California Family Fights For Privacy, Relief From Cyber-Harassment 544
theodp writes "Just days after his daughter Nikki's death in a devastating car crash, real-estate agent Christos Catsouras clicked open an e-mail that appeared to be a property listing. Onto his screen popped his daughter's bloodied face, captioned with the words 'Woohoo Daddy! Hey daddy, I'm still alive.' Now he and his wife are attempting to stop strangers from displaying the grisly images of their daughter — an effort that has transformed Nikki's death into a case about privacy, cyber-harassment and image control. The images of Nikki, including one of her nearly-decapitated head drooping out the shattered car window, were taken as a routine part of a fatal accident response and went viral after being leaked by two CHP dispatchers. 'Putting these photos on the Internet,' says the family's attorney, 'was akin to placing them in every mailbox in the world.'"
Re:You Can't Fight the Internet (Score:1, Interesting)
However, it is purely a dick move to send an e-mail as stated in the summary. Don't think you can sue someone for being a dick, unfortunately.
Well, you can sue anyone for anything but you won't necessarily win. In this particular case, you'd have a good chance of winning a civil case against the sender of the email and you might even win a criminal case - harassment is illegal. On the other hand, you probably wouldn't win against people who were merely discussing your daughter's death - even if the discussion involved photos.
Stepping back and looking at the bigger picture, not every family would be opposed to a public discussion of their daughter/sister's death - some families might even feel that there were important lesson's to be learned and wish to share those lessons in order to spare others the same fate.
So, why is this particular family opposed to a public discussion? First, that original email may have set them down a path of feeling persecuted. If, instead, some reputable organization had approached them about stepping up and becoming community leaders helping others avoid the same fate, then the outcome might be different. Second, there is a lot of anger toward people who made money in the real estate bubble. Much of the criticism of the daughter may actually reflect anger about the real estate bubble. Finally, it may be that this family (or at least the parents) believe that the purpose of life is to be superficially successful (expensive house, sit-down dinner, etc.). In this sense, their anger may be more a reflection of their own values than anything else.
In the final analysis, their anger is probably due to a combination of factors. The one thing can control, though, is themselves. The best path to inner peace may be for them to reassess their own values and world view.
Perhaps a more effective strategy (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm not sure how well this would work, but it seems like it would be worth a shot. Next time someone wants to get pictures off of the internet, it would be interesting to see what would happen if they sent a story in to /. (or some other similar and large site) something like this:
Hello, my name is x. Pictures a, b, and c are circulating on the internet, and because of d are causing me enormous emotional grief...(further explanation)...I'm asking you please, if you know any kindness, not to circulate these pictures. Thank you.
Now obviously there are completely amoral places on the internet that are going to do whatever the hell they want, but it seems to me like a significant portion of the internet would react positively to such a plea.
Re:You Can't Fight the Internet (Score:1, Interesting)
I would suggest being very careful with making statements such of this. I will not speculate on what has occurred to you in your life because that would be very rude and hypocritical to the reason why I choose to write this post, but those of us (myself is included in this category) who have not "walked a mile" in this families shoes have no right to comment. Until you open your inbox, after losing a loved one, and find a picture of her decapitated head in your email, I would refrain from passing any sort of judgment on these people and they choices that they have made. Frankly, I would be insulted if I received a letter from the CHP three weeks later telling me that they were "Sorry".
If that was my child? My child is not some public service announcement for the CHP nor will I accept that callous response from the lawyer. It's disgusting.
Re:You Can't Fight the Internet (Score:5, Interesting)
This is not either/or. The cops did wrong, should be fired and subject to punishment for any laws they may have broken as well as civil lawsuits. The 4chan kiddies (or more likely, their mommies and daddies) should also be subject to civil suits. Just because the internet exists, doesn't give you the right to be a sick fuck. It also doesn't make being a sick fuck consequence free.
Re:You Can't Fight the Internet (Score:5, Interesting)
You can question whether or not other people have the right to see images like that. Personally, I consider pictures of someones death and/or mutilated body are more personal/private than ones genitals.
The images of Nikki, including one of her nearly-decapitated head drooping out the shattered car window, were taken as a routine part of a fatal accident response and went viral after being leaked by two CHP dispatchers.
