Spyware

We all use a variety of different technology such as mobile phones, e-mail, online shopping and social networks. However, using this technology can put stalking victims at risk. It is important that support professionals and victims understand how technology works, why it puts them at risk and what steps they can take to reduce those risks. These guidelines review the most commonly used technologies and their risks. There is a section on spoof text (SMS) and global positioning satellite (GPS) car tracking devices, but the key risks are set out below.

Web 2.0 has led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and applications. These communities provide places for information sharing and collaboration. They also open the door for inappropriate online activities, such as harassment, in which some users post messages in a virtual community that are intentionally offensive to other members of the community. It is a new and challenging task to detect online harassment; currently few systems attempt to solve this problem. In this paper, we use a supervised learning approach for detecting harassment. Our technique employs content features, sentiment features, and contextual features of documents. The experimental results described herein show that our method achieves significant improvements over several baselines, including Term Frequency- Inverse Document Frequency (TFIDF) approaches. Identification of online harassment is feasible when TFIDF is supplemented with sentiment and contextual feature attributes.

The National Center for Victims of Crime has developed The Model Stalking Code Revisited: Responding to the New Realities of Stalking to assist states that are working to strengthen their stalking laws. This report examines and recommends updates to the 1993 Model Anti-Stalking Code for the States developed at the direction of Congress by the National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice.

Federal and state laws have always played a role in protecting minors from criminal victimization. For example, Congress has enacted laws dealing with child pornography, child luring, and child sexual exploitation. However, given its immediacy, anonymity, and accessibility, the Internet offers a forum, through social networking sites,1 for harassment and other social ills committed against minors. The Internet’s nuances present new challenges for federal and state legislators and law enforcement personnel responsible for defining and prosecuting criminal use. This is especially true with the relatively new crime of Internet “harassment.” The term Internet harassment usually encompasses “cyberstalking,” “cyberharassment,” and/or “cyberbullying.” These activities, when committed against minors, may cause emotional harm. Recent high-profile cases involving teen suicides demonstrate the potentially severe consequences of this emotional harm. As such, legislators are faced with determining how to handle the problem.
 
Various laws, not specific to minors, govern traditional crimes such as stalking and harassment, which generally include a threat of harm. These laws generally criminalize unlawful conduct that fails to rise to the level of assault or battery.2 Recognizing that the Internet can be used to stalk or harass individuals, Congress and some states have amended “traditional” stalking and harassment statutes to include Internet activity. However, these statutes are generally inapplicable in situations in which minors suffer emotional harm due to embarrassment or humiliation. When, if ever, should criminal sanctions be imposed for these incidents? Should legislators amend traditional stalking and harassment statutes to cover these situations? Or should legislators create new crimes covering such activity? Should such activity conducted by a neighbor, for example, be prosecuted on the federal level because the Internet was used? Or should prosecution of such activity remain at the state level? These are just some of the questions legislators may consider in addressing the problem of Internet harassment of children. While these policy considerations are noteworthy, this report focuses on the applicable constitutional constraints legislators may consider in drafting legislation in this area.

This article aims to raise awareness of a rapidly emerging privacy threat that we term cybercasing: using geo-tagged information available online to mount real-world attacks. While users typically realize that sharing locations has some implications for their privacy, we provide evidence that many (i) are unaware of the full scope of the threat they face when doing so, and (ii) often do not even realize when they publish such information. The threat is elevated by recent developments that make systematic search for specific geo-located data and inference from multiple sources easier than ever before. In this paper, we summarize the state of geo-tagging; estimate the amount of geo-information available on several major sites, including YouTube, Twitter, and Craigslist; and examine its programmatic accessibility through public APIs. We then present a set of scenarios demonstrating how easy it is to correlate geotagged data with corresponding publicly-available information for compromising a victim’s privacy. We were, e.g., able to find private addresses of celebrities as well as the origins of otherwise anonymized Craigslist postings. We argue that the security and privacy community needs to shape the further development of geo-location technology for better protecting users from such consequences.

The Office on Violence Against Women was created in 1995 to implement the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and to lead the national effort to stop domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking.

The rapid integration of both Internet and wireless technology into contemporary American culture has created both benefits and detriments for survivors of intimate violence. The Internet has provided domestic violence organizations with a greater capacity to reach out to victims of domestic violence than previously possible through print and word-of-mouth outreach efforts. It has also provided some women, albeit predominantly economically privileged women, greater access to resources about domestic violence as well as Internet based support groups. Unfortunately, Internet and wireless technologies have also aided batterers' efforts to further monitor and control their partners' activities, thereby placing battered women at risk of serious and fatal injuries. This paper explores: 1) the prevalence of web usage by both survivors of intimate violence and the organizations that serve them; 2) the ways in which batterers misuse communication technology to monitor and control their partners activities; and 3) precautions that survivors and organizations can employ to safeguard themselves from liability and harm.

On January 12, 2003, Brandon Vedas, a twenty-one-year-old computer expert from Arizona, died after taking a lethal dose of controlled substances.1 Sad as it is to know that a troubled young man took his own life, the circumstances surrounding Brandon’s apparent suicide offer a glimpse of a new and unfamiliar landscape. At the time of his death, Brandon had a captive audience, watching him through a webcam, as he ingested a lethal cocktail of drugs and alcohol in full view of a group of chat room companions. According to the chatroom transcript, some participants warned Brandon against taking too many drugs, while others actually encouraged him to take more. Brandon’s last coherent words were “I told u [sic] I was hardcore.”

