I don't believe the RAINN stats on rape. I don't believe that so many women get raped. I checked RAINN's sources and they don't really tell you where exactly they get their statistics. They do give a long list of different studies they supposedly used to get their numbers here:
http://www.rainn.org/get-information/statistics/sexual-assault-victims
but you really can't find where that 1 in 6 number comes from. They don't tell you that. They don't tell you because it's not a valid statistic. It's a product of the imaginations of the paranoid people working at RAINN. RAINN is full of radicals who are just looking for ways to inflate sex assault statistics to epidemic levels. Take a look at the FBI's rape statistics for some numbers that are more grounded in reality:
http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_04/offenses_reported/violent_crime/forcible_rape.html
RAINN is full of shit and so are you.
Women earn approximately $.80 to a man's $1
The pay gap is due entirely to the way the statistics are compiled. It completely ignores the fact that there are not equal numbers of men and women working in every field. Women are more likely to work part-time instead of full time. Even women working full time are likely to work fewer hours than men. They are more likely to leave their careers for extended periods of time. Women are more likely to chose to work in lower paying service industry positions than men. Women earn less money because they chose to earn less money. There is no pay gap when studies compare men and women doing similar jobs with similar levels of education, experience and seniority:
http://archives.cnn.com/2000/CAREER/trends/12/12/womenpay/index.html
http://www.reason.com/news/show/119920.html
The pay gap is another feminist myth, it's full of shit and so are you.
Most women in the US are not allowed to control their own bodies, as numerous State and Federal government regulations have been imposed on their reproductive systems and available medical procedures.
What the hell? I suppose you want all medical procedures for women to be completely unregulated? I'm willing to bet if that were the case you'd be bitching about how the government did nothing to protect women from unsafe medical procedures and fraudulent doctors. You're crazy. Women are fully able to 'control' their bodies.
The brunt of housework and child-rearing still falls primarily on women.
You make child rearing sound like some hellish chore or prison sentence. Women who feel like that don't have any business having kids in the first place. This will probably shock you, but many women *want* to have kids and they *want* to take care of them as the primary care taker. You are out of your mind and completely disconnected with reality. You've read one too many Dworkin books and they've fried your brain.
ALL of these forms of oppression stem from misogynistic beliefs--primarily pushed by those in power, but to a certain degree they are perpetuated by ignorant fools who buy into them.
Nearly all of the 'oppression' that people like you speak of is nothing more than an imaginary creation of your paranoia and victim complexes. You are a damn nut, and I'll not waste anymore time dissecting the rest of your drivel.
How does being drunk and naked at a PARTY reflect badly on somebody? Somebody who has never done that looks worse in my eyes.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Racism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of oppression need to be rooted out of society. Allowing these hateful ideas to be propagated anonymously is harmful to society and the oppressed minorities they target.
Who the hell are you to decide that certain ideas are harmful to society and shouldn't be allowed to be expressed, anonymously or otherwise? Who the hell are you to force your views on the subject on the rest of society? That's politically motivated censorship. That's exactly what it is whether you call it that or not.
Revealing the identities of the authors isn't going to lead to the widespread revocation of people's free speech rights. However, it might just teach some neanderthals to keep their disgusting mouths shut.
You want to intimidate those who express opinions you find distasteful or that you disagree with. You want to make people who say things you don't like shut up. Who the hell are you to decide who gets to speak? What if I decided that I didn't like what you were saying and then demanded that your personal information be posted? I'll bet you wouldn't spout off so much if your name and address were attached to your every post, either. Your position is pure authoritarianism - you just want to crush those you dislike and to hell with any consideration of rights or liberties. The problem with authoritarians like yourself is that you always assume that *you* will be the ones who get to decide what is and isn't allowed, what can and can't be said. People with authoritarian belief systems never pause to think of what their lives might be like if they were living under the sort of absolutist rule they dream about if the values of the rulers were different than their own. It's pure fucking hell, spanky, and that's why civilized people moved away from such thinking.
