Could This Crime Have Been Prevented?
I had a chance to participate in a mini-conference on victims of cybercrime recently. The over-riding complaint was the unwillingness and inability of police to take victims of cybercrime seriously. Particularly female victims; who are often portrayed as 'just women out for revenge.' Some of these women were subsequently physically attacked and only then did law enforcement take them seriously.
Cybercrime is progressing faster than the law and the police know how to deal with it. So often rather than admit they 'don't know what to do' - police blow-off the victims.
This is dangerous. I don't know what the solution is but if you're a victim of any crime, including cybercrime - go to the police and demand that they make a report. Ask to see the supervisor until you find someone willing to make a report and GIVE YOU A COPY OF THE REPORT.
Maybe the shooter in Pittsburgh could have been stopped if someone had taken his online threats more seriously...
IF YOU ARE ON AN AGGREGATOR - CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE ABOVE VIDEO
Impact of Criminal Harassment on the Victim
The cumulative effect of harassing behaviour and actions causes victims to experience intimidation, as well as psychological and emotional distress. The psychological effect of stalking on victims can produce an intense and prolonged fear. This fear usually includes an increasing fear of the escalation of the frequency and nature of the conduct (for example, from non-violent to life-threatening) and is accompanied by a feeling of loss of control over the victim’s life.
Some common responses by victims to the trauma of being stalked include the following:
Criminal harassment or “stalking,” as it is commonly called, is not a psychiatric diagnosis. No single psychological profile exists for stalkers. Stalking and harassing behaviour can take many forms. A popular portrayal of criminal harassment is the stalking of a celebrity or public figure. In Canada, however, it appears that the primary motivation for stalking another person relates more to a desire to control a former partner.
Individuals who harass and stalk can possess one or more of a variety of psychological difficulties, ranging from personality disorders to major mental illnesses. Since the introduction of the first anti-stalking law in the United States, there have been a number of attempts to create stalking typologies from both the psychiatric and the law enforcement perspectives. Regardless of the typology, however, most individuals who stalk are engaging in obsessional behaviour. They are obsessional in the sense that they have persistent thoughts and ideas regarding the victim. They do not necessarily fulfil the diagnostic criteria for any serious psychiatric disorder. However, many have prior criminal, psychiatric and drug abuse histories that fall under Axis 1 diagnosis. The most common include alcohol dependency, mood disorders and schizophrenia.
Although no typology is all-inclusive, the one developed by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) Threat Management Unit is used as a theoretical framework in threat assessments by both the Behavioural Sciences Branch of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Behavioural Sciences Section of the Ontario Provincial Police.3 It proposes three types of stalking behaviour: simple obsessional, love obsessional and erotomanic stalker.
Erotomania is a delusional disorder in which the central theme is that another individual is in love with the stalker. The erotomanic stalker is convinced that the object of their attention, usually someone of the opposite sex, fervently loves them and would return the affection if it were not for some external influence. The person about whom this conviction is held is usually of a higher status than the stalker but is often not a celebrity. The victim could be their supervisor at work, their child’s paediatrician, their church minister or the police officer who stopped them for a traffic violation but did not charge them. Sometimes it can be a complete stranger.
Love obsessional stalkers, on the other hand, can be obsessed in their love without possessing the belief that the victim loves them. Very often, the love obsessional stalker suffers from a major psychiatric illness, such as schizophrenia or mania, and wants to “win” the love of their victim.
The simple obsessional stalker is similar to what has been described, in other typologies, as the intimate partner stalker. Most of these stalkers have been in some form of relationship with the victim. The contact may have been minimal, such as a blind date, but more commonly it is a prolonged dating relationship, common-law union or marriage. The perpetrator refuses to recognize that the relationship with the other person is over and the prevailing attitude is “If I can’t have her (or him), then no one else will.”
The stalker mounts a campaign of harassment, intimidation and psychological terror. The motivation for the harassment and stalking varies from revenge to the false belief that they can convince or coerce the victim back into the relationship.
Most simple obsessional stalkers are not mentally ill. Many have longstanding personality disorders. Department of Justice Canada research found that of 601 cases examined, 91% of the accused were male and 88% of the victims were female. Analysis of the accused-victim relationship showed that a large proportion of female victims were stalked by an ex-husband or ex-boyfriend. In many respects, intimate partner stalking is an extension of domestic violence and relates to a desire to control a former partner.
