From the NYT, with tons of implications for Wikipedia and pseudonymity/Terms of Service;

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/28/us/28internet.html

QUOTE

Is lying about one’s identity on the Internet now a crime?

MySpace’s terms of service require users to submit “truthful and accurate” registration information. Ms. Drew’s creation of a phony profile amounted to “unauthorized access” to the site, prosecutors said, a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, which until now has been used almost exclusively to prosecute hacker crimes.

While the Internet’s anonymity was used in this case as a cloak to bully Megan, other users say they have perfectly good reasons to construct false identities online, if only to help protect against the theft of personal information, for example ......

Big ol' discussion on pseudonymity and the possibility that lying about your identity to a site which expects a genuine answer on registration, may actually be breaking the law. Pros and cons, etc ... read on.

I'm confused. I thought she got away with that particular tenuous attempted charge, and is only getting done for lesser ones now?

She was convicted on three misdemeanor counts of computer fraud for having misrepresented herself on MySpace. As she violated their ToS, she was charged and found guilty of unauthorized access, per the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 1986. Hence the fuss ....

A 21-year old cyber law, too

None of this would apply to sites that don't have any term of service requiring truthful personal information, though.

Right. And if WP got of its collective arse and implemented RL registration, there'd be a certain legal precedent for having that be actually binding; something I see as being a good thing overall.

Ah-I'll have to look at it some more. She got away with some other similar charge which would have meant a longer sentence.

I'm not certain what Dan is getting at above. Presumably if a wiki had a ToS against vandalism, which a pseudonym agreed to, then vandalism would be a violation of the ToS and subject a vandalizing user to these draconian consequences, if upheld. The fact that no IRL info was required was would be a discovery problem but not a bar to prosecution. When a persons signs a "fake" signature it has the same binding effect that their real signature would have.

The trial court apparently accepted "unauthorized access" to include "violate terms of service." This being a felony criminal case it is likely that an appeal will be pursued. Then we will get some guidance on if this very expanded meaning of "unauthorized access" will stand.

Of course the huge distance between a dead teenager and a mere vandalized site could justify many distinctions.

Well, this is it, and this is kinda where I was going with this. If WP implemented some sort of RL authentication schema, would it be open to draconian abuse (yes) and would it actually happen?

This is yet another example of how WP is astonishingly retrograde relative to modern concepts of reasonable behavior as recognized by civil authorities.

Whereas the 1986 US Cyberlaw seeks to minimize fraud and deception in cyberspace, the policies on WP are notably the opposite. On WP, operating under a cloaked identity is a hallowed and protected custom, and pulling off someone's cloak is a bannable offense. The only modern parallel that comes to mind is a stage play, where it is expected that the actors are wearing costumes and adopting synthetic personas, and the audience is expected to go along with that pretense. Decloaking an actor in mid-performance would be disruptive of the presentation of the drama on stage.

But this is hardly the first example of WP adopting retrograde practices relative to modern notions of civil behavior in a tax-exempt educational enterprise. The most astonishing feature of WP is that it routinely employs banning and indefinite blocking without just cause and without due process (i.e. trial and proof of just cause). The oldest civil law in the annals of human history deemed banning without proof or trial to be such an egregiously incivil act, it was made a capital offense in the very first law Hammurabi of Mesopotamia inscribed into stone tablets, some 3768 years ago...


The US Civil Rights Movement might have begun at Woolworths Lunch Counter, but it really took center stage when George Wallace sought to block the doors of Ole Miss to would-be scholars whom he wished to bar from the premises where young scholars absorbed the sum of all human knowledge in preparation for life in the 20th Century.

What is WMF teaching to the youth of the 21st Century? Is WMF inculcating the world's youth into primitive cultural practices that have been going out of style ever since humankind began to think seriously about due process, fairness, civil rights, equal protection, and the rule of law?