Petty dictators like you need to accept the fact that you don't control society and you never will. You're going to have to learn to tolerate the fact that there will always be people out there who you will disagree with, sometimes very strongly. If you can't learn to function in a society where people can freely disagree with you then you shouldn't expect any tolerance from others in return. If you want to act like a tyrant who believes they have the right to silence and oppress others who hold opinions they disagree with, then you should expect to be treated in the exact same way by everyone who disagrees with you.
So you find an IP address. The RIAA would just love it if somehow it were possible to conclusively prove a connection to an individual. It isn't. So I don't see how it is possible to connect anyone with an action "on the Internet".
Yes, this means that pretty much you can do, say or publish anything you want without any consequences, as long as it is on the Internet and you don't go bragging about it. Just about all of the hackers/crackers/script kiddies that have been caught were caught because of bragging. The few real RIAA victories have been because a tracable email address was connected with uploading music files to others.
Does anyone actually use their actual name when registering for forums anymore?
Wouldn't it be great if after all the time wasted they found the forum user's name to be: George Jetson or Fuq 0fF Biatchs.
I HATE TO DO THIS:
I managed to find the whole legal document this girls sent.
I still think its stupid, but I also think that, hey, if you explicitly threaten to RAPE someone (and yes, the girls do acuse a couple of ACs of it and yes, they did post explicitly that), then youre open to be law-fucked all over.
I appologize to anyone that might have felt offended by my initial knee-jerk reaction.
NO SIG
After going beyond the wired article, I withraw my initial position of this being a free speech thing.
They DO DESERVE to be exposed.
They actually DID threaten to rape with her FULL name.
Now that deserves some serious spanking.
NO SIG
I'm a long time veteran of autoadmit, but thankfully I was on vacation when the thread in question occurred. Knowing myself, I would jumped on the bandwagon and posted something stupid like dumb bitches or whatever. The tragedy is that lots of guys, being spurred by a single malicious individual, did exactly that. These guys were students at top law schools who had hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in their education(like the does). If they are outed, all of this will go down the drain.
I feel bad for the girls, who are innocent and were singled out through no doing of their own. Their lives have been ruined because people on the internet chose to gossip about them and google's caching of the site preserves this. I believe they are right to sue just as someone in the 18th century was right to sue over published libel.
I believe that the real blame here rests on the website's owner who refused to take the thread down even though he knew that it would cost the girls their jobs. The owner has already been punished enough. His job offer was rescinded when this came out.
95/100 threads on autoadmit are flame, and many of them are worse than the thread in question. I still return to autoadmit because it is one of the very few sites on the net where one can find genuinely intelligent people(slashdot seems to be another).
Okay. First of all, you realize that the Bill of Rights is actually the first ten amendments, right? The fact that there even are amendments should be enough to show that nothing in the Constitution is absolute!
:-)
Actually, the Constitution is considered a "living document." There are some that believe the Constitution to be enduring (Scalia being an example), but they are in the distinct minority. And even those extreme cases accept the use of amendments.
You may disagree with the unmasking of the punks that trashed these young women, but to deny that Freedom of Speech is not absolute is a bit odd.
Oliver Wendell Holmes' quote about "yelling fire in crowded theater" is the most common example of why these rights are not absolute, and rightfully so.
JAGga.me ----> Producing video games addressing emotional health and wellness issues affecting teens.
This is not a free speech issue [...]
and yet claim
[they] made [...] comments [...]
I think you need to get your story straight. Oh, and those comments would be tolerated in other settings, and you saying otherwise is meaningless.
-- arstchnca
--
So you are saying what? All women are weaker than men and less able to defend themselves, automatically?
Talk about a BS blanket statement
It's true. Just is. Sure, there's exceptions, but, overwhelmingly the odds are if you put 100 men on and 100 women on an island and there are no rules, the men will come out on top.
I know feminists who might come to blows with you just for implying tha
Yeah, and these very feminists are looking for laws against any expression of male power in the workplace because they know they cannot defend themselves. Feminism only exists because western men have decided to trade for that which men in other cultures simply take, and even the most strident feminist has absolutely no problem summoning the government to ensure such theft never takes place in western culture and many work to extend it around the world.
