Bullying 2.0

A jury in Los Angeles has convicted a woman for accessing information on a website in violation of its terms of service. She was convicted of three misdemeanor charges, reduced by the jury from felonies. The woman convicted, Lori Drew, was charged because she created a MySpace account and used it to convince her daughter’s nemesis, Megan Meier, that a made up boy liked her. When Drew sent Megan a message that said, “The world would be a better place without you,” Megan hung herself.

Other than the substantial “ick” factor of the whole sordid affair, the prosecution claims Drew “violated federal laws that prohibit gaining access to a computer without authorization.” I’m not convinced that this actually is applicable to what happened here. The whole thing underlines the fact that technologies have been moving faster than the laws that should govern them. What Drew did is certainly wrong, in a moral sense, but I don’t know that it violates any specific law, let alone the one she was charged with:

Legal and computer fraud experts said the application of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, passed in 1986 and amended several times, appeared to be expanding with technology and the growth of social networking on the Internet. More typically, prosecutions under the act have involved people who hack into computer systems.

I’m not a lawyer, and Drew’s defense would seem to rest on a kind of backseat, “I’m not touching you,” finger a centimeter away kind of argument. Instead of trying to shoehorn people into violating laws that don’t really apply, we need to work on sensible laws for crimes as they arise. Besides, I can’t imagine that the Drew family’s trips to the supermarket are a whole lot of fun just at the moment. The whole thing just leaves a bad taste in my mouth, both of prosecutorial overreach and grandstanding, and of … well, I don’t know exactly what you’d call what Lori Drew did. “Shameful” and “disturbing” don’t quite do it justice.