Bay Blogger Thursday

So, when did you start the blog and why?

I started my blog on December 11, 2004, with the idea that I would feature hard-hitting journalism stories on it but that I would present "the other side of the news." I kicked it off with an article about Chris Daly, one of my favorite politicians of all time, and the threat of censure that he faced at that time. The motion for censure was presented by fellow Supervisor Michela Alioto-Pier because Daly had told a landlord lobbyist to "fuck off" at a public hearing.

As to why I started my blog, I have been an aspiring writer for a few years. One of my law school professors encouraged me to write a book, and I have always wanted to do so. I know that writing is a strong suit of mine. When I heard about how easy it is to create a blog, I knew that I had to do it. I was not prepared at that time to publish my personal stories on the Internet, nor did I think that I would ever do so. However, I went through a very difficult time emotionally, beginning in January 2005, at the hands of someone whom my regular readers know as El Diablo. The personal stories started pouring forth from that experience. I found that writing my personal story was far more interesting to me than researching news articles and finding the other side.

Do you have your blog listed on any blogrolls or aggregators? How do you think this particular troll might have found you?

I do have my blog listed on blogrolls, and I am registered on Technorati and other such sites. However, I know exactly how Blogstalker found me. Late on a Tuesday night a few weeks ago, I decided to publish a shameless plug for my blog on craigslist. Within minutes of my ad appearing on the site, I received two emails, which were actually blog comments. (My blog comments are set up to automatically generate a notification email.) The comments were both anonymous, but it was obvious that they were from the same person. He - I am assuming gender - immediately made it known that he had found me on craigslist when he wrote, "... You are such a whore for attention, even resorting to spamming on craigslist to get attention."

What do you think might have set them off?

He was obviously searching for people to harass. It was immediately clear that he did not actually have a personal problem with me ... just that he had a personal problem in general! He could not have had more than a minute to read my writing before the first comment came in, as the ad had just hit the craigslist site, yet his comment was along the lines of how horrible a writer I was. He generally seemed angry that I had advertised my blog on craigslist. The inordinate sense of anger over a craigslist ad was terrifying to me. I have no doubt that he harassed others who had advertised in that section that evening (craigslist SF, artist section, approximately 1:40 a.m. on Wednesday, June 15th).

Can you give us an example of one of the comments?

"It would make a big difference to the sanity of the world if you stop spamming craigslist you psycho attention whore." (His grammatical errors, not mine.)

At what point did it go from annoying to creepy to outright scary?

Well, at the beginning, it was just hurtful, as not one comment line went by without his mentioning what a horrible writer he thought I was. Then, when he kept up with it, I realized that he did not necessarily think I was a bad writer but was just insistent on making me believe that he felt that way. My site meter revealed that he had done several "page views," which refers to how many posts he was reading. He usually read about 10 posts each time he visited my blog. So, after I got over feeling hurt by the comments, I started getting freaked out after a few days. He would leave a comment, and I would delete it, then he would log on a few hours later to leave another. He never made any threats in the comments. However, the hateful tone of his comments, coupled with the frequency and duration of his visits, really started to scare me. I kept thinking that he would get bored after a while, if I did not give his comments any attention, but it was clear after 9 days that he was obsessed. He would log on at various times of the day, and it appeared that he kept very erratic hours. (For example, he would log on at 3:00 a.m., then at 1:00 p.m., then at 7:00 p.m. The next day, the hours would be completely different but just as widely spread apart. It was difficult to determine when this person was working or sleeping, if at all.) On Friday, June 24th, the day I went to the police station, I really believed that I was in potential danger. Again, he had not written anything threatening, but there was something inherently threatening to me in his absolute determination not to be ignored. The difference on that day was that he kept posting the same comment each time I deleted it, rather than writing a new one. Something about that freaked me out because he no longer seemed interested in putting me down in new ways ... suddenly, it was all about showing me that he was fully engaged in some of kind of sick psychological game with me. I felt really scared when I saw how he kept trying to leave the same comment on that day.

