California Family Fights For Privacy, Relief From Cyber-Harassment

theodp writes "Just days after his daughter Nikki's death in a devastating car crash, real-estate agent Christos Catsouras clicked open an e-mail that appeared to be a property listing. Onto his screen popped his daughter's bloodied face, captioned with the words 'Woohoo Daddy! Hey daddy, I'm still alive.' Now he and his wife are attempting to stop strangers from displaying the grisly images of their daughter — an effort that has transformed Nikki's death into a case about privacy, cyber-harassment and image control. The images of Nikki, including one of her nearly-decapitated head drooping out the shattered car window, were taken as a routine part of a fatal accident response and went viral after being leaked by two CHP dispatchers. 'Putting these photos on the Internet,' says the family's attorney, 'was akin to placing them in every mailbox in the world.'"

Comments

Re:The 2 responsible should be fired

[troll8901]

1. They should lose any pensions and should never be able to work in law enforcement again...
2. If this is a crime then they should be prosecuted as criminals.

If these were law, persons of authority making a mistake, will be receiving harsher punishments than criminals.

This will deter good people from joining the police and patrol positions, and attract bad, smart people into joining the police and patrol positions.

Re:Parent implies link to virus!

[schmiddy]

tl;dr If you go to her name dot net the video is a virus.

You don't need to post cliffnotes summaries of your slashdot posts, or any other writing for that matter. If an ADHD Windows-using teenage reader is too jacked up on Mountain Dew to read the three concise sentences you wrote, too bad for him, let him run the virus-video.