Blog 1 - Cyberstalking

There are many wonderful ways to use the internet; it connects people all across the globe in many wonderful ways. Unfortunately, the internet is a double edged sword, and it does not come without its negatives. While there is an endless list of horrid things people do on the internet, I feel as if one is the most despicable ways people can use the internet is to cyber stalk. My reasoning for this is that it can be detrimental to someone’s life in a multitude of ways. There is the most well known method of cyber stalking, which is the way child molesters use it in order to get in contact with and deceive children in having sexual intercourse with them. This is particularly disturbing to me that people with this repulsive sexual fetish now have a way to keep it under the radar. However, there are other ways cyberstalking can ruin lives besides causing emotional damage; take the case of Leandra Ramm (http://www.newsweek.com/2014/08/22/how-law-standing-cyberstalking-264251.html). She had the opportunity to obtain a promising Opera career, when someone she’d never met…“Pos(ed) as a director of a music festival, Colin Mak Yew Loong first contacted Ramm in the United States in 2005 and promised to help further her music career. Initially, she was grateful, but when she stopped replying to his messages, realising that he was a fraudster, Mak resorted to threatening e-mails and phone calls. He sent her around 5,000 emails. He also created hate groups on Facebook and Twitter about her, created a blog about her and made rape and physical threats against her and her family members, along with bomb threats against opera companies that engaged her. He also stalked her by proxy; unsurprisingly her promising career quickly collapsed.” After all of this, she was diagnosed with PTSD and contemplated suicide. It took 6 long years and a legal team with connects to the secret service in order to build an effective case and get this man, and get him convicted, sentenced to 3 years in prison. I propose several solutions to prevent any of this from ever happening. On the national level, we can follow the EU’s example of passing the Istanbul Convention, which is a significant push in the direction of cyberstalking, making stalking and actions associated with it illegal in the countries that ratified it (http://www.newsweek.com/2014/08/22/how-law-standing-cyberstalking-264251.html). On the international level, we as a global community must develop some sort of international system of protection against international cyber crime. There are issues with both of the systems; on the national level, there could be loopholes for cyber crime to get around the standards of physical stalking. On the international, it will be extremely difficult for countries with different values and standards than us to get on board and persecute cyber crime. If my solutions were implemented, than the internet would be a much more safe place for children and woman alike, as both domestic and foreign potential cyber stalkers would be liable to be persecuted for their crimes. The case of Leandra Ramm proves that it is possible to hold these criminals accountable for there actions; we as an international society just need to make this process easier to accomplish.