Bill Targets Cyber-Impersonation

by Alejandro Martínez-Cabrera

Two months ago, a San Jose Mercury News reporter received a profanity-laced e-mail critical of one of her stories. More than a year before, a similar e-mail was sent to a long mailing list of hundreds of Silicon Valley industry, labor, political and community leaders.

The sender of the e-mails appeared to be Carl Guardino, the chief executive of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, which represents the high-tech industry. The problem: He didn't actually send it.

"This absolutely misrepresented me in a very harmful way," he said. "It was completely out of character and it depicted me in a very bad light."

Guardino was the victim of online impersonation, and he soon found out he wasn't alone - friends, colleagues and relatives had stories of usurped identities and tarnished reputations. Unfortunately for them, the state law on impersonation was written in 1872 and is not equipped to deal with the digital age.

But a bill making its way through the Legislature is looking to change that. Inspired by Guardino's story, state Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto, introduced a bill in June that would make it a misdemeanor to maliciously impersonate someone.

If Simitian's bill passes, online impersonations with the purpose "of harming, intimidating, threatening or defrauding" would be punishable with a maximum fine of $1,000 and one year in jail.

But while supporters believe the law urgently needs to be updated to punish and deter malicious impersonators, privacy advocates worry that such legislation might easily cross the line and threaten people's First Amendment rights.
Political commentary

Simitian said his bill is not going after those who create fake Barack Obama Facebook profiles for political commentary, or the likes of Fake Steve Jobs, Newsweek writer Daniel Lyons who poses as Apple's chief executive in his satirical blog.

Instead, the bill is meant to deal with miscreants whose impersonations range from the naughty to the outright sinister.

In recent years, impersonators have tweeted under the names of Maya Angelou, Kanye West and St. Louis Cardinals' manager Tony La Russa, to name a few. Revenge-seekers and pranksters have embarrassed their victims in front of potential employers and created smears that are difficult to remove from the Web. Students have posed as teachers to harass other kids.

In one case in December, a Wyoming woman was raped in her home by a man responding to a Craigslist ad looking for "a real aggressive man with no concern for women" to fulfill a rape fantasy. However, she didn't post the ad - it had been her disgruntled ex-boyfriend, a Marine stationed in California who was posing as her. Similar stories abound, online abuse experts said.

'No recourse'
The Internet "makes it so easy for stalkers and harassers to ruin somebody's life with a few keystrokes, and there's little to no recourse for victims to try and undo the damage," said Jayne Hitchcock, president of the volunteer organization Work to Halt Online Abuse, who was a victim of cyberstalking.

No one seems to know how widespread the problem is, but Hitchcock said she has noted more complaints about MySpace, Twitter, Facebook and e-mail impersonations.

"I probably see it more often than I'd like to through our organization," she said.

But when it comes to addressing the problem, not everybody is convinced Simitian's approach is the best. Corynne McSherry, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the scope of Simitian's bill was defined too loosely and could have a negative effect on freedom of speech. For one, she said, the definition of harm needs to be narrowed.

"Harm is a pretty broad term. That could just mean that you undermined a politician's reputation. I'm concerned that the nature of 'harm' is too vaguely defined," she said.

McSherry also expressed concern that the bill would not protect some forms of parody and satire on the Internet that involve impersonation.

For instance, she pointed to the Yes Men, activists that the foundation is representing in a lawsuit filed against them by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. In October, the group held a fake news conference posing as chamber representatives who promised the organization would no longer lobby against climate-change legislation.

"It was a very effective form of satire that was really useful in provoking some form of debate," McSherry said. "I don't think it's Sen. Simitian's intent to shut down this form of freedom of speech but I believe it's what this bill can do."

Simitian's bill names "credible" impersonators that act without consent, but, McSherry said, "Just requiring that an impersonation is credible is not going far enough to protect the type of political speech I'm talking about."

And even though she supports the spirit of Simitian's bill, Hitchcock questions whether it's enforceable, considering the need to educate law enforcers on online abuse issues and the jurisdictional problems relating to cybercrimes.

"Unless the victim and the harasser are both in California, it's going to need a lot of collaboration between law enforcement agencies and the states. And if (the impersonator) is in another country, good luck. But it's a start," she said.

Hard to enforce
Danielle Keats Citron, a law professor at the University of Maryland who has written extensively about the role of the law and online abuse, believes the proposed law will have challenges based on the enforcement difficulties and the broadness of its interpretation.

But even if the bill in its current form becomes law, Citron said, the statute might have an overall positive effect. At its most basic level, the measure might help change attitudes about what's permissible, she said.

"The legislation is trying to take the lead on this emerging technology that people are abusing, and teaching them how to treat each other," she said. "It's an important point we shouldn't forget."

She added: "But we also have to get the law right."

original article here

Managing Your Online Reputation

Doug Beckstead and Jeff Dunetz are trying this to combat their exposures. - EOPC

by Antony Mayfield

The measure of your reputation is what you do plus what others say about you. That was one of the first things I learned in PR. A reputation can be managed, and can be influenced by the things we do, but it can never be designed or decided upon by its holder. Reputation is earned.

As the social web has distributed the power and influence formerly held by the mainstream media, it has created the need for personal reputation awareness. And despite being a long-time user of social media, I found I learned some new things as I navigated these waters for myself. Below are three tips that I found useful.

