Archive for the ‘Cyber Civil Rights’ Category
Identifying Those Responsible for a “Living Horror” and Its Signficance for Proposed Federal Law
posted by Danielle Citron
In what can only be described as the worst side of humanity, the bulletin board Dreamboard hosted a members-only sharing of child pornography, particularly of children under 12. New members could join the board only if they posted child pornography. Members had to continue to post images of child porn every 50 days or face removal. The rules of the board, printed in English, Russian, Japanese, and Spanish, included: (1) “Keep the girls under 13, in fact, I really need to see 12 or younger to know your[sic] a brother,” (2) “don’t avoid nudity in previews. I will NOT accept you if there’s no nudity. And my definition of nudity is pussy or anal in the shot. You just waste your own time if you don’t do this. Because you will not get in, if you don’t follow the rules.” One section of Dreamboard was titled “Super Hardcore,” and the rules required images and videos of “very young kids, getting fucked, and preteens in distress, and or crying. . . . If a girl looks totally comfortable, she’s not in distress, and it does NOT belong in this section.” This part of the site featured images of adults having violent sexual intercourse with very young children, including infants. One file was entitled “2yo assfuck she cries for mommy nasty pthc pedo 1 yo 3 yo 4 yo.” The board amassed over 120 terabytes of violent sexual rape and abuse of children.
According to the rules of the site, members were to use encryption technologies to prevent detection. The rules specified precisely which encryption technologies and proxy servers should be used and which should be avoided. Members did not use their real names, but instead screen names to conceal their identities. All of this suggests that the board went to great lengths to secure their anonymity.
Early this month, Attorney General Eric Holder, Jr. announced that federal investigators has charged 72 people for violating child pornography laws and more than 50 people have been arrested in the United States. The defendants included doctors, lawyers, police officers, and a Navy commander, according to the Ellis County Observer. Thirteen of those charged have pled guilty, and four members have been sentenced between 20 and 30 years. Around 600 people from around the world were members of the bulletin board, which has been shut down. The bulletin board used a server in Atlanta. As Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer explained, the site “was a living horror.” John Morton, director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, declined to say how investigators overcame the technological precautions used by some of the members. He did tell the New York Times: “To those inclined to abuse small children, know this: this isn’t a place on the Internet or the planet in which you are truly safe. It may take us some time, it may take us some effort, but we will find you regardless of a screen name, a proxy server or an encryption effort, period.” Read the rest of this post »
August 18, 2011 at 11:48 am
Posted in: Anonymity, Architecture, Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Cyber Civil Rights, Privacy, Privacy (Law Enforcement), Social Network Websites
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Scoring Ourselves to Economic Death
posted by Danielle Citron
In The New York Times, Stephanie Rosenbloom asks readers to “imagine a world in which we are assigned a number that indicates how influential we are.” That number would help determine our success at getting a job, hotel-room upgrade, break on a service, or free samples at the store. As Rosenbloom tells us, imagine no more, companies, such as Klout, PeerIndex, and Twitter Grader, are mining our social media activities and assigning us influence scores. Social scoring is based on our online social network activity, including the number of followers, friends, and the extent to which our online activity gets people moving. If if you recommend a salon to your social network friends and they follow suit, your good word has two functions. You’re doing a good thing for your friends and the salon (let’s hope), and now you’re doing good for you. Because you have inspired people to take action, your influence score may rise. In the present, people with high scores get preferential treatment by retailers. More than 2,500 marketers are now using Klout’s data. Audi will begin offering Facebook users promotions based on their Klout score. The Las Vegas Palms Hotel and Casino is using Klout data to give highly rated guests an upgrade or tickets to a show. In the future, those scores could be used by prospective employers, friends, and dates.
On the one hand, this market trend has something important to commend — its visibility. Consumers can find out their influence scores and work to raise them. By contrast, the impact of behavioral advertising is often hidden. We are tracked and scored in databases and have no idea how it shakes out. Joe Turow’s excellent book Niche Envy explains that consumers know very little about how their data personalizes market transactions. Some individuals may end up as haves and others as have-nots, but neither group knows the extent of it. As Turow explains, “our simple corner store is turning into a Marrakech bazaar–except that the merchant has been analyzing our diaries while we negotiate blindfolded, behind a curtain, through a translator.” On the other hand, the information isn’t perfect and the algorithms secret so people may waste time doing things that they believe will raise their scores but don’t. But that isn’t really troubling, unless every job or blog post had the effect we hoped it might. What’s troubling is the trend’s implications for society and culture. It seems old school to say that people blog, make friends, and engage in online chats to play, experiment, and create culture. Now, they may feel pressured to do all of these things as a matter of economic necessity. We may forgo experimentation for product endorsements, and idle chatter for better job prospects. This makes our children’s choice to engage with social media seem like less of choice than a carefully cultivated necessity. It also spells far more trouble for people who are already victimized, those who cyber mobs target with lies, threats, technical attacks, and privacy invasions. They go offline or write under pseudonyms to protect themselves. We now know that those choices (if we can call it that) cost more economically than they already do aside from the many other costs that my work discusses. I imagine there’s more to this influence score story but I thought I’d share my initial take.
June 28, 2011 at 6:24 pm
Posted in: Advertising, Architecture, Culture, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, Google & Search Engines, Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Web 2.0
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Bullet, So Not Dodged
posted by Danielle Citron
The question that I had been dreading came at last: “Mom, can I have a Facebook page?” My daughter provided a strong defense: she’s 13, so she meets Facebook’s Terms of Service age requirement; she’s nearly an adult in her religion’s eyes (her bat mitzvah is in a week); past practices proves she’s responsible; and well, she feels ready. (And I just discovered, she’s done her homework: see this Yahoo Answers! “My mom won’t let me get a Facebook page, how do I convince her?” thread that I found on my computer).
Next came the conversation. We talked about how increasingly social media activity is part of one’s life’s biography. Anything said and done in social network spaces becomes part of who you are in our Information Age. Colleges may ask for your Facebook password. Over 70% of employers look at social media data for interviewing and hiring (and sad to say, the outcomes are grim for applicants who over 60% of the time don’t get the interview or job due to social network profiles). It’s not just what you post that speaks volumes — your social network (friends and their friends) tells some of your story for you. There goes any control that you thought you had. FB users often wrestle with whether they should de-friend those whose online personas don’t match their sensibilities (or the way in which they want others to perceive them). This means that users need to keep a careful eye on their friends’ profiles (as well as ever-changing privacy settings).