A consultant criminologist with the Federal Bureau of Investigation has developed what he regards as a preliminary typology of stalkers. It resolves some of the deficiencies of the above-noted LAPD typology but has not been subjected to the same empirical examination. It is intended to be developmental and heuristic, recognizing that the danger of typologies lies primarily in the likelihood that they may be viewed as an absolute classification schema.
This preliminary typology proposes seven types of stalkers: the random target stalker; celebrity stalker; single-issue stalker; casual acquaintance stalker; co-worker stalker; intimate partner stalker; and domestic violence stalker. The intimate partner and domestic violence stalkers are the most similar to the simple obsessional stalker.
Another recognized but not well-studied group of stalkers stalk as a component of their paraphilic (sexually deviant) focus. Some rapists and paedophiles have stalked because stalking is incorporated into their sexually deviant fantasies and offending. Some sexual sadists will go through “behavioural try-outs” that will include stalking.
Investigators and Crown prosecutors are encouraged to contact a police expert if they need assistance in determining the type of stalker with which they are dealing.
Cyber-Stalking and Online Harassment
Criminal harassment can be conducted through the use of a computer system, including the Internet. Although this type of conduct is described in various ways, not all such conduct falls within Canada’s definition of criminal harassment. For example, “cyber-stalking” or “on-line harassment” is often used to refer to (1) direct communication through e-mail; (2) Internet harassment, where the offender publishes offensive or threatening information about the victim on the Internet; and (3) unauthorized use, control or sabotage of the victim’s computer. In some cyber-stalking situations, criminal harassment charges may be appropriate; however, depending on the activity involved, charges under sections:
342.1 (unauthorized use of a computer),
342.2 (possession of device to obtain computer service) and
subsection 430(1.1) (mischief in relation to data) should also be considered.
Activities that can be considered cyber-stalking can include delivering threatening or harassing messages through one or more of the following:
* e-mail;
* chat rooms;
* message boards;
* newsgroups; and
* forums.
Other variations of cyber-stalking include the following:
Some 20% of the cases referred to the Threat Management Unit of the LAPD involve stalking through electronic mail.
One out of four of the 600 cases referred to the Sex Crimes Unit of the NYPD in a recent study involved cyber-stalking.
- CANADIAN REPORT ON STALKING.
IF YOU ARE ON AN AGGREGATOR - CLICK HERE TO SEE THE ABOVE VIDEO
Hacker compiles thoughts of fitness-center shooter
By Paula Reed Ward
Shortly after George Sodini killed himself following his shooting of 12 women in a fitness club in suburban Pittsburgh, his diary describing his hatred of women and plans to someday carry out such a tragedy showed up online.
Within a day of the shooting, Web surfers could find benign YouTube videos and Sodini's musings about underage girls on online forums.
Finally, someone posted links on the Internet to Sodini's receipts from purchases he made online of ammunition and large-capacity magazines for his guns, as well as records of his Google search history -- including queries like "mass murderer profiles," "murder suicide statistics" and "going to die anyway."
The lightning speed and reach of the global communications network became clear when a hacker decided to see if he could break into the account of a killer and let the whole world follow on a trek through the world of a dead man.
The items, when viewed individually, could be harmless minutia. But when viewed as a whole, it foreshadows Tuesday's horror.
"I think the fascination comes from being able to see into the private mind of a mass murderer," said Alex, the Canadian computer hacker who compiled much of Sodini's online life into a public Web site for all to see.
When he learned that the man responsible for killing the three women at an American fitness center Tuesday was an information technology professional -- Sodini worked as a systems analyst at the Pittsburgh law firm K&L Gates -- Alex saw it as a challenge to learn as much as he could about him by hacking Sodini's information.
Alex, who spoke on the condition that his last name not be used, said it was simple.
"This was fairly easy. I didn't even have to do anything to a server. I didn't force my way in."
Instead, using Sodini's Web domain, georgesodini.com, Alex was able to find his e-mail address. From there, he went to the webmail server that Sodini used, and clicked on the box that asked if he forgot his password.
That prompted a security question asking Sodini the name of his favorite pet. In his previous Google searches, Alex had already found the answer to that. He typed it in, and just like that, he accessed Sodini's e-mail, and from there other, older Web pages the man had kept, his Gmail account, and therefore his Google search history.