Heck, any number of women boxers or martial artists in general could (at least) surprise you or I in a physical confrontation.
Probably, unless I was a black belt boxer that could bench 400lbs and carried a pistol, in which case, they would not have good odds at all. Oh, sure, yes, there are some women out there that could beat the rear of many men, but for the most part, men are bigger, stronger, faster and more aggressive, and women are sitting ducks as a whole. Are there women out there that could kick my ass? Probably, evolution isn't about exceptions - its about larger trends, and civilization is nice and all, but ultimately, Darwin doesn't care about how women get pregnant and men are bred to reflect that.
wife has trained with Rorion Gracie for 5 years.
Big deal. If all of these body builders and ultimate fighting people were so fricking tough - why the hell are they not in the war!
They might be able to fight in some mock cage, but, let's see these guys have some real balls and walk down the streets of Ramadi in Iraq. It makes me sick to see all of this ultimate fighting and pro-wrestling circus crap on TV and these guys are acting like badasses when many of them can't be bothered to get in the war.
I'll tell you what. I'm no tough guy. I'm no bad ass. But, if I were twenty years younger, I'd be in Iraq right now, simply because, if I lived through it, no matter how tough someone said they were, I could say, I went through a real war. Toughness isn't flexing in a cage and having 5% body fat. Toughness is riding in an unarmoured HMMV convoy day in and day out wondering if you'll be take out next. Toughness is telling your blown up buddy to hang in there even though half his torso is gone. Toughness is getting blown up, being in a firefight, fighting every sensible instinct to run so that your teamates can get out alive.
Seriously, martial arts is overhyped. If you want a good account of martial arts vs western style fighting, how the hell did the USA successfully invade Okinawa, the birthplace of Karate, with 50,000 Americans killed or wounded, versus 200,000 Japanese -dead-. Suicide charges, ninja sneaking around, night fighting and all of this cartoon stuff they call serious fighting, and the USA kicked their asses with a bunch of conscripts from a country that teaches its children to hunt from an early age and thus kicked their ass.
Do you think women bodybuilders or powerlifters need (or want) a 110 pound rent-a-badge walking them to their cars?
Yeah, but how many women body builders are there? And look what it does to women? And, what if a woman body builder goes up against a male body builder?
I mean, I've never heard of an army where all the men got raped, but I could rattle off plenty of cases in the last century where indeed, mass rapes did take place. Even Boudica, probably the greatest of all women fighters, got raped.
Sorry, but your thesis is a joke. You might ask your feminist friends just how it is that women essentially came to be the property of men, and still are, in many parts of the world. Why can't -those- women defend themselves?
This is my sig.
History of the case here: http://www.abajournal.com/news/yale_students_unmask_anonymous_critics_legal_careers_at_risk/
I have been called the worse names in the book and had all sorts or horrible threats, but you know what, I don't care. It's the fucking internet. They should of contacted the forum moderator and had him remove the post and ban the accounts as I assume its in the logs for violation of the ToS. End of story. -Seth
Fortunately a man called Samuel Colt made it so that one's defense no longer relies entirely on physical strength.
You really need to read up on some WWII history if you think the reason Okinawa turned out the way it did was because the locals were trying to karate chop soldiers, especially considering the locals (Okinawans) weren't entirely happy with the Japanese pinning them between the proverbial rock and a hard place of the Japanese and American forces and their poor treatment by the Imperial forces.
I take it that you posted this AC because you don't agree. It's interesting that you mention employers and the state - groups who have disproportionate power over us. If we ever have an equal society, we won't need anonymity; the consequences for our actions will be precisely as they should be: eg people who behave loutishly may be shunned, but not condemned to poverty.
Yea, vanquish all the trolls! (hope I'm not modded troll)
Yeah, this is a massive oversimplification.
Normal people, men and women, when they argue, stand a few metres apart and shout at each other. Aggressive people (men and women, I happen to have mostly argued with more aggressive women), will stand within the other person's reachable space, and take an aggressive posture. This is the threatening behaviour. The thought in the back of your mind is that if you keep trying to make your point, will they snap and break the generally agreed upon rules of non-contact / non-violence? Even if, as is often the case, the threat is not real, the behaviour is still coercive.