That’s a lot of responsibility. Or, as Bill Keller of the New York Times put it when he allowed his 13-year old daughter to join Facebook, he felt “a little as if I had passed my child a pipe of crystal meth.“ Beyond the potential privacy and reputational concerns that accompany social media use, an online life has other potential perils, like overuse (and thus inattention to studies, face-to-face family time, etc.) that cyber-pessimists underscore (see Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows). And bullying, serious harassment, bigotry increasingly appear in mainstream social media in ways that kids can’t necessarily avoid (my work explores those problems, see here, here, and here, as well as terrific work by guest bloggers Ari Waldman and Mary Anne Franks). Of course, there’s also lots of positive stuff emerging from these networked spaces. Social media outlets like Facebook allow us to enact our personalities. They let us express ourselves in ever-changing and expanding ways. FB and other outlets host civic engagement as Helen Norton and I have emphasized.
I wonder, too, if my kid has a meaningful choice. Can digital natives really stay away from social media if all of their friends socialize there? And will employers and colleges expect that applicants partake in these activities because everyone else does? Someday, will resisting having a Facebook profile express something negative about you? Will it signal that you’re not socially adjusted or successful? As Scott Peppet underscores in his work, we may be forced to give up our privacy to show that we are indeed healthy, social, smart, and the like. That’s a lot to process, right? I’m going to chew on this a while. Your thoughts are most welcome!
June 4, 2011 at 11:19 am
Posted in: Architecture, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, Google & Search Engines, Privacy, Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Web 2.0
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Thoughts on Snyder v. Phelps and Future Cases
posted by Danielle Citron
Thanks so much to Professor Neil Richards (who generously serves as our First Amendment guest expert) for his thoughts on Snyder v. Phelps. This post aims to build on his insights and contemplates the opinion’s implications for cases of targeted online hate. In Snyder, Justice Roberts, speaking for the majority, underscored that speech on public affairs “occupies the highest rung of the hierarchy of First Amendment values” and thus deserves “special protection.” The majority contrasted speech on “matters of purely private significance,” explaining that it enjoys less rigorous First Amendment protection because restrictions on such speech fail to threaten “meaningful dialogue of ideas” or to risk “‘self-censorship’ on matters of public import.” Seemingly reflecting its intention to chart a wide territory for matters of public import to provide breathing speech for public discourse, the majority provided select, narrow examples of purely private speech, such as an individual’s credit report and videos of someone engaging in sexually explicit acts. The majority found that the Church engaged in speech on public affairs because it critiqued broad policies such as the government’s stance on gays in the military (even though some of its signs did target Matthew Snyder and his family) and because the protest occurred in a “public place adjacent to a public street,” the archetype of a traditional public forum that enjoys special First Amendment protection.
The majority rejected the Snyder family’s argument that the protests constituted personal attack on private individuals because Westboro had long spoken on the subjects addressed in its picketing and because “no pre-existing relationship or conflict” existed between Westboro and the Snyders that might suggest that “Westboro’s speech on public matters was intended to mask an attack on Snyder over a private matter.” In other words, the Court seems to be saying that Westboro’s speech did not concern a “purely private matter” because the group had long held hateful views (such as “God Hates Fags”) and because it had no personal relationship or conflict with the Snyders before the attack. Herein lies a concern with the Court’s division of the speech universe between speech on public matters and those involving “purely“ private ones. Some severely emotionally-damaging harassment of individuals stems from a perpetrator’s general hateful beliefs and involves victims who are strangers to the perpetrator.
Consider a neo-Nazi group’s online harassment of Bonnie Jouhari. Posters on a white supremacist website targeted Ms. Jouhari, a civil rights advocate and mother of a biracial girl. They revealed her home address and her child’s picture. The site showed a picture of Ms. Jouhari’s workplace exploding in flames next to the threat that “race traitors” are “hung from the neck from the nearest tree or lamp post.” Posters included bomb-making instructions and a picture of a hooded Klansman holding a noose. Ms. Jouhari suffered headaches and anxiety, and her daughter was diagnosed as suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder. With the majority’s reasoning in hand, perpetrators of similar attacks might insist that intentional infliction of emotional distress claims should fail because they had long held discriminatory views, which can be understood as political objections to anti-discrimination laws, and had no previous contact with the individuals that they targeted. They might contend that such attacks constituted protest on a matter of public concern, not a purely private matter deserving less First Amendment protection. Justice Breyer, in concurrence, alluded to just such a problem. Breyer asked: “suppose that A were physically to assault B, knowing that the assault (being newsworthy) would provide A with an opportunity to transmit to the public his views on a matter of public concern. The constitutionally protected nature of the end would not shield A’s use of unlawful, unprotected means. And in some circumstances the use of certain words as means would be similarly unprotected.”
March 6, 2011 at 2:44 pm
Posted in: Constitutional Law, Cyber Civil Rights, First Amendment, Tort Law
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A Few Preliminary Thoughts on Snyder v. Phelps
posted by Neil Richards
This morning the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Snyder v. Phelps, No. 09-751, holding that a military funeral protest by the Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church was protected by the First Amendment, and did not give rise to civil liability under the state law torts of intentional infliction of emotional distress (IIED), invasion of privacy, or civil conspiracy. The case has generated a lot of media attention, in part because it offered a chance to see whether the Roberts Court would continue its trend of retaining or expanding strong First Amendment protections. (In United States v. Stevens 130 S.Ct. 1577 (2010), which I blogged about here last year, the Court claimed fidelity to the existing structures of First Amendment law, even though it seems to have expanded corporate speech protections in Citizens United 130 S.Ct. 876 (2010), and cut back on incitement doctrine in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, 130 S.Ct. 2705 (2010)). Snyder v. Phelps is also notable because the defendant, Fred Phelps, is possibly the most unappealing First Amendment claimant that has made it to the Supreme Court. In an opinion by Chief Justice Roberts, the Court upheld the funeral protest, essentially holding that speech on matters of public concern made peaceably in a public space receives protection even if it causes significant psychological and emotional harm. As the Chief Justice concluded:
Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and—as it did here—inflict great pain. On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker. As a Nation we have chosen a different course—to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate. That choice requires that we shield Westboro from tort liability for its picketing in this case.
