Threats Online: Is There a Duty to Tell?

The operators of an Asperger’s syndrome message board on which an Orange County teen threatened a “terror campaign” in the days before he killed his two neighbors and himself said Tuesday that they felt no responsibility to have alerted authorities to the threat.

Yet within a few hours of the shooting, there was soul-searching and second-guessing among members of the online forum even though they had tried to seek out the shooter’s parents before the incident.

The case has renewed questions about the responsibility of website managers to monitor and act on violent comments made online.

“There has been some talk of what do we do in the future when somebody posts. How do we handle this kind of situation?” said Dan Glover, 17, co-founder of wrongplanet.net, a resource for people with Asperger’s syndrome. “It’s difficult. Whose responsibility is it?”

Those are among the many questions raised in the aftermath of Saturday’s shooting in Aliso Viejo in which William Freund donned a dark cape and paintball mask and terrorized his neighborhood. He shot and killed Vernon Smith, 45, and Smith’s daughter, Christina, 22. He fired at a house and tried to shoot another neighbor, but his shotgun jammed. Then he walked home and killed himself, firing once into his torso.

The shooting came days after Freund posted messages threatening to “start a Terror Campaign to hurt those that have hurt me.” In other messages, he wrote of buying a gun and ammunition and contemplating suicide.

Website moderators tried to contact Freund’s parents but did not want to call police, fearing it would complicate his already difficult life. They did alert authorities to Freund’s postings after the shootings.

Some of the website operators said they felt guilty and sick to their stomachs. Many agreed they would learn from the experience. Already, they were debating privacy policies and better oversight of the online forums. And one of the founders said they would probably do things differently next time.

Experts agree they had no legal obligation to contact authorities.

“Are we going to impose a legal obligation on a 17-year-old and a 19-year-old who want to do something good for people and to take the time to read all the postings and figure out which ones they need to react to and which ones they can ignore? The law has generally said no,” said Jennifer Granick, executive director of the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford University.

“There’s a tendency when something terrible like this happens to look for a place to point the finger, but saying that a website owner

Orange County Sheriff’s Department spokesman Jim Amormino did not assign blame or fault, but said: “Any time somebody becomes aware that anybody is going to commit any kind of violence, law enforcement would love to be notified.”

Had they known about Freund, Amormino said, law enforcement officials would have investigated to see whether it was possible for him to carry out the threat and tried to contact him.

“I’m not saying in this case it would have helped,” Amormino said. “We may not have been able to locate him in time.”

On wrongplanet.net, co-founder Alexander Plank, 19, said members “reached out to this guy. They didn’t say, ‘Go away. We don’t want suicidal people.’ They helped him. They worked with him. They got him to a place where he wanted to go to a hospital. If you have that inside you, what people say to you isn’t really going to matter.”

But they stopped short of calling authorities. Moderators tried to contact his parents but were unsuccessful after finding dozens of Freunds listed in the phone book. They also blocked Freund from posting links to pro-suicide websites.

In the Web’s brief history, postings that foreshadowed murders and suicides have prompted extensive debate among ethicists and legal experts.

There is a high legal threshold to prosecute Internet threat cases. Judges have thrown out cases involving Internet messages, including one involving a student’s fantasies of raping, torturing and killing a fellow student. Cyberspace is also a place where people exaggerate and say things they would never do. Identifying users can be problematic, especially on ailment-related sites like wrongplanet.net, where anonymity and false names are common and respecting privacy may be an issue.

Kevin Bankston, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, said there was no apparent legal duty for Web or online community hosts to monitor users’ communications and report problems to authorities unless child pornography was involved.

If there were a requirement, it would be “onerous” and difficult to uphold, said Bankston, whose nonprofit group advocates free speech and innovation.

The federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act prohibits providers of communications from disclosing confidential personal information about their clients to the government unless the provider “reasonably believes that an emergency involving immediate danger of death or serious physical injury to any person” exists.

But that exception allows notification; it does not require it.

In Southern California, several cases involving Internet threats involved students. In 1998, UC Irvine student Richard Machado was convicted of civil rights violations in the first successful prosecution of making threats in cyberspace after he sent e-mails to 62 students with Asian surnames at the school saying he would “find and kill every one of you personally.” He was sentenced to one year in prison.

“Here you had a situation where the writer expressed a specific intent to do harm to individuals,” said Michael Gennaco, a former assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted the case.

Freund never specified targets.

Throughout a 10-day period preceding the Oct. 29 shootings, Freund made repeated oblique references to hurting people in posts that were littered with spelling and grammatical mistakes.

“IM gona Cause Alot off damage with my remigton 870,” he wrote on Oct. 15. “Its the synthetic Kind so IT looks very modern, And is super heavy to whack people with.”

The following day, he wrote of anticipated mayhem on Halloween, and wrote “guess what I have ... A real shotgun. ITs gona be a fun halloween.”

Also in 1998, a man confessed to an Internet support group for alcoholics that he had killed his 5-year-old daughter in North Dakota. Members debated whether authorities should be alerted. A few members contacted police, and later that year, Larry Froistad Jr. pleaded guilty to the murder and was sentenced to 40 years in prison.

And in 2003, a Riverside Polytechnic High School student was arrested on suspicion of threatening to “shoot up a school” in a message posted on the website of rapper 50 Cent. The FBI’s Internet Tip Service was contacted just hours after the message was posted. A Riverside County district attorney’s spokeswoman could not release results of the case because the student was charged as a juvenile.