1. You Are Your Network
I had a call from a BBC researcher asking for background on social networks. The breaking story that day was that personal details and embarrassing photos of the newly appointed head of Britain’s foreign intelligence service, MI6, were splashed all over one newspaper. The source? His family’s Facebook profiles.

It made me think about my own family’s personal details and images. What if I became a story? What would a journalist find? My profile’s privacy settings were locked down, but sure enough, a few clicks showed that my wife’s was wide open.

It was a clear lesson: If you want to manage privacy, reputation, and your security to any extent, you have to think about those around you — especially those who are not as tech-savvy.

2. If You Can’t Delete, Compete
Although it’s a good idea to ask people to remove embarrassing content about you, in the majority of cases the best course is to make sure that you are the first and best source of information about yourself appearing on Google (Google) and other major search engines. “Crowding out,” or pushing that embarrassing party photo down in the search rank can be achieved over time. This approach is best combined with an ethos of developing a thicker skin.

The time may soon come when so much content about our lives is online that we get suspicious if we find no unpolished or slightly embarrassing bits about someone when we look. Why are they so perfect? What are they hiding?

Reputation is a messy and uneven business. Playing the content game is often preferable to an all out war — a battle you will most likely lose.

3. There’s a Cottage Industry Around “Reputation Protection”
In discussing online reputation with friends and colleagues, they predicted that there would be services that offer “the digital equivalent of tattoo removal.” While I didn’t doubt that there would be demand for this kind of thing, I wondered about how it would be realistically implemented.

There is, in fact, a small industry growing up to help people manage how their privacy is affected by the web. At the high end, rich and powerful celebrities now hire digital security specialists to help them lock down everything from their voicemail inbox, to their e-mail and Facebook accounts, and to look for the weak points where stalkers or prying journalists might try to get some juicy information.

For the rest of us, a host of services promise to safeguard your identity and reputation online — I even get one service free with my credit card. It tells me less than my Google Alerts, though, so I’m broadly skeptical about the effectiveness of services like this. At best, they should be combined with an effort to develop personal web literacy and an understanding of how to manage online reputation responsibly.

Conclusion
It is incredibly important that we help our friends, colleagues and families understand the social web. They make up our most valuable social networks. And when you understand networks, you understand that their success and well-being is intrinsically linked to your own.

As Howard Rheingold says, “What you know or don’t know about networks can influence how much freedom, wealth and participation you and your children will have in the rest of this century.”

It should be the goal of every web-savvy professional to have their online reputation precede them.

SOURCE

Managing Your Online Reputation

Doug Beckstead and Jeff Dunetz are trying this to combat their exposures. - EOPC

by Antony Mayfield

The measure of your reputation is what you do plus what others say about you. That was one of the first things I learned in PR. A reputation can be managed, and can be influenced by the things we do, but it can never be designed or decided upon by its holder. Reputation is earned.

As the social web has distributed the power and influence formerly held by the mainstream media, it has created the need for personal reputation awareness. And despite being a long-time user of social media, I found I learned some new things as I navigated these waters for myself. Below are three tips that I found useful.

1. You Are Your Network
I had a call from a BBC researcher asking for background on social networks. The breaking story that day was that personal details and embarrassing photos of the newly appointed head of Britain’s foreign intelligence service, MI6, were splashed all over one newspaper. The source? His family’s Facebook profiles.

It made me think about my own family’s personal details and images. What if I became a story? What would a journalist find? My profile’s privacy settings were locked down, but sure enough, a few clicks showed that my wife’s was wide open.

It was a clear lesson: If you want to manage privacy, reputation, and your security to any extent, you have to think about those around you — especially those who are not as tech-savvy.

2. If You Can’t Delete, Compete
Although it’s a good idea to ask people to remove embarrassing content about you, in the majority of cases the best course is to make sure that you are the first and best source of information about yourself appearing on Google (Google) and other major search engines. “Crowding out,” or pushing that embarrassing party photo down in the search rank can be achieved over time. This approach is best combined with an ethos of developing a thicker skin.

The time may soon come when so much content about our lives is online that we get suspicious if we find no unpolished or slightly embarrassing bits about someone when we look. Why are they so perfect? What are they hiding?

Reputation is a messy and uneven business. Playing the content game is often preferable to an all out war — a battle you will most likely lose.

3. There’s a Cottage Industry Around “Reputation Protection”
In discussing online reputation with friends and colleagues, they predicted that there would be services that offer “the digital equivalent of tattoo removal.” While I didn’t doubt that there would be demand for this kind of thing, I wondered about how it would be realistically implemented.

There is, in fact, a small industry growing up to help people manage how their privacy is affected by the web. At the high end, rich and powerful celebrities now hire digital security specialists to help them lock down everything from their voicemail inbox, to their e-mail and Facebook accounts, and to look for the weak points where stalkers or prying journalists might try to get some juicy information.

For the rest of us, a host of services promise to safeguard your identity and reputation online — I even get one service free with my credit card. It tells me less than my Google Alerts, though, so I’m broadly skeptical about the effectiveness of services like this. At best, they should be combined with an effort to develop personal web literacy and an understanding of how to manage online reputation responsibly.

Conclusion
It is incredibly important that we help our friends, colleagues and families understand the social web. They make up our most valuable social networks. And when you understand networks, you understand that their success and well-being is intrinsically linked to your own.

As Howard Rheingold says, “What you know or don’t know about networks can influence how much freedom, wealth and participation you and your children will have in the rest of this century.”

It should be the goal of every web-savvy professional to have their online reputation precede them.

SOURCE