In addition to looking up terms about mass murder, Sodini did searches on "corruption of minors" and "age of consent Pennsylvania."
He queried things like "social phobia," "cognitive therapy" and "avoidant personality disorder," and other innocuous things, like lyrics by the singers Pink and Van Morrison.
Alex also found YouTube videos Sodini posted more than a year ago of him talking about his feelings and another of him giving a walking tour through his home.
While the videos had only a couple dozen hits when Alex found them, by the end of the day Thursday, they numbered more than 25,000.
"It's just curiosity," Alex said of hacking Sodini. "It has been interesting to try and reconstruct what is left of his online life."
Louis B. Schlesinger, a professor of forensic psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said people have always been fascinated by crime.
It is particularly so, he said, if the crime is something different or extraordinary.
"It's very discomfiting when there's mass murder," Schlesinger said.
And so people will try to gather as much information about a person as possible to reassure themselves that there was something tangibly wrong with the killer -- a diagnosable mental illness, past abuse or even a brain tumor -- to show that the person was unlike everyone else.
"Going off and losing control is very frightening," the professor said.
But there are other reasons to be intrigued by crime.
"Many people get some sort of vicarious gratification with criminals who are very clever," Schlesinger said. "In a case like this, a lot of people, strangely enough, can identify with him."
Alex agrees.
"I've found, and I'm sure other people have found, similarities in their lives with his -- at some point feeling lonely or removed from other people.
"He looked normal, had a normal job, led from outside perspectives a normal life. But in reality he was not well, and he snapped."
Though his Google history shows Sodini clearly wanted to learn more about a variety of mental illnesses, it is unknown if he ever sought treatment of any kind.
"In retrospect, things are so clear," Schlesinger said. "Could this have been prevented? Impossible to know."
IF YOU ARE ON AN AGGREGATOR - CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE ABOVE VIDEO
On the Net
Cybercrime is progressing faster than the law and the police know how to deal with it. So often rather than admit they 'don't know what to do' - police blow-off the victims.
This is dangerous. I don't know what the solution is but if you're a victim of any crime, including cybercrime - go to the police and demand that they make a report. Ask to see the supervisor until you find someone willing to make a report and GIVE YOU A COPY OF THE REPORT.
Maybe the shooter in Pittsburgh could have been stopped if someone had taken his online threats more seriously...
IF YOU ARE ON AN AGGREGATOR - CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE ABOVE VIDEO
Impact of Criminal Harassment on the Victim
The cumulative effect of harassing behaviour and actions causes victims to experience intimidation, as well as psychological and emotional distress. The psychological effect of stalking on victims can produce an intense and prolonged fear. This fear usually includes an increasing fear of the escalation of the frequency and nature of the conduct (for example, from non-violent to life-threatening) and is accompanied by a feeling of loss of control over the victim’s life.
Some common responses by victims to the trauma of being stalked include the following:
- self-reproach;
- a tendency to downplay the impact of the stalking;
- interpretation of the stalking as a “private matter”;
- a sense of betrayal and stigma;
- anxiety and fear, due to the unpredictability of the stalker’s conduct;
- feelings of being helpless and unable to control their lives;
- lack of confidence in police, resulting in a failure to report;
- inaction, due to a lack of awareness that the conduct is criminal; and
- denial or embarrassment
Criminal harassment or “stalking,” as it is commonly called, is not a psychiatric diagnosis. No single psychological profile exists for stalkers. Stalking and harassing behaviour can take many forms. A popular portrayal of criminal harassment is the stalking of a celebrity or public figure. In Canada, however, it appears that the primary motivation for stalking another person relates more to a desire to control a former partner.
Individuals who harass and stalk can possess one or more of a variety of psychological difficulties, ranging from personality disorders to major mental illnesses. Since the introduction of the first anti-stalking law in the United States, there have been a number of attempts to create stalking typologies from both the psychiatric and the law enforcement perspectives. Regardless of the typology, however, most individuals who stalk are engaging in obsessional behaviour. They are obsessional in the sense that they have persistent thoughts and ideas regarding the victim. They do not necessarily fulfil the diagnostic criteria for any serious psychiatric disorder. However, many have prior criminal, psychiatric and drug abuse histories that fall under Axis 1 diagnosis. The most common include alcohol dependency, mood disorders and schizophrenia.