There is a lot to say about this important decision, but a few preliminary observations struck me as especially interesting. First, the holding in the case seems to be correct, at least as a matter of fidelity to existing First Amendment precedent. In Falwell v. Flynt, 485 U.S. 46 (1988), the Court held that IIED suits by public figures had to satisfy the protective actual malice standard of New York Times v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964), continuing the trend of First Amendment cases protecting speech on matters of public concern even if they caused emotional injury. Some observers thought that Snyder was a chance for the Court to halt the trend, since Snyder, the plaintiff in this case, was merely the father of an ordinary soldier killed while serving in Iraq and not a public figure. What’s interesting about today’s opinion is that the Court sidestepped this question entirely, holding that the nature of the speech was a matter of public concern and thus protected. The Court held that the Church’s rather distasteful message – that God hates America and is punishing it for its tolerance of homosexuality, particularly in the armed forces – was principally a commentary on public affairs rather than a private act of harassment against the Snyder family. Again, this is consistent with the broad theme of modern First Amendment law that speech on matters of public concern (especially politics) is entitled to very strong protection, and cannot be regulated or made the subject of civil liability even when (like this speech) it is both offensive to many and causes significant harm.
The second aspect of this case that’s notable is what it says about tort liability and free speech. Dan Solove and I have argued (here) that torts are most threatening to the First Amendment when they allow the state to control the content of public debate. Snyder is certainly consistent with that theory, and it seems to all but rule out liability for IIED when the speech at issue is about a matter of public concern. The Court also ruled that the invasion of privacy (intrusion upon seclusion) claim for funeral disruption violated the First Amendment because the speech was protected, and the captive audience doctrine did not save Snyder’s claim. The invasion of privacy claim is odd, because it seems that the district court in this case mis-applied Maryland law. Although the intrusion upon seclusion tort would be violated (and probably could to impose liability constitutionally) if a protestor disrupted a funeral by entering a church or menacing a gravesite, those facts weren’t present here. (In fact, the concurrence by Judge Shedd at the Fourth Circuit level made exactly this point, but the point wasn’t preserved on appeal). So in reality, the invasion of privacy claim boils down to something like “you hurt my feelings when you picketed the funeral from a public place”; in other words, a classic IIED claim.
There are thus lots of questions about the relationship between tort liability and free speech that the Court refused to decide and remain open. For instance, the Court tells us that speech on “matters of public concern” is protected, which it defines as “a subject of general interest and of value and concern to the public.” But it doesn’t define private speech, so we don’t really know how broad the “public speech” category is. Presumably, because the Court uses a kind of “enquiring minds want to know” standard, it’s a rather broad category, but it’s hard to be sure from this opinion. The Court does hint in a couple of places that personally directed harassment, speech to a small number of people, and the publication of someone else’s sex tape would be “private speech” and more readily amenable to regulation based on their content. In addition, the Court refused to rule on a second IIED claim, one arising from a post on the Church’s website that described the funeral protest in detail. The court noted only that “an Internet posting may raise distinct issues in this context,” and declined to rule on the question. This allows the possibility that the Court could create a separate category of cyber-harassment, though given the overall tenor of the opinion, I think this possibility is unlikely to occur in practice. It is interesting to see the Court treading warily in the Internet speech context, however.
The third notable aspect of this case is Justice Alito’s dissent. Last year in Stevens, he dissented from the Court’s protection of animal cruelty videos, apparently on the ground that certain images are so horrible that society can regulate them. Today, he also seemed outraged by the emotionally harmful nature of the Church’s protest, and would have allowed the state to regulate the protest by holding that the tort actions weren’t protected by the First Amendment. Alito seems willing to approve a per se rule that funerals call for special sensitivity and special protection against “emotional assaults.” But reading this opinion together with his Stevens dissent, it appears that Justice Alito is the most willing member of the current Court to allow regulation of speech based upon its morally objectionable nature or its emotionally harmful content. It will be interesting to see how he rules the next time the Court hears a hate speech case, if only to test his fidelity to this principle. If his vote in that future case is consistent with his vote today, Justice Alito may be the best friend of anyone who seeks a broader protection against hate speech and other words that wound.
Finally, although the case is something of a victory for orthodox free speech theory, there is one note of concern for free speech advocates, which is the opinion’s toleration of “free speech zone” theory. The opinion notes with approval that the funeral protest took place from a free speech zone from behind a protective fence, and notes at the end that even though Phelps’ speech was protected, it would certainly be amenable to possibly aggressive time, place, and manner restriction. If, as Tim Zick suggests in his excellent recent book Speech Out of Doors, spatial tactics have become the new frontier of free speech protection, Snyder v. Phelps possibly moves us even further in that direction, for all of its protection of the funeral protest at issue. So the real message to states from Snyder v. Phelps might be not that lots of speech is protected, but as a blueprint for ways to regulate lots of speech in the future.
March 2, 2011 at 6:06 pm
Posted in: Constitutional Law, Courts, Current Events, Cyber Civil Rights, First Amendment, Media Law, Privacy, Supreme Court
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Super on Egypt and the Trajectory of Civil Rights Movements
posted by Danielle Citron
My colleague David Super has an insightful op-ed in today’s Baltimore Sun entitled “In Egypt, Treading the Path of Civil Rights.” Many of you know David’s important scholarship, which reconstructs an intellectual framework for anti-poverty law (see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here). Here is his superb op-ed:
These opportunities come once in a generation, social movements whose cause is so manifestly just, and whose potential is so transformative, that they rise above the clutter of ordinary politics. The civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez and others inspired a generation as it overcame Klansmen, brutal sheriffs and growers’ thugs. Two decades later, we watched in awe as the brave people of Eastern Europe brought down one repressive communist dictatorship after another. Over the past three weeks, millions of Egyptians matched the bravery of these visionaries.
These movements have a palpable continuity. The civil rights movement refuted Soviet propaganda that free societies are incapable of social justice. Likewise, the people of Tunisia, Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries find inspiration in the popular revolutions that brought down communism. But they are also heirs of King and Chavez: As ubiquitous as the slogans against the regime have been calls of “Peaceful!” and calls for giving voice to the poor and unemployed.