Some people might have just shut down or moved their blog, or gone anonymous -- what made you decide to keep at it?

I love writing, so shutting down my blog was not an option. I decided not to move it because I have developed a loyal readership, and I did not want to lose the people who faithfully log on every day to read what I write. Going anonymous is something that I committed from the beginning never to do. For one thing, I would love to be "discovered" as a writer. While I realize that someone with an opportunity to offer could access me just as easily under a pseudonym, there is something about being identified by my real name that makes me feel as if I am more accessible. Also, writing the type of personal stories that I write, while remaining identified by my real name, has been a tremendous benefit to me on my personal journey. I feel challenged every day by the awareness that anyone in my world can access personal stories about me. It helps me to be more authentic in my day-to-day life, as I know that I am already doing so online. If I were to go anonymous, I believe that I would lose some of the courage that I gain in my everyday life from knowing that my personal, non-anonymous stories are just hanging out there for the world to peruse.

How did the police react to your fears? Were they helpful? Did they seem to have any experience in online stalking?

The police were great. The first officer with whom I spoke was a bit daft, but he had an ornary look on his face before he even knew what I was in there for. When I explained the problem, he just told me to email my ISP. When I tried to explain how a blog works and that it is not really an ISP issue, he said, "Yeah, but whenever I have email problems, I just email my ISP. They are very helpful." I tried a few times to explain how a blog is different, that I doubted my ISP would assert jurisdiction over some random person in the blogosphere, but he was not having it.

When I returned the next day, on the advice of an officer at another precinct with whom I spoke on the phone, I received much better assistance. The officer there listened to my story and sent my statement (which I had typed up ahead of time) and attachments (Blogstalker's emails and the site meter readings to show the frequency of his visits) to Investigation. Tuesday of last week, I called the Investigation department to follow up, and the woman on the phone asked if I wanted to press charges. This led me to believe that the person had already been tracked down, so I asked her if that was the case. She said that they could not give any information over the phone. So, having no job at the moment and therefore having nothing better to do, I went down there to check things out. The inspector with whom I spoke took my case seriously because I had gone down there, but I had the feeling that he would not have done so otherwise. They had not begun looking for the person before I went down there.

Anyway, the inspector with whom I spoke seemed to feel that tracking the guy would be difficult, but he sympathized with my fears and said that he would do anything he could to help. As the behavior to that point was not criminally actionable, which I knew before I made the report, he felt that the best he could do would be to issue a verbal warning to the guy. By that time, three days after I had made the report and Blogstalker had disappeared from my site meter, I was satisfied with that course of action. I certainly did not want to nail a fly with a sledgehammer. I just wanted to make sure I would be safe and that this guy would not take back up with harassing me.

Part of the problem is that the Investigation Department does not have Internet access. Depending on whom I spoke to, I received varied degrees of assurance that they could help with the online aspect at all. I received some phone calls right around this time, which I believed then were related but do not now. The police officers were much more certain that they could help with the phone calls than with an investigation of the guy's domain name. However, a couple of them mentioned that the S.F.P.D. is just learning how to address online issues and that they could probably help. If my case had landed in the hands of an eager police officer, he or she would probably have launched into a full-fledged investigation of the online issues. However, most of the officers with whom I spoke did not feel equipped to deal with the online issue. The investigator working the file left it that he will review my phone company's "annoying call tracking log" when it comes in next week, then he will try to pair up that information with anything that he can discover online. I think that any assistance I receive will be wholly dependent on how persistent I am. I suspect that if I let it go, which I might at this point, it will be dropped. If anything scary happens to prompt me to take up with it again, though, I think that this particular inspector will move on it. He was great.

Since the order your requesting would require that they stay away from your home or business, do you worry that by serving it you'll actually help them by giving them your address or general location?

