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Protecting Yourself Online |
| By John S. James
AIDS Treatment News #323
The other party was a Sacramento vice officer who had said he was 14 years old (changed to 13 the day before, to increase the penalty under California law), and Mirken was charged with attempted sex with a minor (see "Writer Needs Help: Legal Defense Fund," AIDS Treatment News #310, January 8, 1999). Last week--a year and over $55,000 later--the only remaining charge was dropped after the prosecution presented its case to the jury. The judge ruled that simply meeting in a park, with no attempted touching and no evidence of preparation for a sexual encounter, did not meet the legal standard for "attempt," which requires an unequivocal act toward committing a crime. At the time of the arrest, San Francisco police seized Mirken's computer and found pictures and conversations which were used against him--even though all of this evidence had either been quickly deleted, or automatically saved by the software without any action on Mirken's part and without his knowledge. Safe Conversation Online Mirken's lawyer, Bruce Nickerson, an expert in police gay- decoy cases, told us the most important rule is to treat whatever one says online (in chat rooms, instant messages, email, etc.) as if it were open to the world; the sense of anonymity is an illusion. Police are increasingly posing as young people online; the Sacramento online sting, like many others, has arrested only gay men. Unless clear boundaries can be worked out and publicized, adults will become even more nervous about any relationship with gay youth, adding to the isolation which leads to a suicide rate among gay teens which is three to four times that of other teenagers. After the charges were dismissed, Mirken told us that "one must be cautious, and especially wary of any conversation at all concerning having sex with a juvenile, a huge focus of law enforcement now, rightly or wrongly, and one that will not change soon. "There are still gay and lesbian teens who desperately need help and support, and we cannot abandon them." Computer and Internet Privacy
Passwords, credit cards, and all kinds of confidential information are also vulnerable. Most deleted information can be removed permanently by commercially available programs like "Shredder" (for Windows), "Eraser" (for Macintosh) or "Wipe Info." But users need to be aware of the limitations of each program; for example, some only remove deleted information already in the computer, and others only prevent new deleted information from being added, but do not remove what is already there, unless special procedures are followed. Some will remove the contents of deleted files, but not the names of those files. Some do not clean the dangerous Windows "swap file," described by one expert as an "Aladdin's cave" of deleted treasures. Many email users--probably the majority--never open most of the attachments they receive, because of the danger of computer viruses; instead, these attachments usually accumulate in a folder, and are ignored unless they turn out to be needed. Often they are not removed even if the email which carried them is deleted. Unless someone manually deletes the old attachments occasionally--which is easy to do if they are sorted by date--they will remain indefinitely on the computer. Some of the hundreds of solicited, unsolicited, and "spam" files may well contain pornography, hate literature, confidential business information, or other material which could be harmful if the computer is stolen, subpoenaed for a lawsuit, seized by law enforcement, or otherwise gets into unfriendly hands. When using the Web, images from your previous session(s) will usually remain in a cache (temporary memory), unless you either follow a simple procedure to clear the cache after your session, or set your browser to not use a cache in the first place (which will usually slow down your sessions). Some browsers also save a history file--a record of the sites you visited--and it may not be obvious how to remove this information. Also, some applications such as email and database programs can save deleted information in their own files beyond the reach of security software; for example, some word processors may save a new version of a file as the old version plus the editing changes. (We have received text files as email attachments which included previous versions; in one case, we received a document about software which included "slack space" listing songs about torture. It could just as well have included account numbers and passwords, or other confidential business or personal information, from files which had been saved by the sender but later deleted.) Users need to know how to make sure that what they delete is really gone--and that what they send to others includes no surprises. Computer users should also know that email can usually be traced, and that some word processors and other applications add hidden identifying information to every document they produce. And they should know that PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) is becoming a de facto standard for encryption. A particularly serious mistake, when using a private account from a public terminal, is to forget to log off when you leave--allowing anyone around to gain access to your account. For more information, see the Center for Democracy and Technology's top ten tips for online privacy, www.cdt.org/privacy/guide/basic/topten.html We would appreciate references to useful Web sites or other information on personal-computer privacy--both to inform our readers, and to help us make sure that the confidentiality of our subscribers is fully protected. You can reach this writer at jjames@aidsnews.org Copyright 1999 by John S. James. Permission granted for noncommercial reproduction, provided that our address and phone number are included if more than short quotations are used. |
Bruce Mirken 
© 1997-99 BEI