The contrast between Egyptians’ jubilation over President Hosni Mubarak‘s departure and the trepidations expressed in the U.S. and elsewhere is disappointing. Some seem eager to see the military preserve the oppressive regime that former generals Mubarak and Vice President Omar Suleiman led. This would be tragic. Parallels from the civil rights movement and Eastern Europe’s liberation suggest these fears are unfounded. Read the rest of this post »
February 14, 2011 at 12:55 pm
Posted in: Civil Rights, Current Events, Cyber Civil Rights
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Salutary Legislative Efforts to Permit Pseudonymous Litigation
posted by Danielle Citron
Cyber harassment often invades victims’ privacy by exposing their sensitive personal information, revealing photographs, and the like. Because search engines reproduce information cached online, time’s passage cannot alleviate their reputational, emotional, and physical damage. Unlike newspapers, which were once only easily accessible in libraries after their publication, search engines now index all content on the web, and can produce it instantaneously. Victims must live with digital privacy invasions that are deeply humiliating, reputation-harming, and potentially dangerous, as well as searchable and accessible from anywhere, and by anyone, in the world. Often, the information is taken out of context, producing a distorted and damaging view of the person.
While lawsuits can serve to redress victims for these harms, they also risk compounding the severity of these privacy problems. Law often permits victims to sue perpetrators for intentional infliction of emotional distress, invasion of privacy, and defamation. But victims typically must bring such civil lawsuits in their own names. As a result, the complaints, which are available to the press and interested individuals, further publicize the cyber harassment, exacerbating the privacy harms suffered by victims. In turn, victims may refrain from pursuing their harassers in court not because they lack legitimate claims but because they fear exposing themselves to further privacy invasions.
Hawaii’s proposed Senate Bill 288, if enacted, could be invoked to combat this problem when the online harassment occurs in domestic abuse cases. The bill would permit pseudonymous papers “in cases of alleged domestic abuse where the alleged victim has already received an order of protection, temporary restraining order, or protective order against the accused party.” The bill covers cases where pseudonymous filing is “reasonably necessary to protect the privacy of the alleged victim and will not unduly prejudice the prosecution of the defense.” The proposed legislation permits victims of domestic abuse, including cases involving online harassment, to bring law’s coercive power to bear against perpetrators. Because the bill allows courts to weigh the victim’s interest in privacy against the public’s interest in disclosure, it aims to protect privacy and transparency. Disappointingly, however, the bill only covers cases involving domestic abuse, thus failing to reach instances of online harassment involving privacy invasions where victims may refuse to sue their attackers for fear of publicity.
February 11, 2011 at 5:17 pm
Posted in: Civil Procedure, Cyber Civil Rights, Privacy, Privacy (Gossip & Shaming)
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Wikipedia’s Efforts to Close its Gender Gap
posted by Danielle Citron
Time magazine recently did a true-to-form story on Wikipedia, where guest editors (and our very own featured author) Jonathan Zittrain (see here too), Robert McHenry, Benjamin Mako Hill, and Mike Schroepfer assisted in writing/editing/re-writing a feature entitled Wikipedia’s “Ten Years of Inaccuracy and Remarkable Detail.” As the piece explained, Wikipedia just celebrated its 10th birthday. The site has 17 million entries in more than 250 languages, quite a feat given that Encyclopedia Brittanica only has 120,000 and only in English. The Time wiki-like piece notes that Wikipedia has a “diverse, international body of contributors.”
According to The New York Times, most contributors are male. More specifically, “less than 15 percent of its hundreds of thousands of contributors are female.” This, in turn, has skewed the gender disparity of topics and emphasis. Wikimedia’s executive director Sue Gardner explains that topics favored by girls such as friendship bracelets can seem short when compared with lengthy articles on something boys typically like such as toy soldiers or baseball cards. The New York Times notes that a category with five Mexican feminist writers might not seem so impressive when compared with 45 articles on characters in “The Simpsons.”
Why is this so? Joseph Reagle, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard and author of “Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia,” explains that Wikipedia’s early contributors shared “many characteristics with the hard-driving hacker crowd,” including an ideology that “resists any efforts to impose rules or even goals like diversity, as well as a culture that may discourage women.” He notes that adopting an ideology of openess means being “open to very difficult, high-conflict people, even misogynists.” The demographics of Wikipedia’s editors may also stem, in part, from the tendency of women to be “less willing to assert their opinions in public.”
How Wikipedia is now, and has been, responding is worth noting. Sue Gardner told the Times that she hopes to raise the share of women contributors through subtle persuasion and outreach to welcome newcomers to Wikipedia. Dave Hoffman and Salil Mehra’s terrific piece Wikitruth Through Wikiorder demonstrates that the site has already fostered efforts to create a more inclusive environment. As Hoffman and Mehra explain, Wikipedia has an Arbitration Committee whose volunteer members rule on disputes and set forth concrete rules on how users should behave. The Arbitration Committee has sanctioned users who make homophobic, ethnic, racial or gendered attacks or who stalk and harass others. According to Hoffman and Mehra’s empirical study, in cases when either impersonation or anti-social conduct like hateful attacks occur, the Administrative Committee will ban the user in 21% of cases. Wikipedia’s more than 1,500 administrators, in turn, enforce those rules. Wikipedia also permits users to report impolite, uncivil, or other difficult communications with editors in its Wikiquette alerts notice board.
February 1, 2011 at 11:39 am
Posted in: Anonymity, Architecture, Current Events, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, Social Network Websites, Web 2.0, Wiki
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The Ugly Persistence of Internet Celebrity
posted by Danielle Citron
Many desperately try to garner online celebrity. They host You Tube channels devoted to themselves. They share their thoughts in blog postings and on social network sites. They post revealing pictures of themselves on Flickr. To their dismay though, no one pays much attention. But for others, the Internet spotlight finds them and mercilessly refuses to yield ground. For instance, in 2007, a sports blogger obtained a picture of a high-school pole vaulter, Allison Stokke, at a track meet and posted it online. Within days, her picture spread across the Internet, from message boards and sport sites to porn sites and social network profiles. Impostors created fake profiles of Ms. Stokke on social network sites, and Ms. Stokke was inundated with emails from interested suitors and journalists. At the time, Ms. Stokke told the Washington Post that the attention felt “demeaning” because the pictures dominated how others saw her rather than her pole-vaulting accomplishments.
