Cyber Stalking

The former human-resources manager at the Great Wolf Lodge in Thurston County has pleaded guilty to charges of cyber stalking for making more than 4,000 obscene and threatening phone calls to 1,200 different people in the United States and Canada.
Daniel Leonard, 32, of Olympia, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Tacoma on Tuesday and faces up to five years in prison when he's sentenced Dec. 3.
Leonard's crimes were first discovered by the Monterey, Calif., police in August 2009 when a woman reported receiving what the U.S. Attorney's Office described as "highly sexual and threatening phone calls." She said the caller ID showed several different numbers and area codes, but that the voice — which sounded altered in some fashion — was always the same.
The woman received calls at home and at work for several months, until police were able to track down a so-called telephone "spoofing service," which allows a caller to change or fake a caller ID number.
The company, Tel Tech, in New Jersey, said Leonard had used the service and provided records of all the calls he had made.
The records showed that Leonard had called hundreds of women, including one woman in his apartment complex in Olympia, who received 177 calls. The woman filed numerous police reports, saying she believed the caller could see inside her apartment when he was talking to her.
Investigators say Leonard often used a device that electronically altered his voice.
A federal search warrant revealed that some of the victims had worked with Leonard either at the Great Wolf Lodge, a resort outside Grand Mound, or when he worked in human resources at the Hotel Victor in Miami.
Federal prosecutors say many of the victims altered their lives. Some moved, others quit jobs and still others canceled their cellphone numbers, only to start receiving calls at work or home.



http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2012897687_leonard15m.html

MARION COUNTY, Fla. -- It's the modern day equivalent of graffiti on a bathroom wall. A Marion County girl was arrested for posting explicit messages about another girl and adding her phone number to an Internet porn site.
Marion County sheriff's deputies say 17-year-old Shannon Marie Mitchell posted sexually explicit messages about a 15-year-old girl on a porn website. The messages included the girl's cell phone number along with comments like “great at phone sex.”
The messages were enough for investigators to transport Shannon Mitchell to the Juvenile Assessment Center on a charge of aggravated cyberstalking, which is a felony.
“Guys from wherever were calling saying, ‘I’m going to be in Ocala. I hear you do this, I hear you do that.’ As you can imagine, for a 15-year-old girl, that's got to be hell,” Judge Cochran of the Marion County Sheriff’s Office said.
Mitchell, a high school senior, was interviewed at her Ocala home by detectives. During the interview, detectives said, Shannon stated, “I did it,” and told detectives the victim would not stop harassing her.
Mitchell and the 15-year-old victim have never met, but investigators say the suspect is currently dating the victim's ex-boyfriend and that may have been enough to provoke Mitchell.
To the victim’s family, it is not a game.
“She has received countless inappropriate text messages, private phone calls coming through,” the victim’s mother told WFTV over the phone.
The sheriff's office said that the original posts that prompted their investigation have been removed. But with more complaints of teens harassing each other via cell phone and over the Internet, deputies want teens to know how seriously they take the crime.
“When you make a call to the Marion County Sheriff's Office and say my child is being cyber-bullied or sexually harassed, we investigate that,” Cochran said.
Mitchell is charged with a third-degree felony. If she were an adult, that charge could carry a maximum of five years in prison and a $5,000 fine. However, in the juvenile system the focus is on rehabilitation and judges have more discretion.

http://www.wftv.com/news/22715275/detail.html

States have begun to address the use of computer equipment for stalking purposes by including provisions prohibiting such activity in both harassment and anti-stalking legislation (Riveira, 1,2). A handful of states, such as Alabama, Arizona, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, New Hampshire and New York have specifically including prohibitions against harassing electronic, computer or e-mail communications in their harassment legislation. Alaska, Oklahoma, Wyoming, and more recently, California, have incorporated electronically communicated statements as conduct constituting stalking in their anti-stalking laws. A few states have both stalking and harassment statutes that criminalize threatening and unwanted electronic communications. Other states have laws other than harassment or anti-stalking statutes that prohibit misuse of computer communications and e-mail, while others have passed laws containing broad language that can be interpreted to include cyberstalking behaviors (Gregorie).

> Recent federal law has addressed cyberstalking as well. The Violence Against Women Act, passed in 2000, made cyberstalking a part of the federal interstate stalking statute. Other federal legislation that addresses cyberstalking has been introduced recently, but no such measures have yet been enacted. Consequently, there remains a lack of legislation at the federal level to specifically address cyberstalking, leaving the majority of legislative prohibitions against cyberstalking at the state level (Wiredpatrol.org).

Over 1 million women and 900,000 men are stalked in the UK every year** but until now there’s been very little research available about cyber-stalking. Today sees the launch of a research project expected to reveal the true extent of the problem.  The Electronic Communication Harassment Observation (ECHO) was commissioned by the charity Network for Surviving Stalking and will be carried out in partnership with University of Bedfordshire.    
Project leader Dr Emma Short from the University psychology department expects the research findings to change public attitudes towards stalking,”There are stalkers for whom the internet and mobile phones are just convenient ‘tools of their trade’.  But we think there are also vast numbers of internet users who are engaged in harassing behaviours simply because they don’t know the rules of appropriate on-line communication. At the moment there are very few widely agreed guidelines or rules about how to behave on-line – we hope ECHO will define behaviours that are generally experienced as anti social or likely to cause distress in on-line communication.”
Chief Executive of Network for Surviving Stalking Alexis Bowater, herself a cyber-stalking victim, urges anyone with experience of on-line harassment or cyber-stalking to participate in the study. “If you’ve been bombarded by emails, or if someone’s made you feel alarmed, distressed or even frightened by what they’ve sent, written or posted about you on-line, please tell us about it by filling in an ECHO questionnaire. It’s anonymous. Network for Surviving Stalking is putting cyber-stalking on the agenda in government; industry and the criminal justice system – it’s time everyone started taking this crime seriously.”
Anyone who thinks they’ve experienced on-line harassment or cyber-stalking can take part in ECHO.  Participants are asked information about their on-line behaviour; what form the harassment has taken and how it has affected them.  The questionnaire is at www.nssadvice.org/survey




http://www.nss.org.uk/2010/09/cyber-stalking-project-launched/