From MySpace To Murder - Part II



Almost exactly two years ago, I wrote one of the first articles to note the phenomenon of "personal" social networking profiles and blogs suddenly becoming very public due to their author's notoriety after a newsworthy event: a piece about 14-year-old Kara Borden and her 18-year-old paramour, David Ludwig. David was convicted of killing Kara's parents when they refused to allow her to date him. Their online profiles provided reporters and the public a small window into a relationship that led to tragedy.

Since then, we've seen countless examples of news organizations using information from the Facebook, MySpace and YouTube accounts of individuals who become newsworthy due to crime and scandal. The latest involves a University of Washington student, Amanda Knox, age 20, who allegedly aided and abetted the murder of her roommate, Meredith Kercher, 21, a British exchange student, while the two were studying abroad in Italy.

The sordid details of the murder drew international attention. At first, the police were baffled. They looked through the victims Facebook pictures for clues.

After a friend of the victim mentioned strange men that had visited the apartment with Amanda, the victims roommate was questioned. Amanda's story didn't seem to add up. She acted odd and changed her story when confronted by police. Then Amanda's online profiles were uncovered.

Amanda had a MySpace and Facebook profile, and even was featured in a short YouTube video. In the context of the grisly murder, Amanda's online persona takes on a chilling tone.

On her MySpace page, Amanda goes by the handle "Foxy Knoxy" The British press has already adopted this nickname to refer to Amanda in their sensational headlines. Schoolmates allege Amanda was constantly bringing strange men to her apartment for sex.

Her profile states that she doesn't drink or smoke, but her YouTube video seems to indicate otherwise:



In her MySpace blog, she wrote a short story about the drugging and rape of a young woman:

"A thing you have to know about chicks is that they don't know what they want," one of her characters says.

Her MySpace account links her to one of the other suspects involved. A man she allegedly carried out the crime with is referred to on the MySpace page:

"I've been working every night (except for Monday night) from 10pm to 2.30am at a bar called Le Chic. It's a really small place owned by this man from the Congo. His name is Patrick."

News outlets have picked up on all this. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer questions whether or not online profiles are "fair game" for journalists to pick at. As the Seattle Crime Blog puts it, sarcastically:

How foolish we reporters are, thinking that something somebody puts up on the Internet is - gasp! - public information. The Internet is "a place to share and be open." ...Amanda Knox was open, and the media is sharing. Shocking, I know.

As I said two years ago, an online profile will never give an exact picture of a person, infamous or not. But in the case of sudden noteriety, everything on an online profile becomes open to interpretation. Reporters and the public seek out an online profile so they can attempt to sort out who a person is. Amanda is vehemently defended by friends back home, but pretty much vilified in this news article. What side of the story does the online profile, the only thing actually written by the defendant, seem to support? On one hand, Amanda liked Disney's The Lion King and listed her mom as her hero. On the other hand, she wrote stories about rape and refered to herself with a sexual nickname. How wholesome was she?


Amanda's (Now Public) MySpace Pictures

It's an answer the courts will decide for sure, but for now, Amanda's online persona invites the world to speculate. Amanda, like Kara and David before her, serve as reminders that online profiles are very public indeed, and users would be wise to be concious of what they reveal. Amanda is just the latest MySpacer to find that, in times of trouble, your "My Space" can become everyone's.

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Meredith's friends have set up a Facebook Group in her memory.

McCain Learns Internet Manners


McCain Was No Doubt Surprised By His MySpace Page

Presidential nominee Sen. John McCain is 70 years old. When he was young, the only way to get "online" was to stand in one. So he can be excused for not knowing some of the basic rules of the internet world. But his web team should know better.

Unfortunately for McCain, the people who set up his MySpace page broke one of the cardinal rules of the internet--by committing a sin called "hotlinking." And the victim got revenge. Just see the picture above.

For those of you not up on the internet lingo. "Hotlinking" is when someone copies the location of a picture or video on someone else's site (for example: http://sokpuppet.blogspot.com/PICTURE.JPG) and then inserts that location into the html code of their own site. Lost? Well, its as simple as this: The image appears on that person's page, but it's being loaded from someone else's. Anyone visiting the hotlinker's page sees the image and has no idea its from another site.

People usually do this because they're too stupid and lazy to download the image, then reupload it onto their own web server.

But it isn't a victimless crime. Every time an image is loaded, it uses up bandwidth (space) on the host's server. Web site owners pay good money for a limited amount of bandwidth, and when someone hotlinks to an image on their page, then their bandwidth gets eaten up without anybody actually going to their page. You can see how this could be frustrating. It's even worse when that image is original and/or copyrighted.

In this case, McCain's MySpace page "hotlinked" to this image:



When the original owner of that "contact me box" found out he was being hotlinked, it was very simple to get revenge. He simply replaced that image, hosted on his server, with a different one, but kept the name the same.

The Result: McCain suddenly supported hot lesbian marriage.

McCain should consider himself lucky. Other "hotlinkers" have suffered far worse retribution. Think about all the images someone less mature could have replaced that image with. We could have seen McCain's smiling face right above some farm animal in a compromising position...

I use Photobucket or TinyPic to host my images. McCain should look into it.

