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May 16, 2008

Lori Drew, aka the most evil woman alive, was recently charged by the US Attorney's office in LA.

Drew created the persona of a fake teenage boy on MySpace to bait and bulley her teenage daughter's ex-best-friend. The friend in question hanged herself from the torment.

Wired just ran coverage of the charges with commentary by Jennifer Granick of the EFF.

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/05/myspace-indictm.html

Granick's commentary, unfortunately, is misguided and completely inappropriate. She likens this case to one of a short-term employment contract, where blogging against a corporation is prohibited.

I think they made a very BAD comparison in the article. This has absolutely nothing to do with the terms-of-use example of 'blogging'.

This has more to do with enforcing contract law that has to do with data access and fraud... and possibly touches on the concept of acceptable use.

I don't know if Granick was being sly to elicit public support or completely inept. If its the latter, I hope he does defend Lori Drew so she loses and gets the max sentence.

At the essence, Ms. Drew signed up to MySpace , said "I am this person" and created a bunch of credentials and a persona. None of those were true.
In repeatedly logging into the website, she essentially defrauded MySpace and its users as well.
And in doing so, she also broke the terms of service creating the condition in which she "improperly accessed" the network in accordance with the 'rules' that MySpace set forth with their own network access policy. That's where the technicality came in.

The law was vague in the way its worded, and the US Attorney charged her under essentially a 'hacker' law for improperly accessing the network. The elements are all there: Drew accessed the network, she violated the Terms of Service, and this concept is really in keeping with the 'spirit' of the law -- that computers are accessed by approved people. Drew wasn't the person privileged for the account in question -- the fictitious teenager 'Josh' was.

Better comparisons the EFF should have made where:
- changing your browser identifier from Firefox to Safari
- checking a friend's email for them
- 99.9% of internet spiders that pretend to be another computer or person
- 99.9% of internet search engines, and just about every web2.0 firm that indexes/imports from a website with the slightest infraction of a TOS
- the list goes on.

I'm a bit troubled by the precedent this could set for future situations -- but in this *EXACT* case, I think the law is being applied as it was intended for and should be. Violating the TOS wasn't criminal, but violating the TOS meant she should not access the network anymore -- and that was criminal.

I'm not a lawyer, and I don't play one on TV.

Posted by Jonathan at May 16, 2008 6:20 PM

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