The Dark And Ugly Of Social Networking

Related to Jesse's post about embarrassing shit on the Internet comes the sad and weird conclusion to the Megan Meier suicide case with the indictment of Lori Drew.

For those out of the loop, Lori Drew is a psychopathic mid-westerner who decided to cyberstalk Megan Meier under a false MySpace profile. The profile of one "Josh Evans," was created in 2006 and used to first flirt with Meier and then, bizarrely, suggest the world would be better off if she killed herself. Which she did.

Since Missouri courts couldn't do shit with the case, federal prosecutors shifted it to California, where MySpace's servers are based, and smacked Drew with three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization to obtain information to inflict emotional distress, and one count of criminal conspiracy.

Drew's daughter was a friend of Meier's before the two had a falling out. Drew hacked into the Josh Evans profile to discover what Meier really thought about her daughter. The case complicates from there. (For the whole story, I recommend the Wikipedia page and the New York Times.)

Wired reports that the sentencing in this case set a strange and frightening legal precedent. Since there is no federal law against cyberbullying, the feds used an age-old "violation of terms of service" law to bust Drew, which may cause 1984-esque ripples in the legal sea.

"Empowering terms of use to be key pieces of evidence in criminal matters -- when terms of use are generally thought of by the people who are entering into them as purely contract or civil maters -- is something that should be done carefully," says Andrea Matwyshyn, law professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton Business School. "I think you're going to have strong disagreement as to whether this is an advisable course to take."

This is a tricky matter, to say the least, and definitely not one for a light and fluffy Friday morning. However, it deserves serious consideration. Because the law hasn't caught up to the negative possibilities of the Internet, Drew almost managed to escape prosecution. But because the case had garnered so much national and international attention, the Feds wanted to take a stand (which MySpace wholly supports, says their press release). Doing so, and so quickly, may have altered the course of the law, or, in reverse, get the case thrown out if it reaches the Supreme Court.

Still, one cannot be charged with a law that does not exist yet, so the Feds may have done the right thing under the guise that it was the only thing they could've done.

What're your thoughts and opinions on the case, Homotronic Biddyonic Phonic Defenders of the Universe? I can only say I wish we'd foreseen this, somehow, and should definitely craft the law for the future.