ThinkingSkull.com

Imagine if you could only log onto the Internet using your real name, communicate with only one email address, and be charged with a felony for every time you didn’t? What if anonymity online became a criminal act? It could happen… and sooner than you think.

In an article entitled The Girl Who Will Change the Internet?, G4’s TheFeed laments the decision by their overlords to discontinue using “screen names” or any form of anonymous logons other than their own names for any posts. This is a preemptive compliance with something that could become very real because there have already been attempts to make it happen.

The article describes 13-year old Megan Meiers, a girl with a history of diagnosed mental problems who was duped into believing the fake “Josh Evans” was a real person and eventually committed suicide over what she perceived to be a good and trusted friend turning on her. Worse yet, the fictional boyfriend was actually the mother of a childhood friend who was using the account and fake identity to monitor her own daughter’s well being. With nothing in the real world to actually charge the woman with other than being mean and irresponsible as an adult, pressure on law makers have forced them to come up with “one count of Conspiracy and 3 counts of Accessing Protected Computers Without Authorization,” essentially described as lying to the MySpace servers.

Anyone who knows me at all knows I’m signed up all over the ‘Net as “Grim D. Reaper.” The character is a fictionalization used to promote my movie website and, frankly, it has met with positive response. Before that I was “The Crystal Lich,” which is a little harder to visualize conceptually and hence the reason for the change when I started making promotional YouTube videos. But am I committing a crime, a felony no less, by representing myself as a character?

A friend of mine suggested the following: if a blanket rule of non-anonymity were criminalized throughout US history, would Samuel Clemens have been thrown in jail for publishing his works under the pseudonym Mark Twain? How about Stephen King for using Richard Bachman? Vampire author Anne Rice as erotic writer Anne Rampling? Pen names and screen names are ways of creating identity and often self-marketing to avoid “brand” confusion, and just because you’re not a multi-media conglomerate business shouldn’t mean that you’re not allowed to use the freedom and freebies of the Internet to accomplish the same thing.

While what happened to Megan Meiers is a tragedy, the fact was that she was doing things that should have been monitored and that her own parents have a certain degree of responsibility as well, creating any blanket rule criminalizing anonymity would be too ambiguous. The same rules that already apply to discussing sex to a known minor online being illegal (and damn well should be) could be extended to include suggesting tasks harmful to the minor.

One of the key words here is “known,” because if a child misrepresents themselves as an adult online, then either the child or the child’s parent must assume some responsibility (last time I checked, no one’s blog comment system came with a government ID check nor could many afford to implement one). With regard to the Megan Meiers incident, the adult in question knew that they were talking to a child, knew who the child was, and instigated the cruel crowd mentality that has destroyed plenty of childhoods. The other word is “task,” which I have used in this preliminary bit of text: “to hold responsible any adult knowingly suggesting to a minor any task intentionally detrimental to the minor’s welfare.” My thoughts are that willfully making statements resulting in a child’s death would certainly infer responsibility.

“Conspiracy,” sadly, is broad and ambiguous enough without adding “Accessing Protected Computers Without Authorization” as code for “you lied on your sign-up form.” While everyone (including myself) thinks the woman being charged should shoulder some responsibility for this (even if its just community service educating minors on the dangers of the Internet), these broad charges resulting in a conviction could set the precedent needed to again attempt to make ‘Net anonymity illegal, and that’s a bad thing.

My name is Alan Smithee, and I approved this message.