I do not think now that it will go that far. However, when I requested this course of action in my police report statement, I anticipated taking it that far. At that time, I did consider how creepy it could be for this person to have all of my contact information, especially given that he is a total stranger and had already demonstrated so much vitriol toward me. However, when he disappeared from my site meter readings after I wrote the post giving notice of the police action, I gained the sense that he was more of a cowardly pest than anyone to fear. Prior to making the statement, I was terrified, but a few days after he disappeared, I figured that he was probably gone for good. Even when I was afraid, though, I figured that the cat was already out of the bag on his having my contact information. I remedied that problem after going to the police by removing all of my information from the 411 directory, from google-searched Internet sites, from whitepages.com, etc. I knew, though, that if he wanted my address, he already had it. So, giving him the information about where I live/work/etc. seemed duplicative. I figured that he might as well be ordered to stay away from me, since he likely had the information already.

What do you think of the larger privacy implications both for yourself (you do blog under your name) and for the troll (to serve any ordinance, you'll have to reveal their anonymous identity)?

This entire blogstalking incident has started me thinking about privacy implications for myself generally. It is scary how accessible I am to the general public. Sometimes I think I am crazy to give people my real name, especially when my blog invites everyone in to some intimate information about me. However, when I start to go down that path, I think about all of the people who "put themselves out there," such as my friends who sing in local bands and use their real names. And then I remember that I am a single woman who meets men everywhere and gives out my number to the cute ones. I suddenly realize that we are not as safe or privacy-protected as we delude ourselves to be anyway. I certainly increase my risk of scary things happening by making my blog so personal and so non-anonymous, but I realize now that the best thing I can do is to make sure that I am anonymous in other ways ( e.g., making myself unlisted in the phone book, which I have now done).

The question of Blogstalker's privacy implications is an excellent one. I am extremely liberal, so I am all about privacy. I am very anti-big-brother. It pains me to EVER give out information about others, and I would never do it unless I felt threatened. In this case, Blogstalker did not make any overt threats to me; however, I went with my gut. As I answered in a previous question, I was terrified by last Friday, the day that I went to the police. There was something about the total lack of control in knowing that this person - who most likely lives here in SF - knew exactly how to contact me, yet I had no idea who he was. At that point, I knew that privacy had to be trashed in his case. The only case that I will EVER endorse for abolishing someone's privacy rights is if he or she is abusing them to harm others. Though he did not actively threaten me, his obsession was scary enough that I decided I should take it public.

One very unfortunate side effect to my decision to do so is that my readership plummeted, immediately after I published the post about the police. Mission accomplished, in that Blogstalker disappeared as well (unless he is reading my blog from a new computer), but I was very sad to lose as many readers as I did. It was a consequence that I had not anticipated or considered before I took it public. I would have expected people to understand that I did what I had to do when I felt afraid, but I can understand why some people stopped reading. After all, I think that a lot of people read blogs at work. Maybe some people were afraid that their employer's domain name would somehow end up in the hands of the police and that their bosses would find out that they were blog-surfing at work. Who knows. All I know is that I would NEVER publish someone's information for any reason other than self-protection from the threat of harm. Several hateful comments in bizarre and frequent intervals definitely warrants invasion of privacy, as far as I am concerned.

Going forward, how do you think your online habits might change?

Great question. My online habits will not change at all, but my anonymity in other places will remain intact. I will remain an unlisted number, even after Blogstalker is a distant memory. After all, I intend to do more advertising of my blog to the general public, so I have to anticipate that something like this could happen again.

What kind of advice would you give to someone who's having a similar problem?

Go public if you are scared. It was a horrible feeling to have pangs of fear in my gut each time I saw an anonymous email in my inbox. The comments were so hate-driven and so unnecessary, and it really scared me. I hated feeling as though this person could find me and harm me and that no one would ever find out what had happened. I felt so empowered when he disappeared and stopped leaving comments because I went public. Even if I were to later find out that he is still reading from another computer, I would not care. What bothered me was seeing that domain name continue to appear several times per day on my site, usually accompanied by a mean-spirited and abusive comment. So, I would definitely advise a blogger in this situation to use the blog as a shield. It definitely protected me. It was great to use the blog as a vehicle to warn this person of my plans - and then to watch him disappear.