As for all this talk of what scares a child, that's nonsense. When I was little I was scared of dogs that barked, thinking that the noise itself was indication of aggression when it actually wasn't. The reason pet dogs aren't outlawed as a threat to society is that young children have not yet developed the ability to understand a situation or person emotionally, and will more likely be scared of the loudest (or less frequently raised) voice rather than the most aggressive tactic used by either person.
Two or three guys could just as easily jump another guy on the way to the office as they could most women. You make it sound like all men are kung-fu experts or armour plated or something. Most people only need to be outnumbered or surrounded or caught off guard and they're just as vulnerable as anyone else.
The fundamental issue at the very bottom of this mire that is internet trolling and harrassment is not whether to protect the privacy of citizens or whether freedom of speech is more or less important than anything else. Instead it is one about basic human behaviour - what one could call 'secular moral'. This is things like trustworthyness, reliability and a certain measure of willingness to fit into society.
In the case of trolling I think we are seeing important principles, like freedom of speech and right to privacy, being abused to take away people's right to assemble peacefully. So, is the privacy and freedom of speech of a single bully more important than the rights of many to go about their legal business?
In some jurisdictions, a threat to cause physical harm is considered assault. It's not about free speech, it's not even about the right to slander (which is not legal, though some free speech advocates may wish it were), threats are an act of violence. If somebody threatens to physically harm you, and those threats are creditable, it's not psychologically very different to actually being harmed.
You changing the subject and altering history a bit doesn't change the facts.
Women (and men) are responsible for their own defense.
That was my "thesis" and if you don't like it then that is fine but that doesn't automatically make it wrong.
I used martial arts and bodybuilding as an example that women can be equal to men and you changed the subject.
Your appeal to patriotism was pointless.
If you want to play with the statistics then I'll give all 100 women (on the island of yours) handguns and tell them it is ok to kill any man who makes them feel threatened and make sure they are mentally equipped to do so.
Now what do you do to change the subject or odds? We can do this all day. In fact, I often do.
It is my job.
Your idea of what happened in Okinawa is mistaken as well. Look into it more before you make more references to "cartoon ninjas". I'm talking about reality, not fantasy, here.
The nature of your comments seem to make a case that you've never been exposed to real violence.
The "20 years younger" comment leads me to believe you haven't been in any of the wars (real or fabricated) that we've had either.
For the record: I *have* had a buddy blown in half in a Humvee. Fortunately I also had some make it home as well.
I'm talking from experience. Where are you talking from?
assertion: a positive statement, usually made without an attempt at furnishing evidence
The internet CAN be used for serious purposes, but it can also be used for less serious purposes. The internet is like a baseball bat; you can play games with it, or use it to bash someone with.
From TFA: "Women named Jill and Hillary should be raped."
I'm wondering under what law anybody could be prosecuted for that? Yes, it's beneath contempt, but it's also protected speech. If my bank pisses me off and I say it should be robbed, I should be prosecuted? And if there was no prosecution, why should the trolls' victims be allowed to unmask them?
If I was the pathetic asshole who posted the offending phrase, I'd counter sue for invasion of privacy. I would have posted this anonymously just for effect, but I don't want to wait a "slow down cowboy" hour.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
The Federalist and anti-Federalist papers were originally anonymous broadsides and newspaper articles. Sometimes the ONLY way to express a controversial opinion in a closed society is anonymously. Considering the con-gress just eviscerated the searches must have individual warrants clause of the 4th amendment I think the U.S. is increasingly becoming a closed society. This is just another example IMO of our rights being stripped from us right before our very eyes.
And no INAL, but I think any reasonably intelligent person can parse words well enough to engage with laws and in fact ought to if "democracy" is to mean anything at all.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
Tell that to the founding fathers who wrote the Federalist, and anti Federalist papers in a 100% anonymous fashion.
"The tradition of anonymous speech is older than the United States. Founders Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay wrote the Federalist Papers under the pseudonym "Publius," and "the Federal Farmer" spoke up in rebuttal. The US Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized rights to speak anonymously derived from the First Amendment.