Although no typology is all-inclusive, the one developed by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) Threat Management Unit is used as a theoretical framework in threat assessments by both the Behavioural Sciences Branch of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Behavioural Sciences Section of the Ontario Provincial Police.3 It proposes three types of stalking behaviour: simple obsessional, love obsessional and erotomanic stalker.
Erotomania is a delusional disorder in which the central theme is that another individual is in love with the stalker. The erotomanic stalker is convinced that the object of their attention, usually someone of the opposite sex, fervently loves them and would return the affection if it were not for some external influence. The person about whom this conviction is held is usually of a higher status than the stalker but is often not a celebrity. The victim could be their supervisor at work, their child’s paediatrician, their church minister or the police officer who stopped them for a traffic violation but did not charge them. Sometimes it can be a complete stranger.
Love obsessional stalkers, on the other hand, can be obsessed in their love without possessing the belief that the victim loves them. Very often, the love obsessional stalker suffers from a major psychiatric illness, such as schizophrenia or mania, and wants to “win” the love of their victim.
The simple obsessional stalker is similar to what has been described, in other typologies, as the intimate partner stalker. Most of these stalkers have been in some form of relationship with the victim. The contact may have been minimal, such as a blind date, but more commonly it is a prolonged dating relationship, common-law union or marriage. The perpetrator refuses to recognize that the relationship with the other person is over and the prevailing attitude is “If I can’t have her (or him), then no one else will.”
The stalker mounts a campaign of harassment, intimidation and psychological terror. The motivation for the harassment and stalking varies from revenge to the false belief that they can convince or coerce the victim back into the relationship.
Most simple obsessional stalkers are not mentally ill. Many have longstanding personality disorders. Department of Justice Canada research found that of 601 cases examined, 91% of the accused were male and 88% of the victims were female. Analysis of the accused-victim relationship showed that a large proportion of female victims were stalked by an ex-husband or ex-boyfriend. In many respects, intimate partner stalking is an extension of domestic violence and relates to a desire to control a former partner.
A consultant criminologist with the Federal Bureau of Investigation has developed what he regards as a preliminary typology of stalkers. It resolves some of the deficiencies of the above-noted LAPD typology but has not been subjected to the same empirical examination. It is intended to be developmental and heuristic, recognizing that the danger of typologies lies primarily in the likelihood that they may be viewed as an absolute classification schema.
This preliminary typology proposes seven types of stalkers: the random target stalker; celebrity stalker; single-issue stalker; casual acquaintance stalker; co-worker stalker; intimate partner stalker; and domestic violence stalker. The intimate partner and domestic violence stalkers are the most similar to the simple obsessional stalker.
Another recognized but not well-studied group of stalkers stalk as a component of their paraphilic (sexually deviant) focus. Some rapists and paedophiles have stalked because stalking is incorporated into their sexually deviant fantasies and offending. Some sexual sadists will go through “behavioural try-outs” that will include stalking.
Investigators and Crown prosecutors are encouraged to contact a police expert if they need assistance in determining the type of stalker with which they are dealing.
Cyber-Stalking and Online Harassment
Criminal harassment can be conducted through the use of a computer system, including the Internet. Although this type of conduct is described in various ways, not all such conduct falls within Canada’s definition of criminal harassment. For example, “cyber-stalking” or “on-line harassment” is often used to refer to (1) direct communication through e-mail; (2) Internet harassment, where the offender publishes offensive or threatening information about the victim on the Internet; and (3) unauthorized use, control or sabotage of the victim’s computer. In some cyber-stalking situations, criminal harassment charges may be appropriate; however, depending on the activity involved, charges under sections:
342.1 (unauthorized use of a computer),
342.2 (possession of device to obtain computer service) and
subsection 430(1.1) (mischief in relation to data) should also be considered.
Activities that can be considered cyber-stalking can include delivering threatening or harassing messages through one or more of the following:
* e-mail;
* chat rooms;
* message boards;
* newsgroups; and
* forums.
Other variations of cyber-stalking include the following:
- sending inappropriate electronic greeting cards;
- posting personal advertisements in the victim’s name;
- creating Web sites that contain threatening or harassing messages or that contain provocative or pornographic photographs, most of which have been altered;
- sending viruses to the victim’s computer;
- using spy-ware to track Web site visits or record keystrokes the victim makes; and
- sending harassing messages to the victim’s employers, co-workers, students, teachers, customers, friends, families or churches or sending harassing messages forged in the victim’s name to others.