Time’s passage has not helped Stokke shake her online notoriety. Sites continuously updated their photo galleries with pictures of Stokkes taken at track meets. Blogs boasted of finding pictures of Stokke at college with headings like “Your 2010 Allison Stokke Update,” “Allison Stokke’s Halloween Cowgirl Outfit Accentuates the Total Package,” and “Only Known Allison Stokke Cal Picture Found.” Postings include obscene language. For instance, a Google search of her name on a safety setting yields 129,000 results while one with no safety setting has 220,000 hits. Encyclopedia Dramatica has a wiki devoted to her (though Wikipedia has faithfully taken down entries about Ms. Stokke).
January 30, 2011 at 6:16 pm
Posted in: Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, Google & Search Engines, Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Social Network Websites, Technology, Tort Law, Wiki
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Outsourcing & Tracking the Service Sector
posted by Frank Pasquale
A recent article on Kinect hackers mentions the ease with which the new Microsoft game platform can drive real world devices:
When Kinect appeared on store shelves, Adafruit Industries, an online seller of DIY electronics kits, offered $1,000, then $3,000, to the first person who could analyze Kinect’s innards and share the information with developers at large. It took all of six days before the Kinect’s secrets were cracked. . . . Geeks around the world set to work. One strapped a Kinect to a Roomba, letting him steer the robot vacuum cleaner by waving his hand. Others used Kinect to control World Of Warcraft characters with their bodies rather than keyboards.
Cool, right? Well, perhaps not so much. A website based on the film “Sleep Dealer” spells out a business model for using technology to further stratify the labor force:
The 20th century generated the tools to globalize and maximize production. Computers simplified tasks, the Internet connected every human being, robots climbed stairs, vacuumed carpets and pumped hearts. There was only one missing piece, a link that could tie them all together, and Cybracero Systems discovered it: We call it THE NODE®. Through basic nodes implanted in the wrists, ankles and eyes of workers, they are able to connect to and control human-like machines in the first world. In this way, any job, even manual labor, can be accomplished.
Some call it “unbelievable”. We call it “Telepresence”. Through Telepresence, a chauffer in Tijuana nodes up and drives a cab through the streets of London. A nanny in Tijuana babysits a toddler in Beverly Hills. A crew from Tijuana raise a skyscraper in Chicago. Soon, Telepresence will be globalized.
January 18, 2011 at 11:00 am
Posted in: Current Events, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, Employment Law, Privacy (Electronic Surveillance), Technology
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Advancing the Fight Against Cyber Hate with Greater Transparency and Clarity about Hate Speech Policies
posted by Danielle Citron
Today, online intermediaries voluntarily seek to combat digital hatred, often addressing hate speech in their Terms of Service Agreements or Community Guidelines. Those agreements and guidelines tend to include vague prohibitions of hate speech. The terms of service for Yahoo!, for instance, requires users of some services to refrain from generating “hateful or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable” content without saying more. Intermediaries can advance the fight against digital hate with more transparency and clarity about the terms of, and harms to be prevented by, their hate speech policies, as well as the consequences of policy violations. With more transparency and clarity, intermediaries can make behavioral expectations more understandable and users can more fully appreciate the significance of digital citizenship, see here, here, here, and here. The more intermediaries and users understand why a particular policy prohibits a certain universe of speech, the more likely they can then put into practice, and adhere to, that policy in a way that achieves those objectives.
Before seeking to provide guidance on how intermediaries might do that, it is important to recognize that efforts to define hate speech raise at least two significant challenges. First, many disagree over which, if any, of the harmful effects potentially generated by such speech are sufficiently serious to warrant action. Second, controversy also remains about the universe of speech that is actually likely to trigger harms deemed important enough to avoid. So, for example, even if an intermediary defines hate speech as that which tends to incite violence against targeted groups, how do we determine which speech has the propensity to do that? Much of this lies in identifying the factors relevant to making such causal predictions. In Intermediaries and Hate Speech: Fostering Digital Citizenship for the Information Age (forthcoming BU Law Review 2011), Helen Norton and I don’t pretend that that we can make hard choices easy and recognize that intermediaries’ choices among various options may turn on a variety of issues: their assessment of the relative costs of hate speech and its constraint; empirical predictions about what sort of speech is indeed likely to lead to what sorts of harms; the breadth of their business interests, available resources, and the like; and their sense of corporate social responsibility to foster digital citizenship. Intermediaries’ choices on how to define hate speech and the harms that they seek to avoid — however difficult — can and should be made in a more principled and transparent way. Read the rest of this post »
January 7, 2011 at 11:36 am
Posted in: Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, First Amendment, Google & Search Engines, Technology, Web 2.0
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The Offensive Internet
posted by Danielle Citron
Harvard University Press recently published The Offensive Internet: Speech, Privacy, and Reputation, a collection of essays edited by Saul Levmore and Martha Nussbaum. Frank Pasquale, Dan Solove, and I have chapters in the book as do Saul Levmore, Martha Nussbaum, Cass Sunstein, Anupam Chander, Karen Bradshaw and Souvik Saha, Brian Leiter, Geoffrey Stone, John Deigh, Lior Strahilevitz, and Ruben Rodrigues. Stanley Fish just reviewed the book at New York Times.com.
January 4, 2011 at 2:18 pm
Posted in: Anonymity, Architecture, Articles and Books, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, Privacy, Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Technology
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19 Points on Wikileaks
posted by Frank Pasquale
Don’t worry, it’s not another prolix post from me, just commentary on Jack Goldsmith’s Seven Thoughts on Wikileaks and Lovink & Riemens’s Twelve theses on WikiLeaks. (And here’s an FAQ for those confused by the whole controversy.)
Goldsmith, who takes cybersecurity very seriously, nevertheless finds himself “agreeing with those who think Assange is being unduly vilified.” He believes that “it is not obvious what law he has violated,” and Geoff Stone today said that many Lieberman-inspired efforts to expand the Espionage Act to include Assange’s conduct would be unconstitutional. Goldsmith asks:
What if there were no wikileaks and Manning had simply given the Lady Gaga CD to the Times? Presumably the Times would eventually have published most of the same information, with a few redactions, for all the world to see. Would our reaction to that have been more subdued than our reaction now to Assange? If so, why?