So what is the penalty of leaking images like this? I take it they will lose their jobs and face a civil lawsuit from the parents, but will they be fined or face jail-time?
Re:You Can't Fight the Internet (Score:4, Interesting)
If you can't set a good example, at least be a horrible warning.
With pics.
Re:gross. I don't want to see it either. (Score:3, Interesting)
A friend of mine had to work crash sites when he was in the Air Force years ago. He was very careful to see that nothing like this ever happened to any of the photos he took. As he put it, "According to the First Amendment, the public has a right to know, but in these cases, they have no need to know." If those two stupid fools had realized this simple fact, none of this would be happening.
Re:You Can't Fight the Internet (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:You Can't Fight the Internet (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe the parents need a firefox extension that will identify the image algorithmically and censor it. Such an extension might be useful to block other shock-images as well. If there was an anti-goatse firefox plugin, I would install it.
Perhaps some machine-learning expert will read this post and implement it.
Re:You Can't Fight the Internet (Score:2, Interesting)
What a horrible idea. Thank god it isn't the law in any sane country. If it were, no one could take a photograph, anywhere, without getting releases from everyone in it. Newspapers and TV news could just shut up business. And remember, SHE IS DEAD. Dead people don't have many rights, and specifically, no right to privacy. Again, this is good.
Re:You Can't Fight the Internet (Score:4, Interesting)
We can probably isolate three people doing potentially wrong things here.
Firstly, whomever leaked the image to the public. Without knowing the motivation, we can't say much about that. You can argue in their favor and say this was done as a wakeup call to the public about the dangers of reckless behaviour or you could look at it as pointless shocker imagery. I, for one, would go with the free speech argument.
Then, there's the person captioning the image as described in TFS. Freedom of Speech and satire on one hand, impiousness and causing alarm or distress on the other. Again, I'd argue in favor of FoS, as long as this isn't presented in a deceptive, shocker site fashion.
Lastly, there's sick bastards attempting to deceive people into viewing this under the pretense of legitimate content, like property listings. I'm not quite sure how one could possibly argue in favor of that. To me, this seems very fucking sick and absolutely unnecessary. This is where people should, in my opinion, be prosecuted.
Re:You Can't Fight the Internet (Score:5, Interesting)
Its not that they are well off that irks people. Its what they choose to do with that wealth.
I'm a physician and make about $250-300k a year. With this I pay off the debt I accrued in medical school (I put myself through undergrad and med school because I am from a very poor background. Poor as in welfare, foodstamps, and housing projects.) I also pay the mortgage on two adjacent (although modest) homes for myself and my partner's elderly parents. My partner and I share a 6 year old civic (hybrid) although he has 2 used motorcycles as well. We donate about 10% of our income, and I volunteer 2 days a week at a free clinic.
If I had ten times the money I wouldn't buy a porche. I also wouldn't spend my money on a quixotic quest for retribution through the legal system.
That said, the parents of this girl have every right to do so. And we have every right to say that their quest, while understandable, is dangerous in that it threatens the freedoms of speech rights of an entire country. And that statement is not from a place of class rivalry, but from an understanding of free speech and the necessity of defending even repulsive free speech.
You can't just say that censorship is OK when applied to douchebags. Arguably the people who post these pictures and link to them are supreme douchebags. However, I also think that Bobby Jindal, Karl Rove, and the entire membership of the KKK are also arguably supreme douchebags. However others would disagree with me. So we can't use douchebaggery as a bar for censorship. In fact its the very speech that repulses us most that we must defend because that's where freedom of speech is most easily chipped away. See Virginia v. Black et al. http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/analysis.aspx?id=14776 [firstamendmentcenter.org]
In order for speech to be free, even the most repulsive speech must also be protected.
Re:You Can't Fight the Internet (Score:3, Interesting)
No about the sociopathy. One's mental state while under drugs is not the same as one's normal mental condition, and this sounds like the flying-high, stupid behavior of a teenager on cocaine. And her family didn't give her access to the car: she stole it from them. I'm really sorry for them: they were apparently starting the long, hard process of dealing with a cocaine user in the family. She doesn't deserve that insult: she might well seriously regret her behavior, when off the cocaine, that she engaged in. But she won't get the chance.