The right to anonymous speech is also protected well beyond the printed page. Thus, in 2002, the Supreme Court struck down a law requiring proselytizers to register their true names with the Mayor's office before going door-to-door.
These long-standing rights to anonymity and the protections it affords are critically important for the Internet. As the Supreme Court has recognized, the Internet offers a new and powerful democratic forum in which anyone can become a "pamphleteer" or "a town crier with a voice that resonates farther than it could from any soapbox."
http://www.eff.org/issues/anonymity
See also:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1568/is_n11_v26/ai_16763603
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
I didn't change the subject at all. You've lost the point. You argue that equality is based on physical strength and it isn't. So, in your mind, you have to conjure up some arbitrary list of ways that women can be the same and they aren't. Celebrate that women are different. Pretending everybody is the same is not necessary because you don't need to be the same to be =equal=. Equality is a spiritual thing, it's about us having souls and being possessed of some shred of free will. And you've completely lost the point.
If you want to play with the statistics then I'll give all 100 women (on the island of yours) handguns and tell them it is ok to kill any man who makes them feel threatened and make sure they are mentally equipped to do so.
Again you lose the point that women need to be defended by men, from men. There needs to men that police men, and protects them from other men. If you can't recognize that basic need then, I can't help you. But, if you say that women do not need to be protected, then I'd say that's great because as a rule, I agree with you on self defense being a personal responsibility and to that end I think police are not capable of "protecting and defending" and at all and I question the need to pay for something that cannot do what it says.
The "20 years younger" comment leads me to believe you haven't been in any of the wars (real or fabricated) that we've had either.
No, I haven't. There weren't any long wars when I was younger so I didn't see a point in enlisting. I grew up during the Cold War anyway, so if there was going to be a war, civilians would wind up getting killed in droves from nukes and other stuff.
Your idea of what happened in Okinawa is mistaken as well. Look into it more before you make more references to "cartoon ninjas". I'm talking about reality, not fantasy, here.
My point is that the entire martial arts and ultimate fighting and wrestling is a fantasy. You have all of these people being prepared for entirely the wrong kind of conflicts. You said it yourself... the easiest way to be prepared is to know how to use a handgun.
But with respect to the "warrior" spirit...In a knock down drag out war, ultimate fighting, martial arts...those things don't matter in a world where rifles are accurate, artillery is accurate, bombs do not miss, and the radioactive radius of a single 10MT bomb. Fortunately, the USA has been very fortunate to not have to fight a power that has the same sort of weapons that we do. But, there will be a time, if we are not educating geeks such as myself to stay ahead, when our soldiers will be on the receiving end of cluster bomb drops, JDAM munitions and everything else science has given to the fighting man... and, they will be shooting back at robots in the sky that can be massed produced.
If we took all of these martial arts and fighting things, and replaced them all with calculus, we'd be a lot farther ahead of the game. Math is useful. Karate is not.
And yeah, you could kick my ass, for sure, but I'd still be right.
This is my sig.
Let's see if I can follow your logic here. Pseudo-Anonymous people on a blog post photos, home address, email addresses, telephone numbers, and full legal names, of women accompanied by death threats and rape threats. That's perfectly ok.
The women seek to have the identities of the people who posted their identities revealed, that's horrible and makes them asswipes?
Can you explain where you're coming from here, because honestly I'm not following you. Why is it ok for the "let's rape the bitches" crowd to post the names and other personal information of the women, but it isn't ok for us to know the identities of the people doing the posting?
"Mission Accomplished" -- George W. Bush May 1, 2003
For the record: I *have* had a buddy blown in half in a Humvee. Fortunately I also had some make it home as well.
I'm talking from experience. Where are you talking from?
