There are few things more disgusting than a grown woman creating an internet persona for purpose of causing mental harm to a 13 year-old girl, as Lori Drew did, and yet, the news today that her conviction has been overturned is a very positive development in the fight to keep the internet free.
A federal judge on Thursday tentatively threw out the convictions of a Missouri mother for her role in a MySpace hoax directed at a 13-year-old neighbor girl who ended up committing suicide.
U.S. District Judge George Wu said he was tentatively acquitting Lori Drew of misdemeanor counts of accessing computers without authorization.
Now make no mistake, Lori Drew is a vile human being and she'll have to live with her role in a young woman's decision to hang herself, but the charges she was brought up on, illegally accessing computers, was an enormous crock of shit that, if successful, could have given the government a new way to crack down on unpopular speech. Judge Wu had similar thoughts:
(Wu) said that if she is to be found guilty of illegally accessing computers, anyone who has ever violated the social networking site's terms of service would be guilty of a misdemeanor.
"You could prosecute pretty much anyone who violated terms of service," he said.
Get that? You could go to prison or be fined for violating a website's TOS, even if what you did broke no laws. One can certainly do ethically the wrong thing without breaking the law. Drew being thrown into prison would seriously blur the two.
The fact is, it's often the people we hate or abhor whose fights, however selfish they might be, are at the forefront of preserving everyone's essential liberties, be they freedom of speech or the right to due process.
So while I loathe Drew's actions wish her nothing but pain and anguish for what she's done, I will celebrate the fact that her tossed-out conviction is a true victory for all of us who love the freedom the internet allows and want to keep it safe from more government intrusion.