Convicted Murderer Sues Wikipedia, Demands Removal of His Name

Here’s an interesting question: if you’re famous (or infamous, as in this case), does Wikipedia and other open-source internet reference sites have a duty to you to remove information that you don’t want published?

Wikipedia is under a censorship attack by a convicted murderer who is invoking Germany’s privacy laws in a bid to remove references to his killing of a Bavarian actor in 1990. Lawyers for Wolfgang Werle, of Erding, Germany, sent a cease-and-desist letter demanding removal of Werle’s name from the Wikipedia entry on actor Walter Sedlmayr. The lawyers cite German court rulings that “have held that our client’s name and likeness cannot be used anymore in publication regarding Mr. Sedlmayr’s death.”

German media have already ceased using Werle’s full name regarding the attack. Jennifer Granick, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says German publications must also alter their online archives in a bid to comport with laws designed to provide offenders an avenue to “reintegrate back into society.” “It’s not just censorship going forward. It’s asking outlets to go back and change what is already being written,” Granick said in a telephone interview.

It’s not the first time Wikipedia, the world’s most popular online, public-driven encyclopedia, has been targeted by would-be censors. And it likely won’t be the last. The site went offline overseas for a day in December, as British censors blacklisted it over an entry on the German rock band Scorpions. The entry included the cover art of the Scorpions’ 1976 Virgin Killer album, which depicts a nude young girl.

“Our client has served 15 years of his life sentence for murdering Mr. Sedlmayr in 1990. He has been released on parole [sic] in August 2007. His rehabilitation and his future life outside the prison system is severely impacted by your unwillingness to anonymize any articles dealing with the murder of Mr. Sedlmayr with regard to our client’s involvement,” according to the Oct. 27 cease-and-desist letter, which demands legal fees and compensation for “emotional suffering.”

Teens Sue High School That Punished Them for Racy MySpace Pics

Do you think everything you publish on the internet is private? Think again…

Two Indiana teenagers have sued their school district after they were punished for posting suggestive photos on MySpace. The girls, 10th-graders at Churubusco High School in Churubusco, Indiana, say they were humiliated after the school banned them from fall semester extracurricular activities and forced them to apologize to the all-male Athletics Board (composed of varsity coaches). The girls also had to attend three counseling sessions.

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed the proposed class-action suit on behalf of the girls and all present and future students at the school who participate or may participate in extracurricular activities. The ACLU argues the district violated the girls’ First Amendment rights and should not have punished them for activities conducted outside school. The suit names the girls’ high school, school district and principal.

According to the complaint, the photos in question were taken at a slumber party that occurred during the summer school break. The girls were photographed “pretending to kiss or lick a large multi-colored lollipop shaped (like a) phallus.” Other pictures showed them in lingerie with dollar bills tucked into the underwear. The girls each posted the pictures to their MySpace pages. Only “friends” could view the photos on their pages. But after someone copied the images, they found their way to the school principal.

According to the school’s student handbook, the principal “may exclude any student-athlete from representing Churubusco High School if his/her conduct in or out of school reflects discredit” upon the school or creates a “disruptive influence on the discipline, good order, moral, or educational environment” at the school.

There are a lot of interesting comments attached to this article. Many of them get back to the age-old argument of whether or not the school has a right to suspend a student for something that happened off-campus. Even more interesting, the idea that these students (and whoever leaked the photos to the principal) could have been charged with distributing child pornography for posting pictures of themselves while underage and committing what would appear to be sex acts.

I’m pretty sure that when Al Gore invented the internet, he never considered anything like this would happen. Hat tip to Threat Level.

Medical Records: Stored in the Cloud, Sold on the Open Market

While HIPAA protects your personal healthcare data and mandates that you approve the release of said data to other healthcare professionals and your insurer, it appears that what these outside data management companies are doing is legal, even if it sounds distasteful.

When patients visit a physician or hospital, they know that anyone involved in providing their health care can lawfully see their medical records. But unknown to patients, an increasing number of outside vendors that manage electronic health records also have access to that data, and are reselling the information as a commodity.