Whether or not Brandon’s death was the result of undiagnosed depression, a reckless experiment gone awry, or simply an accident inspired by peer pressure remains uncertain. What his tragic death does establish, however, is the permanent impact that information and telecommunications technology (generally referred to as the “Internet”) has had on the way we interact, and its power to creep into the most intimate spheres of our existence. For better or for worse, the Internet has transformed our social landscape, and if current trends hold true, we are at the cusp of a new era facing the dark sociopolitical policy concerns of an interconnected existence. For instance, figures show online dating is rapidly becoming a fixture of single life for more than 45 million adults of all ages, backgrounds, and interests. Researchers at the University at Buffalo have developed a system that allows one person to experience the sense of touch felt by  another, and transmit the sensation over the Internet. A 2003 study examining the media interests of young adults found that teens now spend more time on the Internet than watching television. A report on e-mail at work found that 98% of users with Internet access use e-mail on the job.

The Internet’s awesome power of interconnectivity has made it by far the fastest growing medium in human history. According to a 2002 report by the United Nations (“U.N.”) Conference on Trade and Development, 655 million people around the world now have Internet access. In India, Internet access increased 27.3% from 5.5 million users in 2000 to 7 million users in 2001.9 During the same time period, Internet users in South Africa increased by 27.8%, in Brazil by 60%, and in Mexico by 34%.10 A 2002 study by the U.S. Department of Commerce found that 143 million Americans (about 54% of the population) were using the Internet in September 2001—an increase of 26 million in thirteen months.

But, with increased online integration also comes a new vehicle for misconduct. Operating at a tortured pace, the legal systems of the world have only now begun to recognize the realities of the Internet’s unregulated, borderless realm. So far, only a patchwork of laws exists to protect users against emerging criminal conduct in cyberspace. According to published reports, only fifty or sixty countries have specific laws against cybercrimes. Interpol representatives estimate that more than a hundred countries have no laws on computer offences. Unfortunately, gaping holes in the law, coupled with the Internet’s global setting, create new vulnerabilities for the Internet community at large.

A joint report by the National White Collar Crime Center and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”) found that fraud complaints in the United States arising from Internet transactions tripled in 2002 relative to the year before. The FBI’s Internet Fraud Complaint Center received 48,252 complaints in 2002; in 2001, it only received 16,775 complaints.  The report also found that approximately 46% of the complaints involved auction fraud. Not surprisingly, the total monetary loss tripled from $17 million in 2001 to $54 million in 2002.

Still, the United States is not the only nation facing increased vulnerabilities in cyberspace. In the United Kingdom, law enforcement officials have found that cyber-crime incidents are doubling every eighteen months.  In South Korea, the National Policy Agency reported that in 2001 cyber-offences shot up 126% from the year before, to 33,289 cases, and totaled 39,482 cases in the first eight months of 2002.

Equally unsettling is the societal impact of criminal activity that goes beyond quantifiable figures. Although the ongoing developments in the Internet’s potential hold a special promise for our future, the global presence of this new medium has introduced a host of new dangers that transcend cultural norms, national boundaries, and traditional territorial law enforcement mechanisms.

Benefiting from the confusion, many cyber-predators exploit gaps in the law, test its limits, and hide behind conflicting definitions of criminal activity. Identity predators, for example, abuse lax information-sharing policies to commit identity fraud. Cyberstalkers track their victims online, sending offensive e-mails or menacing messages using Instant Messaging technology. Spammers not only bombard users with unsolicited junk e-mail, but can also spread destructive computer viruses—like the SoBig.F virus—within messages that have misleading subject lines.

In a June 2003 message to WiredSafety.org, one cybercrime victim aptly summarized the user frustrations of an expanding, but loosely-regulated, virtual realm: I am being harassed, stalked, and my personal identity has been plastered over the Internet on a home business web page. I have contacted the Sheriff’s department, but it does not involve a large amount of money. . . . Is there anyone out there that can give me some advice?

This article will strive to shed light on the dark arts of cyberspace by examining three Internet safety policy concerns that remain largely overlooked in this virtual realm: identity theft, cyberstalking, and informational privacy invasions. Part I will discuss the gravity of the identity theft situation in the United States in light of Corporate America’s promiscuous use of the Social Security Number (“SSN”) as the primary method of identifying individuals. Part II will discuss the emerging social concerns in cyberspace involving harassment, bullying, and other scare-tactics known as cyberstalking. Part III will touch on the role informational privacy invasions play in promoting criminal activity in cyberspace. Part IV will lay out the policy challenges that lie ahead, given the rapid integration of Internet technology into the fabric of our everyday lives. In sum, this article will press the need for sound Internet policies that foster economic prosperity and secure a reasonable sense of personal safety.

“[T]hey fell in love; they had children; their relationship became derailed; they felt betrayed; their hearts were broken; they wanted to love and protect their children from the hurt they felt the other caused them to feel. They entered the divorcing process with family and legal cheerleaders; sides were taken; stakes were raised; righteous indignation was fueled; inner fears were stoked.”1

Spyware. Hacking into password protected files. Accessing another person’s online banking information. Grabbing and copying hard drives. Your client has engaged in “self help” e-discovery. Has he or she committed a crime? Where is the line between permissible domestic “spying” and crime? Can you use the “fruit of the poisonous tree”? If you do, are you committing a crime? What are your professional ethics and responsibilities? How can you get this information legally and ethically?

Generally, this is a client driven issue. A spouse may suspect adultery, tax fraud, asset dissipation, or other illicit behavior. Their first concern is to validate and confirm their suspicions. Their distress and sense of betrayal may drive them to extreme, and possibly, illegal behavior. When they show up at our offices, it is our job to advise them. Unless the illicit behavior affects the best interests of minor children, the “evidence” will probably not be relevant in most no-fault jurisdictions. If it is relevant, is it admissible? How can we keep these marital-warriors from drawing us into their battles?2