Teens' online postings are new tool for police
NEW YORK -- When Judge Brian Boatright of Jefferson County, Colo., found a 16-year-old Evergreen High School student standing before him guilty of a weapons charge last month, the strongest evidence hadn't come from a police search, a neighbor's tip, or even a wiretap.
The evidence had been supplied by the teen, who this year had posted pictures of himself surrounded by guns on his page of the social networking website MySpace.com.
MySpace and its cousins, Xanga and Facebook, have, in little more than two years, attracted more than 100 million users, most of them young people creating their own pages to show off to friends. Law enforcement officials, however, have another use for them: They are fast becoming a crucial source of evidence in crimes involving young people ranging from pornography to drugs to terrorist threats.
Last month, Kansas police thwarted a plot for a Columbine-style school shooting involving five boys, based on a MySpace posting citing the planned violence. It was at least the fourth Columbine-style plot this year revealed through MySpace or Xanga.
But the rapid increase in law enforcement use of MySpace, including security officers who routinely monitor the sites in high schools across the country, has caught the attention of civil libertarians and Internet advocates, who worry that in some cases students whose behavior would otherwise pass unnoticed are being subjected to extra scrutiny.
The civil libertarians say most young people don't realize that posting something on a social-networking site is akin to shouting it in a public square: The intimacy of the medium creates a false sense of privacy when, if anything, the Internet is even more open than most public communication.
The potential consequences of youngsters' posts on MySpace came to light again this month, when a 27-year-old man in Connecticut was arrested on charges that he had sexual contact with a 13-year-old girl he met through the site. That same day, Massachusetts Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly called on the site to raise the minimum age required to become a member from 14 to 18.
Longtime Internet researcher Danah Michele Boyd described information on the Web as ''super public" -- remaining available indefinitely, searchable at any time, and accessible by anyone.
While conversations in public spaces might be overheard by passersby, the potential pool of listeners is limited and the conversation itself is ephemeral, explained Boyd, who studies teens and social networking at the University of California, Berkeley.
But the very qualities of the Internet that make it a powerful and democratic communications tool -- its openness and availability to everybody -- put teens under a level of scrutiny normally devoted to paparazzi-hounded celebrities, Boyd said.
''We're looking at all this online stuff with a strictness we never did offline," she said. Most teenagers, she added, assume that their audience on the Web is their peers -- and not parents, school officials, or the police.
''You go online to gloat to your friends about the stupid things you've done -- or to embarrass the heck out of them," Boyd said. ''The number of teens who worry about their image with adults is very small."
That nonchalance is landing teens across the country in legal trouble. Seventeen-year-old Ryan Zylstra of Michigan is facing three counts relating to child pornography and up to 20 years in prison based on a prank gone wrong.
He allegedly posted a photo of two friends having sex -- a 16-year-old girl and 17-year-old boy -- on his Xanga page; distributing sexually explicit images of minors under 18 is illegal under Michigan's child pornography laws.
The prosecutor has offered Zylstra a chance to plead guilty to one of the charges, which carries a possible seven-year term; he has so far rejected the deal, his lawyer said.
Zylstra is not the only teen facing prison time for material posted on the Internet. Three people in Rhode Island, two 16-year-old girls and one 19-year-old woman, face child pornography charges for allegedly posting sexually explicit pictures of themselves on MySpace.
Last week, two youths were charged with setting 17 fires in suburban Washington, D.C., after they bragged about the blazes on MySpace, authorities said. They face 22 charges, including multiple counts of first- and second-degree arson.
Many youths don't try to cover their tracks online, but when they do their efforts often fail.
''They are stupidly believing that they're somehow anonymous because they created a fake
MySpace often aids in investigations to uncover posters' real identities. Though the company's official stance is that it is not an arm of law enforcement, it takes allegations of crime on the site seriously enough that, last month, it announced the hire of Hemanshu Nigam to serve as chief security officer.
Nigam, previously the director of consumer security outreach and child safe computing at
MySpace also issues a guide for law enforcement, advising agencies about such issues as how to subpoena information to uncover the real identity of users, said spokesman Matthew Grossman.
MySpace maintains a team of about 20 people, led by vice president of operations Jason Feffer, who work with police on as many as 150 investigations a month, targeting adults and children.
Even though the material that sparks investigations might be phony, police and schools tend to take what they see online very seriously.
Last month, on the seven-year anniversary of the Columbine school shootings, five Kansas students were arrested after a message about a plot to carry out a similar massacre at their school surfaced on MySpace.
Some of the defense lawyers in that case have said the charges were overblown -- a defense that comes up frequently when threats originate online, where there is little context for potentially threatening messages.
While authorities in Kansas allegedly have found additional evidence, Internet specialists say that some other cases involving threats aren't always as alarming as they first appear. ''Kids have always pulled fire alarms to get out of tests," Aftab said, adding that now, they post bomb threats online.
Although they do not quarrel with the use of MySpace evidence in major criminal cases, civil liberties groups say that schools go too far when they try to discipline students for policy violations that occur off school grounds.
In one recent Massachusetts incident, school authorities demanded that a group of students be tested for drugs after a school security officer saw a MySpace photo showing the students passing around what appeared to be a pipe.
The ACLU of Massachusetts intervened and persuaded the school to drop the demand.
''We got involved in that and said, 'No way can they do that,' " said ACLU lawyer Sarah Wunsch, who declined to name the high school. ''The mere fact that they go to your school doesn't give you the right to demand they submit to drug testing."
In other parts of the country, schools have suspended or disciplined students after MySpace photos surfaced that appeared to show them drinking.
Earlier this year, East Grand Rapids High School in Michigan temporarily prohibited about 20 students from participating in extracurricular activities after seeing an online photo of the teens drinking. Principal Patrick Cwayna said he took the action in accordance with a school board policy designed to deter underage drinking.
Civil rights groups are also filing lawsuits against schools that have suspended or expelled students for such offenses as making fun of teachers or expressing hostility toward classmates on sites like MySpace.
''Speech critical of government officials, which includes school officials, is protected by the First Amendment," said Wunsch.
This month, the Springfield School Board in Ohio reinstated a 14-year-old girl who, along with a friend, created phony, unflattering profiles of a school official and teacher.
The page, said Arnold Gottleib, an ACLU lawyer who represented the girl, contained statements like, ''I like young boys," and ''Michael Jackson's my hero." But, he added, the page ''was almost so over the top, and in some respects juvenile, that I can't believe that anybody with any degree of objectivity could believe it was a school administrator and teacher putting this stuff out there."
Not everyone agrees. Gerry Tirozzi, executive director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, said schools are obliged to take action when students use sites such as MySpace to post material that defames school officials.
''It could change the atmosphere of the school, the attitude of students toward that teacher, even the attitudes of parents toward that teacher," he said. ''The school should go overboard in really representing to students that this will not be condoned."
