Megan Meier, and the defendant Lori Drew
A Missouri woman that was cyber-bullying a depressed teenage girl, Megan Meier, has been convicted by a federal jury in Los Angeles on three misdemeanor counts of computer fraud. The bad news is that she is not guilty of more serious charges.
Her hoax ultimately led to the young gir's suicide. Megan Meier suffered from depression eventually committed suicide after corresponding with Drew. In one of Drew's message she wrote "The world would be a better place without you."The woman Lori Drew was convicted of three misdemeanors for violating MySpace's "terms of service," which requires users to submit "truthful and accurate" registration information.
Do not be underestimate this cyber-bullying verdict though. There is a valauable significance in this Los Angeles federal court case, it expands the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which was passed in 1986 as a tool against hackers, to include social networking Web sites. This verdict should really send an overwhelming message to internet users, especially those who abuse social networking websites.
Some still argue that the governmen is misusing the law. People with the tech industry fear about an expansion of the fraud act. One can argue that users have perfectly good reasons to construct false identities online, such as preventing identity theft of personal information.
The New York Times raised the idea that we will look back on this case as the inflection point at which the Internet changed from free and anonymous to secure and safe. The article quotes Andrew M. Grossman of the right-center Heritage Foundation: "If this verdict stands, it means that every site on the Internet gets to define the criminal law. That’s a radical change. What used to be small-stakes contracts become high-stakes criminal prohibitions."
This particular case was tried by the U.S. attorney , Thomas P. O'Brien. It was determined that Drew had not actually broken any state laws. mySpace is based in Los Angeles.
Picture of Lori Drew, Megan Meier, and Tina Meier
Drew is now facing a sentence of up to three years in prison and $300,000 in fines. Meir's Mother, Tina Meier will press for the maximum charges against Lori Drew.
New York attorney Nick Akerman told The New York Times that the ruling was "simply another important step in the expanded use of this statute to protect the public from computer crime."
But former federal prosecutor Matthew L. Levine, who is now a defense lawyer in New York, told The Associated Press that O'Brien's legal theory was "very aggressive." "Unfortunately, there's not a law that covers every bad thing in the world. It's a bad idea to use laws that have very different purpose," he said.
"I think the industry was hoping there would be a strong verdict blaming one user for abusing another because that way it's not their fault," Linda Criddle, a safety expert, told the newspaper. "These companies claim to have good standards and then do nothing to enforce them. They let people breach their terms and conditions and do nothing about it."
Andrew M. Grossman, senior legal policy analyst for the Heritage Foundation, said the ruling could have a broad impact for Web site administrators.
"If this verdict stands, it means that every site on the Internet gets to define the criminal law," Grossman told The Times. "That's a radical change. What used to be small-stakes contracts become high-stakes criminal prohibitions."
And Phil Malone, director of the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School, said that it could have a chilling impact given that the "vast majority of Internet users do not read Web site terms of service carefully or at all."
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