MySpace Launches Vain Effort To Stop Sickos
[updated 12/8]


MySpace Founder? Or Pedophile? How Do We Know For Sure?

MySpace announced today that they will be partnering with a security firm to keep pedophiles off their service.

However, buried in their press release:

"Today’s announcement is a strong step in the right direction, but a gap will still exist in our ability to keep sex offenders off social networking sites until there is legislation that forces sex offenders to use registered email addresses"

MySpace seems to be claiming that forcing sex offenders to register their email addresses will "close the security gap," by allowing MySpace to ban those addresses from registering with the social network.

"With such measures in place, any use of false or unregistered emails would constitute a violation of the offender’s parole or probation and force them back to jail"

Um... I hate to state the obvious, but if a sex offender is contacting underage girls/boys online for sex... THAT is a violation of parole or probation. Obviously, the fear of violating parole isn't stopping these guys. With all the services out there that allow someone to set up as many free email accounts as they want in minutes, there's no way to prevent a sex offender from creating an email address that hasn't been registered. If they're planning on breaking parole anyway, do you think some requirement that they register their email accounts is going to stop them?

It's stupid. It won't work. It's unenforcable.

MySpace claims that by partering with this security firm, they can identify profiles of sex offenders and remove them from the network. But these sex offenders aren't exactly broadcasting their true selves here. Few teenage girls on MySpace are going to communicate with the 45-year-old bald guy who lives with his parents and lists Lolita as his favorite movie. These guys HIDE their identities. And on MySpace, there's still no way to verify if their being truthful or not. Sex offenders are FELONS. They're not going to put their true details out there, rendering MySpace's new partnership useless-- except to catch the only sex offenders stupid enough to put their real selves out there online. (Like Pamela Rogers Turner).

Wired Magazine used a similar screening program to search for sex offenders on the site's profiles. The author of the article confirmed 744 sex offenders with MySpace profiles. That would seem to support the usefulness of MySpace's partnership with the security firm screening their profiles. But even the author of the article admits:

My search left me less convinced that targeting past offenders would be an effective way for MySpace to find current or future predators. By its nature, a search like mine is only going to produce people who use their real names and addresses, and who are perhaps the least likely of the offenders to be up to no good.

Well said. Those planning on breaking the law usually aren't in a rush to reveal themselves.


This Sicko Wasn't Exactly Fooling Anyone

In fact, MySpace seems to know this already. According to the Wired article, Michael Angus, executive general counsel of Fox Interactive Media, which owns MySpace, told a congressional committee that name-matching against public sex-offender registries wouldn't work. "He also argued that predators could easily use false names," the article states. This seems to go against the claim found in MySpace's current press release, which states, "Through this landmark partnership, MySpace will be able to search existing state and federal databases to identify and delete the profiles of registered sex offenders."

I'd love to call up MySpace and get comment on these two, seemingly contradictory statements, but the last time I contacted MySpace for a story, they strung me along without comment just long enough to get my article scooped by the AP. Bitch.

To me, the answer is simple. MySpace wants its critics to shut up, so they made this partnership, knowing it was useless, just so they'd look good. "Image"--as Andre Agassi used to say--"is everything."

So, Adam, you're such a genius, what will work?

Well, for starters, instead of MySpace selling their adspace to questionable imagery like this...


Subliminally driving MySpacers Towards Sexual Relations?

...they can put up something that doesn't smack 14-year-olds in the face with sexually charged ads the second they log in.

What, MySpace couldn't get an ad deal with Hustler?

Replace these ads with warnings. Big bright warnings that remind younger, stupider kids that some people may be older (and sicker) than they appear.

It won't stop pedos from registering, but it just might stop kids from adding them as friends.

Secondly.. and this is a biggie... MySpace needs age verification. MySpace hates this idea, and its understandable. It would cut the number of users by a large number. But such an action would prove that MySpace is committed to protecting minors. An age verification system would work the same way it does for porn sites. A credit card would be required to register. Or they could require a license number. Or, like Facebook (before it sold out and went public) a school, college, or company email address.

Less intrusively, MySpace could force users to know the last names or email addresses of the person they try to contact, before that contact can be established. They already have a similar "opt in" system like this in place, but it doesn't go far enough. They should automatically make profiles of those under 18 invisible to older users, unless that older user is a friend, or unless that older user knows the other user's last name.

How about an outside-the-box idea? MySpace can require younger users to also enter the email of a parent or guardian when they register. That way, periodically, the parent will receive an email from MySpace showing who their child has been communicating with (though, for the child's privacy, not what was said). This way, parents can ask, "Who's this PedoGuy69 you've been talking to?"

Of course, that raises another point. Which is: it's not completely MySpace's responsibility. While MySpace must make reasonable efforts, nearly every solution available to them still has many loopholes present. It's up to parents to monitor their kid's computer use. It's also up to parents to be involved with their kid's lives. I've heard many stories about kids "dating" people online and their parents never knowing about it. If you have a good relationship with your kid, this shouldn't ever happen.

But MySpace must produce more than these vain, questionably effective efforts if we're meant to view their anti-pedo stance as anything more than good public relations. They must start with the assumption that most people lie online, and then proceed from there.

And, for that matter, so should we.

Adam is a muscular, 21-year-old super-spy living in Iceland with his pet Yak, Noodles.