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Overview of Motives in Stalking
Various companies provides Web-based products or services leveraged by cyberstalkers in the harassment or defamation of their victims. Companies providing search engines or domain registration and hosting services. Companies operating listservs or discussion forums. And then there are enterprising individuals whose inventions -- Web-based Caller ID spoofing tools and anonymous remailers -- and even Usenet may not be sponsored or funded by a corporation. The question of liability for harassment and character assassination is particularly salient since the original authors of the offending material are, more often than not, not only anonymous, but untraceable.
Remarkable are the reactions of company staffers when the abuse is brought to their attention. Some companies avail themselves of exemptions or provisions in existing legislation to wash their hands completely of any role in the prevention or mitigation of the abuse. Once assigned the same conduit-status as the telephone companies, employees of search engines (and even the open source "encyclopedia" Wikipedia) claim "no responsibility" under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which treats these services like passive piping carrying "other people's" content to third parties around the world. This legislation confers a status consistent with legal responsibility (i.e. re-publisher / distributor) on companies offering Web hosting and, even more strangely, news readers (Web sites automatically converting streams of news group messages into Web pages for archiving by search engines). But search engines and open source encyclopedias bare no responsibility when some cyberstalker, or gang of stakeholders, decide to "hijack" the company product for the purpose of harming others. Strangely enough, until the Air Transportation Safety and System Stabilization Act (9.22.2001), the families of commercial airline passengers killed during a hijacking could actually seek civil judgment against the airlines. To this day, even though the airliner's assets are protected under the Act, surviving families could continue to collect what is available through the airliner's insurance coverage. No such negligence is tendered against search engines and open source encyclopedias for elevated risks ... or damages ... when cyberstalkers vandalize a search engine / encyclopedia to threaten a victim's earnings / employment, reputation, or safety. There is no constitutional right to trial by jury, nor is there a process by which a Special Master could dole out from a limited pool of funds made possible by some kind of malpractice or misadventure insurance.
Some Web hosting companies realized that in a vastly competitive market, a zero tolerance policy for clients with abusive Web sites, was not prudent. With tongue firmly in cheek and American flag in hand, companies like GoDaddy.com decided to cater to individuals whose Web sites require bulletproof protection from complaints. GoDaddy.com even markets a subsidiary "privacy service" (Domains by Proxy), whereby they substitute the company name and address information for the name and address of a client. Complainants chipping away at the privacy wall to unearth the identity of a cyberstalker may use a certified mail complaint process to persuade Domains by Proxy to rescind the privacy services, only to reveal a name and address that is fraudulent. And an investigation revealed that even the United States Postal Service can be faulted for allowing cyberstalkers to use aliases when signing for certified mail delivered to their P.O. Box.
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