Lovink & Riemens provide something of an answer:
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December 11, 2010 at 9:39 pm
Posted in: Anonymity, Current Events, Cyber Civil Rights, First Amendment, Google & Search Engines, Government Secrecy, Privacy, Privacy (Electronic Surveillance), Privacy (National Security), Science Fiction, Wiki
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Avatar Experimentation: Human Subjects Research in Virtual Worlds
posted by Joshua Fairfield
I have just posted a (rough) draft of my latest paper, entitled Avatar Experimentation: Human Subjects Research in Virtual Worlds to SSRN. 
Virtual worlds make such great research testbeds precisely because people act in a lot of ways (especially economic ways) as if the virtual world were real. But that complicates ethical research design: you can’t engage in activities that threaten the subject’s digital property or community, for example. This raises human subjects research issues that a lot of Institutional Review Boards may not immediately take into consideration. Here’s the abstract — but the important part is that this is still a work-in-progress (it’s coming out in a symposium issue of the U.C. Irvine Law Review next year), and I would love comments or suggestions.
Abstract: Researchers love virtual worlds. They are drawn to virtual worlds because of the opportunity to study real populations and real behavior in shared simulated environments. The growing number of virtual worlds and population growth within such worlds has led to a sizeable increase in the number of human subjects experiments taking place in such worlds.
Virtual world users care deeply about their avatars, their virtual property, their privacy, their relationships, their community, and their accounts. People within virtual worlds act much as they would in the physical world, because the experience of the virtual world is “real” to them. The very characteristics that make virtual worlds attractive to researchers complicate ethical and lawful research design. The same principles govern research in virtual worlds as the physical world. However, the change in context can cause researchers to lose sight of the fact that virtual world research subjects may suffer very real harm to property, reputation, or community as the result of flawed experimental design. Virtual world research methodologies that fail to consider the validity of users’ experiences risk harm to research subjects. This article argues that researchers who put subjects’ interests in danger run the risk of violating basic human subjects research principles.
Although hundreds of articles and studies examine virtual worlds, none has addressed the interplay between the law and best practices of human subjects research in those worlds. This article fills that gap.
December 2, 2010 at 11:18 am
Posted in: Articles and Books, Bright Ideas, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, Privacy, Science Fiction
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Rights and Responsibilities of Digital Citizenship
posted by Danielle Citron
In response to a previous post, Seth Finkelstein asked me to develop the implications of a conception of digital citizenship, and rightly so. This post begins by explaining which intermediaries Helen Norton and I address and then develops our conception of digital citizenship in a bit more detail. A follow-up post will provide preliminary suggestions about how intermediaries could, and should, educate users about their rights and responsibilities as digital citizens.
As Jack Balkin highlights, the “informational filter, not information, is king” in our digital age. Internet intermediaries wield significant influence over our information landscape in much the same way that mass media does. Search engines, such as Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, determine “what we read” and “who gets heard” by producing links to content in response to user requests. Popular social media sites, such as Facebook, YouTube, and Digg, structure online environments that enable large groups of individuals to connect with each other. While highlighting certain content and voices, Internet intermediaries downplay, block, and delete others. Christopher Yoo has extolled intermediaries’ exercise of editorial discretion as “promot[ing] important free speech values by helping shield audiences from unwanted speech and by helping them identify and access desired content.” As he observes, “the image of the Internet as an unintermediated experience, in which speakers speak directly to audiences without passing through any gatekeepers, is more myth than reality. The real question is not whether some actor, but rather which actor, will serve as the intermediary.”
Commentators have expressed concern about governmental efforts to enlist intermediaries as “proxy censors to control the flow of information.” In Intermediaries and Hate Speech: Fostering Digital Citizenship for the Information Age (forthcoming Boston University Law Review 2011), Helen Norton and I focus exclusively on intermediaries’ purely voluntary decisions to address hate speech. As private entities, intermediaries can, and do, refuse to address cyber hate. Twitter has taken this position. Rather than taking a neutral position vis-a-vis online hatred, other intermediaries encourage it. Consider the social network site Hate Book whose motto is “Post something you hate!” and thousands of websites, blogs, social network sites, and the like designed to spread hate. Our conception of digital citizenship addresses intermediaries that choose to prohibit hateful content (and those might do so in the future) rather than intermediaries that ignore or support it. Pursuant to terms of service agreements and community guidelines, intermediaries remove, denounce, or ignore instances of cyber hate. Yet beyond vaguely-worded prohibitions of “hateful or offensive” speech, intermediaries often provide little explanation or consistency for their actions. They leave unstated and perhaps unexplored how their decisions regarding cyber hate impact citizens whose capability to participate meaningfully offline and online depends upon their inclusion in networked spaces. Intermediaries ought to teach users how to be responsible and respected digital citizens. Read the rest of this post »
November 28, 2010 at 10:53 am
Posted in: Culture, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, Education, Google & Search Engines, Politics, Social Network Websites, Technology, Web 2.0
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Virtual Perils of Cyber Hate and the Need for a Conception of Digital Citizenship
posted by Danielle Citron
Although intermediaries’ services can facilitate and reinforce a citizenry’s activities, they pose dangers that work to undermine them. Consider the anonymous and pseudonymous nature of online discourse. Intermediaries permit individuals to create online identities unconnected to their legal identities. Freed from a sense of accountability for their online activities, citizens might engage in productive discourse in ways that they might not if directly correlated with their offline identities. Yet the sense of anonymity breeds destructive behavior as well. Social science research suggests that people behave aggressively when they believe that they cannot be observed and caught. Destructive online behavior spills offline, working a fundamental impairment of citizenship.
For instance, digital expressions of hatred helped inspire the 1999 shooting of African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Jews in suburban Chicago by Benjamin Smith, a member of the white supremacist group World Church of the Creator (WCOTC) that promotes racial holy war. Just months before the shootings, Smith told documentary filmmaker Beverly Peterson that: “It wasn’t really ‘til I got on the Internet, read some literature of these groups that . . . it really all came together.” More recently, the Facebook group Kick a Ginger Day urged members to get their “steel toes ready” for a day of attacking individuals with red hair. The site achieved its stated goal: students punched and kicked children with red hair and dozens of Facebook members claimed credit for attacks.