The revelation comes in a recent New York Times article about how so-called “scrubbed” patient data isn’t as anonymous as people think. The piece focuses primarily on how anonymized data can be cross-bred with other publicly available databases, such as voting records, which subverts the anonymity. Buried near the end of the article is the news that medical data is collected, anonymized and sold, not by insurance agencies and health care providers, but by third-party vendors who provide medical-record storage in the cloud.

As part of their contracts with the vendors, doctors are agreeing to let some vendors access and collect the patient data, scrub it of personally identifying information, and sell it in bulk to pharmaceutical companies and other buyers, the Times reports.

George Hill, an analyst at Leerink Swann, a health care investment bank, told the Times that the market for health record systems is $8 billion to $10 billion annually. About 5 percent of this income comes not from the sale of information systems but from the sale of data and analysis. As more physicians and hospitals — spurred by federal incentives — switch to electronic recordkeeping, revenue from the sale of health data could grow to $5 billion, Hill said.

Vendors say they re-sell the data for research purposes and scrub it of identifying information first to protect patient privacy. But in 1997, Latanya Sweeney, director of the Data Privacy Lab at Carnegie Mellon University, showed how she was able to pick out the medical records of William Weld (then the governor of Massachusetts) from scrubbed medical information published by the state’s insurance commission by simply correlating the anonymized data with birthdays, ZIP codes and gender information published in the state’s voter-registration rolls.

According to Sweeney, 87 percent of the U.S. population can be uniquely identified simply from their birthdate, gender and zip code. Patient advocate groups have called for greater oversight and regulation of the electronic health-record industry to control what software vendors can access and what they can do with the data.

Hat tip to Threat Level. This link also has an image indicating who really has access to patient data, courtesy of PatientPrivacyRights.org.

Federal Government Considering a Cyberbullying Bill

You may have heard the name of Lori Drew in the news. She was the mother accused of running a cyberbullying scheme against a 13-year-old girl who was a rival of her daughter. Drew created a fake MySpace profile of a teenage boy who pretended to have a romantic attraction to Megan Meier. When Drew (as the fake profile) broke off their relationship, Meier committed suicide. The government argued that violating MySpace’s terms of service amounted to computer hacking, but the judge overturned the jury verdict and deemed she was not guilty. The prosecution is now considering an appeal.

HR 1966 (introduced by Linda Sanchez of California) would ban hostile or harassing speech in e-mail, instant messaging, blogs, websites, telephones and text messages with the intent to cause emotional distress. If the bill were liberally interpreted, I’m assuming that would open up about 85% of the internet to Federal indictments.

Dogbert and the Senator

This seems to be a common practice right now. In Indiana, Susan Bayh, the wife of Senator Evan Bayh, is under similar scrutiny.

Courtroom Dress Code: Wear Sensible Shoes

A defense attorney in Florida has apparently been wearing shoes with holes in the soles in order to foster good faith from the jury that he’s just a simple lawyer (like Matlock, I guess).

Upon reasonable belief, Plaintiff believes that Mr. Robb wears these shoes as a ruse to impress the jury and make them believe that Mr. Robb is humble and simple without sophistication. . . .

Part of this strategy is to present Mr. Robb and his client as modest individuals who are so frugal that Mr. Robb has to wear shoes with holes in the soles. Mr. Robb is known to stand at sidebar with one foot crossed casually beside the other so that the holes in his shoes are readily apparent to the jury . . . .

Then, during argument and throughout the case Mr. Robb throws out statements like “I’m just a simple lawyer” with the obvious suggestion that Plaintiff’s counsel and the Plaintiff are not as sincere and down to earth as Mr. Robb. Mr. Robb should be required to wear shoes without holes in the soles at trial to avoid the unfair prejudice suggested by this conduct.

“I’ve been practicing law for 21 years,” he said, “and Mr. Bone thinks he’s finally cracked the key to my success?” Robb scoffed at the idea. “Gotta be the shoes,” he said. “Like Michael Jordan.” Robb claimed that he had been planning to finally retire his “trial shoes,” as he called them, but said this had changed his mind. “[T]hey’re back in play,” he said. “You ride that horse until it completely collapses.”

On the other hand, wearing holey shoes in court could also indicate a lack of success at one’s profession to the point where you couldn’t afford to purchase a replacement pair, so I don’t see how this argument holds. The judge denied the motion.