Here he is ...
Posted on 12/30/2002 6:49:23 PM PST by hoosierskypilot
NASHUA, N.H. -- The parents of a New Hampshire murder victim are waging a campaign against Internet information brokers like the one used by their daughter's killer.
Tim Remsburg, the stepfather of Amy Boyer, who was slain in October of 1999 when she was 20, has been fighting against such companies ever since.
Boyer was shot to death by former high school classmate Liam Youens, who paid an Internet information broker to track down personal information about her. After killing Boyer, Youens killed himself with the same weapon.
Youens detailed plans for the attack on a Web site and even praised the company that provided the information that helped him track her down. She was shot to death as she left her job -- a location Youens was able to track through the site.
In April 2000, the parents filed a federal lawsuit against the company, Docusearch. The case is on hold while the state Supreme Court wrestles with key legal questions in the case.
(Excerpt) Read more at thelouisvillechannel.com ...
This case, like the Rebecca Schaeffer case many years ago, has to do with information sold on people by commercial companies. It has nothing to do with slander. Over the past few years various laws like the Federal Driver Privacy Protection Act (DPPA) have been enacted. The DPPA along with the Fair Credit Reporting Act offer protections against the misuse of "personal information". But like many laws, if they are not enforced then they are meaningless. I don't know if that's the case here but if you look at the site it seems that they have little or no concern about who is using the data. And the owners appear to be private investigators themselves. They know better.
There are no specific rights to privacy protection in the US Constitution, Amendments or Bill of Rights. Since there are none the challenge is to define what "privacy is". What is "privacy"? Your post here for example. Who "owns" it? You? Nope.
There is also the argument that records held by the gov't should not be kept private. That since they are compiled using tax dollars they belong to everyone. That has to be balanced with the legitimate use of such data by gov't and business. And is one reason the laws I mention above came about.
My view is that the remedy in this case is mostly civil but if the information providers breached any federal laws or any state law they should be prosecuted. And prosecuted with vigor.
The cowboys and gunslingers of information are at work on the internet and have been for several years. But their days are numbered.
So true. Easy information to track down. And will be unless electricity is outlawed.
It's kind of like the guns don't kill people thing. But in this case it's information. And the information did not kill anyone. In fact, if you were to argue that was the case and the "information" killed this person then looked at the mortality rate for "death by information" you could not calculate it. It's so small. More people have died from "death by spoon". Many more people.
She did, but only casually at a camp when they were about 13. Then attended the same high school but were barely acquaintances. She had no idea he was obsessed with her. A year or so after the killing, Amy's step father, Remsburg, and her mother, went to Youens' home to meet his family and find out why they had avoided any and all communication with them. The mother wouldn't talk to them at all. The older brother, who Remsburg described as "Lurch," simply told them that his mother wasn't home and quietly closed the door in their faces. The older sister was much more talkative, mostly about herself and how she thought a lot about suicide. She did tell them that their father left when Liam was in grade school and that he was routinely locked in his room by their mother when she left for work. When she returned, she let him out to go to the bathroom and eat, just like a puppy you don't want peeing on the floor. In his teens, his violent episodes started. When his mother ridiculed his desire to have plastic surgery to correct his sunken chest, he threw a china cabinet down the stairs and told her he would blow her brains out if she spoke to him like that again. Of course, he was made to undergo "counseling" after this. This is a very messed up family.
Likely as not, very few people (if anyone) actually saw it before he went and did this. There's a vast, vast pile of crap on the internet that is forever doomed to be unread, just because there's so much stuff out there. Unless you knew Liam Youens or Amy Boyer, or had some reason to look for them, how would you ever stumble across that page?
I just did a little searching on Google and according to at least a couple of pages I found, in 2002 there were about 16 billion web pages out there and 600 million people online, or about 27 pages per user. Of course, that doesn't prove anything, but the ratio is pretty small.
I don't have a definitive answer to your question but perhaps now somebody will make it their business to start doing regular searches for key phrases that one would expect creepy guys like Youens to use in describing their sick fantasies; e.g., phrases like, "I decided to kill," "I knew I'd kill," "who I would kill," etc., etc. I think I saw something similar to those in Youens' online journal.
You could do a bot-like thing, that searches the net everyday looking for any of thousands of creepy phrases that stalkers, serial killers, child molestors, etc., are known to have used. It would involve pouring over the writings and interview transcripts of hundreds of offenders, a perfect project for a police agency, or LEO psychologist/programmer.
Sorry, just thinking out loud . . . Story made me sick to think that this stuff was on the web and no one caught it.
Oh yes, tons. I have several pages up, with hit counters on them, that have never been loaded by anyone but myself. (I built them for testing purposes and just never took them down.) It can be surprisingly hard to get yourself listed in web search engines these days unless you're willing to put down hard cash. Even submitting your site to Google is no guarantee at all that they'll ever include it. Google's computers decide what to add to their database based on how many already Googled sites link to you. In other words, if your site is popular and lots of other popular sites link to it in some form or another, you're guaranteed to get into Google, and will probably rank pretty highly instead of being relegated to page 21 or something. Otherwise, you may as well not exist.
Also, Google tends to limit the number of pages on a site that it will index. If you put your sites on one of the Internet trailer-park sites like Geocities or Tripod, you'll probably never get viewed ever by anybody.
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