Cyber hate can produce so much psychological damage as to undermine individuals’ ability to engage in public discourse. For instance, posters on a white supremacist website targeted Bonnie Jouhari, a civil rights advocate and mother of a biracial girl. They revealed Ms. Jouhari’s home address and her child’s picture. The site showed a picture of Ms. Jouhari’s workplace exploding in flames next to the threat that “race traitors” are “hung from the neck from the nearest tree or lamp post.” Posters included bomb-making instructions and a picture of a hooded Klansman holding a noose. Aside from moving four times, Ms. Jouhari and her daughter have withdrawn completely from public life; neither has a driver’s license, a voter registration card or a bank account because they don’t want to create a public record of their whereabouts.
Search engines also ensure the persistence and production of cyber hate that undermines citizens’ capability to engage in offline and online civic engagement. Because search engines reproduce information cached online, people cannot depend upon time’s passage to alleviate the damage that online postings cause. Unlike leaflets or signs affixed to trees that would decay or disappear not long after their publication, now search engines index all of the content hosted by social media intermediaries, producing it instantaneously. Read the rest of this post »
November 27, 2010 at 3:49 pm
Posted in: Anonymity, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, Google & Search Engines, Law and Inequality, Legal Ethics, Legal Theory, Politics, Psychology and Behavior, Race, Social Network Websites, Technology, Web 2.0
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Unwitting Mashup of Facebook and Juicy Campus?
posted by Danielle Citron
In a move that recalls the postings on the now-defunct Juicy Campus, Facebook groups devote themselves to vulgar descriptions of female high school students. As Donna St. George of the Washington Post reported on November 11, a Facebook page targeted 30 female students from the T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia. It featured photographs of the students accompanied by “offensive or sexual comments.” Another similar page included a picture of the school’s female principal. The Daily Beast recently reported that Choate Rosemary Hall boarding school banned access to Facebook through campus computers after discovering a 200-plus-page-long threat penned by female students that disparaged fellow female students. The Facebook page described Choate students as “hos” and “gross and faked and spray tanned.”
Facebook’s Terms of Service requires users to agree to refrain from bullying, intimidating, or harassing other users.” Pursuant to that policy (or so we can guess), Facebook took down the page of the 30 girls with the sexually demeaning comments five days after T.C. Williams High School’s principal filed a complaint with Facebook. Despite Facebook’s real-name culture, the author of the Facebook page has not been identified, an unsurprising result given the advantages provided ill-meaning individuals who want to evade responsibility for online activity. In the boarding school matter, it seems that a student copied the thread, publishing it for the consumption of students (and everyone else) who were not privy to the Facebook page. According to the Daily Beast, school administrators “hired a computer forensics expert to track how it had been made public.” Two of the girls who wrote the post were expelled and four were suspended.
In the T.C. Williams High School matter, the principal went on the school’s PA system for two days in a row to let students know that she thought the page was “totally offensive.” The Washington Post reports that the principal also asked students to avoid accessing it: “We’re better than this,” she told the students. If that is all the principal did, it seems a weak showing of moral leadership and civic education. Hopefully, the incident began a longer-term conversation about many things, including bullying, gender harassment, the risks of online activities, and the responsibilities of students while online. Now, the school officials’ response in the Choate matter is worth discussing. Norm Pattis, a Connecticut trial lawyer, contends that the school’s response is too harsh given the dire consequences of a school expulsion on a student’s chances of getting into college. Prohibiting Facebook on campus may also be an empty gesture. On the one hand, Choate students have continued to tweet and tumbl on their school accounts. They also can access social media including Facebook on their mobile devices, raising the same concerns of online civility. On the other, as Pattis suggests, the school missed a crucial teaching opportunity (beyond a 90-minute discussion with students) on how to be leaders, rather than the quick fix of banning Facebook on the campus network. That sounds right to me, too.
November 26, 2010 at 5:06 pm
Posted in: Anonymity, Current Events, Cyber Civil Rights, Feminism and Gender, First Amendment, Privacy, Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Technology, Web 2.0
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Facebook and Google: Twenty-First Century Institutions for Civic Engagement
posted by Danielle Citron
Democracy is often said to work best when citizens build networks of social interaction and trust. Civic engagement informs the inputs into the political process. So, too, it facilitates the formation of social capital, i.e., interpersonal connections and the norms of trust and reciprocity that arise from them. Social capital allows groups to overcome collective action problems so that they can “accomplish things together.” Moreover, civic engagement allows people to see their lives as entwined with others, to “feel [themselves] one of the public,” and “to weigh interests not [their] own.” In turn, citizens inculcate “habits of cooperation and public-spiritedness.” Civic engagement reinforced Alexis de Tocqueville’s “self-interest properly understood”—i.e., weighing interests other than one’s own—and encouraged “responsible citizenship.”
As Benjamin Barber explains, mediating institutions “give expression to the idea of citizenship.” This is especially so when institutions cultivate norms of trust across lines of social division (often referred to as “bridging ties”). In Amy Gutmann’s view, the “more economically, ethnically, and religiously heterogeneous the membership of an association is, the greater its capacity to cultivate the kind of public discourse and deliberation that is conducive to democratic citizenship.” According to Neil Netanel, a liberal democratic polity needs citizens to encounter competing ideals so that they can test their commitments and gain empathy for those with whom they disagree.
Alexis de Tocqueville emphasized the importance of townships and civic associations for citizens to acquire the skills and habits of dialogue. John Dewey found schools uniquely situated to teach children and adults about the social meaning of community. In his view, schools brought diverse people together in ways that “introduce deeper sympathy and wider understanding.” For Cynthia Estlund, the workplace stood as the most important site for the formation of social and political views because it permits informal discourse among people “who are both connected with each other, so that they are inclined to listen, and different from each other, so that they are exposed to diverse ideas and experiences.” She also emphasized its atmosphere of enforced civility and equality, which allows diverse voices to be heard.
Online intermediaries constitute important twenty-first century mediating institutions. They extend workplaces, schoolhouses, and community centers to digital spaces. In this way, they supplement real-space exchanges of information and opinion with virtual ones. Companies encourage employees to use social network sites to deepen workplace relationships. Workers, in turn, discuss issues in person and in online postings. Student organizations meet face-to-face in classrooms and in social network groups. Neighborhood communities combine offline activities with online ones. Google’s Blogger hosts blogs designed to facilitate commentary on community events. In these and other infinitely different ways, users of online intermediaries perform their roles as citizens.
