Rutgers webcam spying case shows erosion of privacy
Barb ShellyThe jury has spoken, and everything about the Rutgers University webcam spying case is still wrong.
Tyler Clementi is dead, a suicide victim three weeks into his freshman year of college.
Dharun Ravi, Clementi’s roommate, faces up to 10 years in prison and possible deportation because of a verdict that many legal experts say was wildly off target.
The definition of a hate crime, meant to protect minorities from acts of overt violence, has been stretched to include peeping Tom behavior in a college dorm. Ravi turned on his computer’s webcam to capture images of Clementi kissing another man, and told the world about it on Twitter.
The webcam verdict lends no clarity or advice for navigating the uncharted frontier of digital protocol. If anything, it leads further into the murk.
Ravi showed signs of being uncomfortable with having a gay roommate, but nothing indicates that he wanted to drive Clementi to harm because of his homosexuality. The jurors acknowledged that, but found Ravi guilty on a bias intimidation charge among other things, meaning he created circumstances that caused Clementi to be intimidated, even if he didn’t realize he was doing anything wrong.
In other words, Ravi stands to be severely punished not so much for his actions, but for the reaction they caused. And although Clementi was troubled by Ravi’s boorish insensitivity — he requested a room change and checked Ravi’s Twitter account repeatedly — no one knows why he took his life. Clementi, a shy, 18-year-old violinist who had recently told his parents he was gay, spoke to no one and left only a cursory Facebook message before he jumped off New York’s George Washington Bridge.
In September 2010, when he spied on his roommate, Ravi was an 18-year-old high school graduate who knew a lot about the digital world and not enough about respecting another person’s privacy.
“I didn’t realize it was anything so private,” Ravi told police in an interview later heard by jurors, in which he acknowledged viewing his roommate in an intimate moment. “It was my room, too.”
The erosion of privacy is perhaps the one clear element in this sorry mess. Ravi, an intelligent young man in many respects, clearly had no understanding of what privacy is or means. He is far from alone in that deficit.
According to an exhaustive New Yorker profile, Ravi’s viewed his college admission scores, a photo of his fake New York driver’s license and his routine comings and goings as Internet fodder. He posted on multiple social media sites and was prolific on Twitter, reporting at one point being “stoned out of my mind.”
If you’re willing to sacrifice your own privacy to the gods of cyberspace, it stands to reason that you may not value someone else’s.
“Found out my roommate is gay,” Ravi announced on Twitter in the run-up to starting college, after some online snooping turned up a part of Clementi’s email address on a gay chat forum. Apparently it didn’t cross Ravi’s mind that Clementi should be the one to decide if, when and how to disseminate that information.
Forget the locked diary. Technology today encourages users to leave an on-line trail that can be picked up by just about anyone. Share, share, share, is the message. Cyberspace has a boundless hunger for your thoughts, your photos, your good and bad moments, your convictions and your prejudices.
Ravi was willing to provide gristle for the beast, and so are many others.
The problem is, the beast is also indiscreet. After Clementi’s death and the eruption of outrage that it provoked, investigators sought and found a trail of tweets, instant messages, text messages and other communications that found their way into the public record. as the prosecution’s case against Ravi proceeded.
For those involved, they are embarrassing at best and incriminating at worst.
It is too late to stuff this beast back into the bottle. But I think it falls to those of us who remember a time when communications were privileged to tell upcoming generations that privacy matters.
A closed door in a college dorm room means you don’t intrude upon the space inside. Your roommate’s romantic life is not your business or your friends’. You don’t need to tell everybody everything about yourself. And once you put information into cyberspace, you cannot control where it goes, or what chain of events it might set off.
All of that is the sort of information we should be sharing.
To reach Barb Shelly, call 816-234-4594 or send email to bshelly@kcstar.com. Follow her on Twitter at bshelly.
Phil Cardarella
1 year, 1 month agoCharging this kid with felonies was political-correctness gone insane.
Bright college kids today do not think anything is evil about homosexuality. It is no more something the think about than racially-mixed dating.
What this kid did was dumb and boorish. Making it a crime? That’s just criminal.
Kent Mueller
1 year, 1 month agoI am puzzled by this piece. The penalty may seem harsh, and that is fair game for debate. But, it seems Barb is excusing the perpetrator due to his own supposed ignorance and also to the openness of the internet.
Ravi didn’t think this was a private thing? Does anyone reading this believe that? Really? Was Ravi trying to help his roommate get assimilated into college life? Come on, get real. Ravi had to know this was hurtful.
Also, as a side note. When a 30 year old, second year law school student (Ms. Fluke)is referenced as a “college student”, why would a college student in his freshman year be referenced as a high school graduate? While technically a college student (Ms. Fluke), those demographics are not what people think of when they are told someone is a college student. I had never before seen a college freshman referred to as a high school graduate, in place of being a college student. Both are examples of altering the stage of innocence to suit one’s position.
Emily Franco
1 year, 1 month agoThis was a few seconds of live feed viewed by one other person. Half the point with Ravi was that Tyler wanted Ravi not to come back from practice until Tyler told him room was available. Tyler follows up with more room request time (extensive requests) in a short span of time.
Tyler posted on gay web internet sites so his sexuality was not a secret. Tyler’s web conversations show him staying up all night, expressing he did not think what Ravi did was that bad it was more a harmless stunt, but Tyler wanted other’s opinions. Tyler’s “friends” online kept egging on Tyler to get Ravi kicked out of school to punish him in 1000 times greater way that the few seconds of live feed. Kind of like the anti-abortion nuts who think it’s their right to hurt others. Did anyone watch Colton on The Survivor? Some gays (and I think Tyler was egged onto his attitudes by internet “friends”) think the lesson of life is to show the other side “THAT THEY RUN THE SHOW.” Sometimes young people who commit suicide want their parents to feel bad, or their peers, or the world. They should learn that they are causing so much more trouble than a few seconds of blurry images seen by another person. When I was a freshman in college my friend and I decided to catch up on research by invading the library after hours. I specifically asked this friend if library alarm went off and guard came in or couldn’t see us in the dark as we were running off, could we be shot by accident. Freshmen then. Freshman now.