Stalkers steal security, identity

By FRANCIS TILL

He was 50, she was 28. He made advances, she rejected them.

His next steps led to one of the world's first convictions for cyberstalking.

In a California court, the man confessed to charges of stalking and soliciting sexual assault. The charges arose from the man impersonating the woman in chat rooms, where he posted her name, address, phone number and instructions for disarming her home-security system, along with messages that she fantasised about being raped.

At least six men took the postings seriously enough to turn up at her door late at night, intent on fulfilling that fantasy.

In 2000, according to wiredsafety.org, there were already as many as 63,000 internet stalkers and 474,000 victims worldwide.

Who are these people? According to the few sources of statistical data, about half the cyberstalkers fits the common perception of a young man obsessed romantically or sexually with a woman. But increasingly, women are cyberstalking men, and motives such as revenge are also on the rise.

Cyberstalking happens at work and at home.

It can be something as simple as persistent emails of a suggestive or threatening nature, but it can also involve sophisticated elements such as the planting of "trojan horse" programs that give a cyberstalker free run of a victim's computer, or identity theft, as in the California case.

Almost all of it involves an element of harassment, but it is more that that.

In a paper delivered yesterday at the Internet Safety Group's NetSafe II: Society, Safety and the Internet conference in Auckland, district court judge David Harvey said cyberstalking involved "the use of the internet, email or other electronic devices to pursue another person", with "the additional characteristic of ... fear".

Definitions are still evolving as case law develops, but importantly, as Harvey pointed out and almost all experts agree, cyberstalking is not just sexual in nature.

Researchers have found that it takes six basic forms, often inter-mixed: sexual harassment, romantic obsession, sexual obsession, revenge, power trips and delusional obsessions.

Simpler forms of cyberstalking can be prevented by self-defence steps such as blocking abusive correspondents and installing firewalls in computers, but committed cyberstalkers may overcome these barriers, forcing victims to turn to the law for help.

Unfortunately, according to Harvey, identifying the harasser and locating him or her can often present significant obstacles, especially if the harasser is remote and using identity cloaking tools.

Also, while laws specifically prohibiting cyberstalking are increasingly the norm, they do not yet exist in New Zealand.

But, said Judge Harvey, "There are sections in current legislation that deal with threats and intimidation that could, in some circumstances, apply to the internet".

He pointed out that the Harassment Act, for example, criminalises cyberstalking behaviours in certain circumstances.

Internet Safety Group of New Zealand

CyberGuards

US Department of Justice report on cyberstalking

Working to halt online abuse

wiredsafety.org