By the way, even though I disagree with you as to the linking between equality from physical fighting prowess, I am grateful for your service. I'm an old geeky man that can't hardly see and has slow reflexes, but yes, if I were younger and Iraq were there, I would go, if I could, not for the flag or anything stupid like that, but because, there are too many good people over there in Iraq and it seems to me that this country has hung them out to dry. It's like, you see an old lady lost in the city, and you help her. You see somebody trying to move a thing, and you help them, and you see your country is sending a lot of good people over to fight a war, and I'd think, jeez, that in some way you would want to join them and help them. It's not about the cause of freedom or george bush and from the vets I know, unit cohesion is way more about just keeping your buddies alive than it is about cheering on the red white and blue.
But as you come back from that, you need to remember that freedom and equality comes from the idea that we each have souls. It doesn't matter if a woman is as strong as a man or even if people have the same utility. A man in a wheelchair has just as much equality as someone who can bench 500lbs and run a 5 minute mile. Race, sex, all of the human markings we create to label and create people with is entirely outside of what equality is. Equality is to say that we are all judged by someone some day, which I call God, and that, we have freedom in our lives in recognition of the idea that we be held to answer for our lives to some higher power.
I could babble on endlessly, but do read the 2nd paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson said it best:
"We hold these truths to be self evident. We are endowed by the creator with certain inalienable rights, that among them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
Get it? You don't have to have people be of the same physical or even mental skill or -any- human unit of measurement to be equal. It's God's call, not yours, and not mine. All you can do is measure people by their utility to some particular task. So, you can say that women are equal to men, and men can be stronger than women, and, actually women have better stamina. It might be the case that women make better fighter pilots because they are physiologically more adept at dealing with g-forces and they weigh less on average, and it might be the case that men might make better infantry because they are bigger and can probably carry more stuff on average, but, it doesn't mean that men and women are not equal.
This is my sig.
They might be able to fight in some mock cage, but, let's see these guys have some real balls and walk down the streets of Ramadi in Iraq. It makes me sick to see all of this ultimate fighting and pro-wrestling circus crap on TV and these guys are acting like badasses when many of them can't be bothered to get in the war.
Murdering a bunch of innocent people defending their families does not make one a bad ass. It makes one a fucking pussy. Sure, it takes courage to risk getting shot, but much, much more to refuse to go murder those innocent people so some sick fuckers can get richer and our country gets robbed blind. Plus, by refusing you demonstrate that your not a complete fucking moron.
So you are a pussy, every single American soldier in Iraq is a pussy and a traitor.
Kindly STFU. Everybody is stupider for having read that inane bullshit you spouted.
In conclusion, go die in a fire.
For the record: I *have* had a buddy blown in half in a Humvee. Fortunately I also had some make it home as well.
It is *never* fortunate when an American soldier makes it home alive from Iraq. That is the greatest tragedy of the whole sordid affair. Murderous scum working against America should die in the far away land they raped to make a quick buck out of my pocket while betraying their country.
Fuck each and every one of the traitors.
You're an idiot. Slander, libel, and threats are illegal. Sounds like all three were present in the postings. No civilized person would think that these things shouldn't be illegal. And if they are legalized, it should be e.g. their father/brother/boyfriend/husband's right to mercilessly savage the person who did it. So OK - let's make all speech of any sort legal. Let's also revoke rights of protection from physical reprisal from the speaker in cases of threats, libel, or slander.
Alternatively, you could just kiss my ass. Free speech with guaranteed right of non-juridical, physical reprisal is a logical contradiction. But foaming-mouthed cretins like you and your ilk are clearly incapable of seeing anything so obvious.
The solution for bad speech is good speech.
You motherfucker.
Solove is not nearly as sympathetic.
"Part of reason people were so upset with Anthony Ciolli was that they believe he stuck to his guns and defended things on free speech grounds," Solove says. "People want to see some sort of contriteness."
In the fantasy world of this guy "people are upset" because sued person is some kind of sympathetic hero, AND NOT BECAUSE HE WAS NOT INVOLVED IN ANY RELEVANT WRONGDOING, SO ATTACKING HIM IS FUNDAMENTALLY WRONG. I am truly impressed with the amount of twisting the facts in a single sentence. He teaches future lawyers -- no wonder those lawyers then proceed to troll message boards for lawsuit material.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Yeah, I think it's clear that the (effective) statement "I'm going to rape you" goes beyond just "feeling" threatened...