The article doesn't say how much cocaine was found in her system at the time of the accident. But it doesn't take being rich or privileged for a live-at-home teenager in trouble to steal a family car and get in a dangerous or even fatal accident. I'm remembering some of the crack users of my younger days, when crack became popular. It was devastating.) Mind you, it takes some wealth to afford cocaine rather than crack. And being pretty and young (not blonde, she had brown hair) can contribute to its availability. And I remember some parties I attended when younger: she'd have found it quite available: I don't think that's changed.
Now, all that said: we all need a sense of scale. A pretty white girl wiped out in a drug-related car accident is a family tragedy. But given the scale of other abuses in the world (such as genocide in places where we've created the local genocides, or wholesale rape as a day-to-day occurence in US prisons, or children starving to death worldwide), we need to look outside our privileged enclaves and go do some people some good. So get over this and go contribute some blood, or help with a Big Brother program for kids who really need a lot more help to avoid even worse fates.
Re:Why people feel the way they do (Score:5, Interesting)
this has nothing to do with free speech. One of the OBLIGATIONS of law enforcement is that privacy of certain records is maintained because it's "abusive" for information they obtain in investigations to be used without going through the proper lawyers. Law enforcement ALREADY knows the images taken can hurt people if misused and has rules their employees chose to ignore.
They all know these rules when they sign up, it's very clear, and in this case chose not to follow them.
Re:Why people feel the way they do (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a problem with some clowns not taking their job seriously
Truly. You'd think that this type of thing would be equal to HIPAA
Wow.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:You Can't Fight the Internet (Score:3, Interesting)
there will always be loopholes and things that are forbidden that shouldn't be if you try it.
That is true. However, you can usually be more specific than "I know it when I see it."
More importantly, laws should be written to avoid false positives. "Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."
Given you did read it, and you don't seem to have liked reading it
Actually, I was quite amused.
you can stop me doing this again, but you've already suffered some very small emotional harm,
Perhaps. I'm also somewhat immunized to this sort of thing in the future.
none of the fixes you suggest would stop me using another identity and a rewording of the same text to be similarly offensive in future.
True. But if it barely affected me now, and now I'm ready for it, it's certainly not going to have much more effect in the future.
If on the other hand I'd somehow found out that you'd recently split up with someone, and I sent you that sentence in a private email, then it would probably hurt you a lot more.
"A lot more" isn't saying much. I'll concede that, but it still generally wouldn't hurt me unless there was some truth to it. Even then, there's still a lot of choice in how to react.
Again, sticks and stones. We've raised a generation of children who have never been spanked, so now we have to invent emotional harm.
Of course, it's an amendment that's been ignored by various governments, with arguments like 'oh but freedom of speech isn't important compared to the war on terror',
Which is precisely my point.
basically there should be a default position that you can do (publish, or act) whatever you like, with the restriction that if a reasonable person believes your action is clearly bad for society you should expect to get a kicking for it.
How do you define "reasonable person"?
I can certainly expect retaliation along the same lines, but I don't see why I should expect a legal issue.
But seriously... go back and read what you wrote. Why is freedom of speech important compared to the war on terror -- that is, to people actually dying -- but not important compared to a little emotional pain that they'll get over?
I am willing to put my life, and the lives of my family, indeed my entire civilization, at risk for this value. You're not even willing to let someone else suffer some emotional pain.
there are things which you clearly should not publish to the whole world; like a list of account and PIN numbers, or in general personal secrets which the person in question should reasonably expect to remain secret
Granted. A majority of these should rely on more than just easily-disclosed secrets -- for example, a PIN just strikes me as an incredibly weak form of security.
But take this example:
if your neighbour leaves his blow-up sheep out in his back garden, then he might want to keep its existence a secret but he loses the reasonable expectation, if he keeps it in a locked room and you find out only by breaking in to his house, then you should expect to get in trouble if you publish its existence
Well, you already broke into his house.
But let's run with this for a minute. Suppose I find this funny picture of a sheep online. Suppose I then start putting captions on it, and distributing it. Maybe I make it a lolsheep -- I CAN HAS PENIS? Is that allowed?
Alright, suppose I find out the guy's email address, and mail that photo to him with the caption. Is that allowed?
Suppose I don't send him a photo. Suppose I just mail him out of the blue and say "I know your terrible secret, and you are a sick, sick man." I'm playing a numbers game -- quite a lot of people have one sick fetish or another. I