Some 20% of the cases referred to the Threat Management Unit of the LAPD involve stalking through electronic mail.
One out of four of the 600 cases referred to the Sex Crimes Unit of the NYPD in a recent study involved cyber-stalking.
- CANADIAN REPORT ON STALKING.
IF YOU ARE ON AN AGGREGATOR - CLICK HERE TO SEE THE ABOVE VIDEO
Hacker compiles thoughts of fitness-center shooter
By Paula Reed Ward
Shortly after George Sodini killed himself following his shooting of 12 women in a fitness club in suburban Pittsburgh, his diary describing his hatred of women and plans to someday carry out such a tragedy showed up online.
Within a day of the shooting, Web surfers could find benign YouTube videos and Sodini's musings about underage girls on online forums.
Finally, someone posted links on the Internet to Sodini's receipts from purchases he made online of ammunition and large-capacity magazines for his guns, as well as records of his Google search history -- including queries like "mass murderer profiles," "murder suicide statistics" and "going to die anyway."
The lightning speed and reach of the global communications network became clear when a hacker decided to see if he could break into the account of a killer and let the whole world follow on a trek through the world of a dead man.
The items, when viewed individually, could be harmless minutia. But when viewed as a whole, it foreshadows Tuesday's horror.
"I think the fascination comes from being able to see into the private mind of a mass murderer," said Alex, the Canadian computer hacker who compiled much of Sodini's online life into a public Web site for all to see.
When he learned that the man responsible for killing the three women at an American fitness center Tuesday was an information technology professional -- Sodini worked as a systems analyst at the Pittsburgh law firm K&L Gates -- Alex saw it as a challenge to learn as much as he could about him by hacking Sodini's information.
Alex, who spoke on the condition that his last name not be used, said it was simple.
"This was fairly easy. I didn't even have to do anything to a server. I didn't force my way in."
Instead, using Sodini's Web domain, georgesodini.com, Alex was able to find his e-mail address. From there, he went to the webmail server that Sodini used, and clicked on the box that asked if he forgot his password.
That prompted a security question asking Sodini the name of his favorite pet. In his previous Google searches, Alex had already found the answer to that. He typed it in, and just like that, he accessed Sodini's e-mail, and from there other, older Web pages the man had kept, his Gmail account, and therefore his Google search history.
In addition to looking up terms about mass murder, Sodini did searches on "corruption of minors" and "age of consent Pennsylvania."
He queried things like "social phobia," "cognitive therapy" and "avoidant personality disorder," and other innocuous things, like lyrics by the singers Pink and Van Morrison.
Alex also found YouTube videos Sodini posted more than a year ago of him talking about his feelings and another of him giving a walking tour through his home.
While the videos had only a couple dozen hits when Alex found them, by the end of the day Thursday, they numbered more than 25,000.
"It's just curiosity," Alex said of hacking Sodini. "It has been interesting to try and reconstruct what is left of his online life."
Louis B. Schlesinger, a professor of forensic psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said people have always been fascinated by crime.
It is particularly so, he said, if the crime is something different or extraordinary.
"It's very discomfiting when there's mass murder," Schlesinger said.
And so people will try to gather as much information about a person as possible to reassure themselves that there was something tangibly wrong with the killer -- a diagnosable mental illness, past abuse or even a brain tumor -- to show that the person was unlike everyone else.
"Going off and losing control is very frightening," the professor said.
But there are other reasons to be intrigued by crime.
"Many people get some sort of vicarious gratification with criminals who are very clever," Schlesinger said. "In a case like this, a lot of people, strangely enough, can identify with him."
Alex agrees.
"I've found, and I'm sure other people have found, similarities in their lives with his -- at some point feeling lonely or removed from other people.
"He looked normal, had a normal job, led from outside perspectives a normal life. But in reality he was not well, and he snapped."
Though his Google history shows Sodini clearly wanted to learn more about a variety of mental illnesses, it is unknown if he ever sought treatment of any kind.
"In retrospect, things are so clear," Schlesinger said. "Could this have been prevented? Impossible to know."
IF YOU ARE ON AN AGGREGATOR - CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE ABOVE VIDEO
On the Net
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