Worth recognizing are the potential democratic goods facilitated by intermediaries. Online intermediaries continue discussions among diverse groups of workers and students who are inclined to listen to each other. Because social media brings the personal lives of individuals to the fore, it has the capacity to deepen empathy for different backgrounds. Of virtual communications amongst workers, Cynthia Estlund notes: Because the workplace would provide face-to-face interactions, “electronic communications can expand and equalize work relationships.” Social science research shows that social network sites support loose social ties that allow users to maintain networks of relationships. A 2007 study found that Facebook does indeed cultivate bridging social capital. Because intermediaries enable groups to combine real-space activities with virtual ones, they impact civic engagement through their architecture and content choices. Read the rest of this post »
November 26, 2010 at 3:30 pm
Posted in: Culture, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, Google & Search Engines, Politics, Social Network Websites, Technology, Web 2.0
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Digital Lives of 2.0 People, Not Locked In But Extended Out
posted by Danielle Citron
Reviewing the movie The Social Network and Jaron Lanier’s book You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto in this month’s New York Review of Books, Zadie Smith warns readers of the perils of social network sites like Facebook where “life is turned into a database.” According to Smith, Facebook “locks us” into a system designed by a college nerd to resemble “a Noosphere, an Internet with one mind, a uniform environment in which it genuinely doesn’t matter who you are, as long as you make ‘choices’ (which means, finally, purchases).” Smith writes:
“When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way, it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t look more free, they just look more owned.”
Smith worries about her students and other “2.0 kids.” She contrasts “1.0 people” who use social media tools to connect with others in an outward-facing way with “2.0 kids” who employ them to turn inward and towards the trivial. 2.0 people, Smith fears, are embedded in the software, avatars who don’t realize that “what makes something fully real is that it is impossible to represent it to completion.” She wonders: “what if 2.0 people feel their socially networked selves genuinely represent them to completion?” In Smith’s view, Mark Zuckerberg tamed “the wild west of the Internet” to “fit the suburban fantasies of a suburban soul,” risking the extinction of the “private person who is a mystery to the world and–which is more important — to herself.”
Smith’s review recalls Neil Postman’s critique of television culture and Benjamin Barber’s warnings about contemporary consumerism. While television helped us amuse ourselves to death and pervasive pop culture produces shoppers, not thinkers, social network sites turn youth culture into over-sharing, unthinking, eager-to-please avatars who “watch the reality-TV show Bride Wars because their friends are.” Yet this can’t be the whole story. Whether 41 or 21, social network participants live in the real world, integrating their online activities seamlessly into their daily lives. Far more goes on in social network sites like Facebook than sharing information to “make others like you” as Smith suggests. On Facebook and other popular social media sites, people join groups of every stripe. They work, as Miriam Cherry’s terrific new article Virtual Work addresses. They build reputations in ways that can enhance offline careers. They join study groups. In many respects, social media sites provide platforms for genuine participation far more than just Government 2.0 engagement. Far from deadening the everyday citizen, social media platforms can resemble Alexis de Toqueville’s town meeting, John Dewey’s schools, and Cynthia Estlund’s workplace. Of course, citizenship participation online is different–it is not the face-to-face interaction envisioned by Toqueville, Dewey, and Estlund. But even with the challenges brought by internet-mediated interactions, 2.0 kids are more than denuded avatars.
November 10, 2010 at 10:56 am
Posted in: Anonymity, Architecture, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, Privacy, Social Network Websites, Technology, Web 2.0
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An Unfortunate Strategy: Civil Rights Charges in the Phoebe Prince Case
posted by Danielle Citron
On January 14, 2010, a 15-year old named Phoebe Prince hung herself after facing bullying by a group of students at her Massachusetts high school. As Emily Bazelon reported in a series for Slate, Prince was a troubled teen long before her suicide. While a student at an Irish boarding school in 2008, she engaged in self-mutilation, leading to medical treatment. After her parents separated in 2009, Prince moved with her mother and sister to the United States where she continued to cut herself and struggle with depression. Although Prince initially flourished at her new high school, she suffered cruel taunts by students after she dated two male students. Facts about the bullying have emerged: students wrote on Facebook and Twitter that Prince was a “gross whore” and “Irish slut;” a student called Prince a “whore” in the cafeteria and told her to “stay away from other people’s men;” group members threatened to beat Prince up; a student spat at Prince and told her to “close her legs;” Prince’s cell phone number became public knowledge and she received countless abusive texts. On the day that Prince committed suicide, several of the students threw a beverage can at Prince as she walked home from school. Six students face criminal charges, including harassment, stalking, and a “violation of civil rights, with bodily injury resulting.”
The case has sparked a national conversation about the destructive nature of online and offline bullying. Massachusetts legislators have passed a comprehensive bullying law, which some hail as a model for other states to follow. Discussion of the Prince case has centered on whether the facts warrant criminal charges. Some perceive the case as involving a predictable, though regrettable, schoolyard fight while others characterize the defendants as evildoers who drove Prince to suicide.
Worth discussing is the impact that the civil rights charge will have on the case and the public’s view of a civil rights agenda more generally. The civil rights charge, a felony, can result in punishment of up to ten years in prison. Jurors will have to determine if the defendants interfered with Prince’s education — by threatening her with physical harm and by causing her severe emotional distress — because of her gender and nationality resulting in bodily injury. Convictions on the civil rights charges may, however, have unintended consequences. As I explored in Law’s Epxressive Value in Combating Cyber Gender Harassment, it has been a significant struggle to convince the public that harassment of the vulnerable, both online and offline, can inflict grievous individual and societal harm. This case could undermine that struggle. Because so many view this case as just involving the rough and tumble of high school and because Prince has a history of mental illness that casts doubt on the notion that the bullying caused her suicide, the public might loudly decry convictions on the civil rights charges as going too far. If the students were subject to lengthy prison sentences, the case could engender resentment, leading to pressure on prosecutors to leave harassment cases alone and discouraging victims of discriminatory harassment to file charges. It is worth considering whether the prosecutor’s dropping the charges would be a positive development in the long-term battle against cyber civil rights violations.
September 19, 2010 at 3:29 pm
Posted in: Civil Rights, Criminal Law, Cyber Civil Rights
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