The hidden face of harassment
From being labelled a paedophile to a deluge of fake hotel bookings, cyber harassment is broader than you might think. Nikki Macdonald reports.
It started with a few bogus inquiries to her professional website. Then came the flood of calls from plumbers and electricians saying, ‘‘We hear you’ve got urgent work.’’
Within days it was 60 restaurant confirmations and hotel bookings in one town. Then Bali, Russia, Croatia.
‘‘I would be fielding calls from angry hotel people: ‘Where are you? We’ve got the wild smoked salmon, you’re not here.’ ‘‘
Then he set up a website with her name and profession as the domain name and used that to send hostile emails to people in her name.
"I just started getting really sick,’’ Bridget* says. ‘‘I started feeling very anxious. My throat closed up. It felt like there was a big lump in it . . . And I got this blinding migraine that turned into a full panic disorder, where I was having 10-20 panic attacks every day.
‘‘I ended up on a lot of medications that didn’t really assist. It would have taken me six months to get well. I had to give a lot of my work back. It was a horror.’’
This is the insidious, less talked-about face of cyber harassment. A seemingly minor irritation escalates into something life-limiting. It’s the persistence and inescapability that makes it so harmful.
Detective Sergeant Damian Rapira-Davies likens it to a game of whack-a-mole: you deal with one problem and it pops up somewhere else. Netsafe boss Martin Cocker says people don’t understand the pervasiveness until they’ve been on the receiving end.
Harmful digital communications broadly break down into so-called revenge porn – publicly posting naked or sexual images of someone without their consent – and online harassment. While most people think harassment means teenagers being horrible to each other online, the cases being revealed by the Harmful Digital Communications Act (HDCA) are much broader.
Rapira-Davies, who is the officer in command of cyber investigations, sees everything from online transactions gone bad to a campaign to discredit a small business.
‘‘This person and his friends left lots of very derogatory comments: ‘Don’t trust this business’, ‘This business is fraudulent, it created bad products’. The intention was to cause damage to that business because the person had an issue with that business. It caused the business extreme detriment. And none of that can be taken down, because it’s everywhere.
‘‘That’s another example of where do we even begin. There were multiple people involved, a variety of platforms, using technology to achieve criminal intent that maybe you wouldn’t have anticipated under the act. You’re typically thinking cyber bullying and revenge porn.’’
The case of the online sale gone bad highlights a major problem with enforcing the HDCA, which came into force in 2015 and is now under review. The seller found photos of the buyer on the internet and posted them ‘‘in locations online that would cause distress’’. Had the seller been in New Zealand, police could have charged him under the HDCA. But he was in Australia.
‘‘One of our greatest challenges in dealing with social media is that there’s no borders,’’ Rapira-Davies says. ‘‘If somebody living in another country is offending, it can be very hard for us to resolve that
. . . We can go to that offender to say your behaviour has been noted. But we can’t dictate to another jurisdiction how they should follow through with it.’’
In that case, Australian police confronted the offender and the pictures were taken down. But Bridget’s case was not so straightforward. When she went to police, she discovered she was one of two victims. Together they worked out who was behind it – a friend she hadn’t seen in years and with whom she had no beef. But he was working in a war zone, far from the arm of New Zealand law.
‘‘It was just diabolical,’’ she says. ‘‘And towards the end of it, police were just quite powerless. We’d worked out who it was, but it was very hard to prove. He was hiding his IP address. They were very ill-equipped to do anything to stem the flow . . . If you can’t get your hands on the person, they can’t seem to be able to control it.’’
In the end, it was only a mutual friend intervening that made it stop.
Private investigator Daniel Toresen, of The Investigators, says jurisdiction is a major barrier to investigating cyber crime. He deals with cases where people are too embarrassed to go to police, or want to discreetly find out who is behind the harassment. He has referred two cases to police in the past year.
While he has dealt with people using the dark web to disguise their identity, the cases are mostly ‘‘normal Joe Bloggs’’ and not terribly sophisticated, he says. In one case, the offender had created a website using the victim’s name.com and ‘‘denigrated the hell’’ out of the person for a year, posting their address and photos of their car.
Whenever someone googled their name, the website and its false allegations were the first thing that came up. They eventually identified the source from a digital fingerprint left on an uploaded Word document.
They confronted the person and demanded they take the website down, which they did. But had they had to rely on the internet providers to get rid of it, they would have entered a global jurisdiction nightmare.
‘‘You can’t take down a website like that. It was hosted offshore. The domain name was obtained using a virtual private server and an alias, through Godaddy. They will have an IP address for the person who set [it] up, but it was so complicated and difficult to get to.
‘‘You are literally stuck with having it on the internet. Google has some right-to-be-forgotten processes to get the search hidden, but that domain is still live. So it’s a terrible impact and very easily done.
‘‘The problem with all these things is that jurisdiction is a major difficulty in investigating them, because it all depends on where that dodgy email or dodgy website is hosted. It could be Lithuania, Poland, America, anywhere. So there’s some real issues with actually who you talk to, to get that taken down.’’
Police can use production orders to compel social media companies to provide some basic information about the person posting. However, unless the victim has taken screenshots, they can only access the offending posts themselves by a circuitous and expensive process involving Crown Law sending an affidavit to the jurisdiction where the company is based and their justice department issuing a subpoena, which local police then have to enforce.
‘‘It would be great if some of those social media platforms made obtaining necessary evidence simpler,’’ RapiraDavies says. ‘‘They will share a small amount using commonly sought production orders but we can’t get the content, which is usually critical evidence.’’
Martin Cocker says Netsafe gets good co-operation from Facebook and Google – better than the public thinks. They deal frequently with complaints about false allegations, from calling someone a paedophile to saying they’re not a real teacher or doctor. In those cases, they can mostly get the posts taken down by notifying the social media company that the allegations breach their terms and conditions.
He believes the HDCA is working, providing remedies and support to thousands of people who previously had nowhere to go. In most cases, Netsafe complaints are resolved simply by getting the offending information taken down. Where the problem is harder to fix is
where the online spat is just one episode in a long-running dispute, whether it’s between former partners, business associates or neighbours.
‘‘Where the harmful digital communication is a standalone offence, or is part of a skirmish between people, we get good resolution rates. Where the offence is part of a long-running dispute between people, we have very low levels of resolution.’’
While he doesn’t want the HDCA changed, Cocker says more investment or regulation in human rights and privacy regimes could help reduce the generic online abuse based on race and sexuality, which isn’t captured by the act.
STICKS ’N STONES
Watch a teen with a phone and it will come as no surprise that young people are probably the biggest instigators and victims of online abuse. That’s not reflected in Netsafe and prosecution statistics, as they’re usually dealt with by school counsellors or principals. That’s how it should be, says Rapira-Davies.
‘‘The last thing we want to do is put a child that needs education through criminal justice processes . . . We don’t want to clog the courts with kids that can’t behave themselves on Facebook. The numbers would be beyond belief.’’
Jean Andrews is on the front line of combatting teenage cyber abuse. The Association of Counsellors’ school spokesperson has 40 years of context as a teacher and counsellor.
‘‘Ten years ago, if students had a row, they would just snarl at each other, send each other notes, maybe front up – boys usually fight it out and it would be done verbally or over the telephone and it would be done and over with. With the internet, of course, there’s instant, immediate and 24-hour communication. So all the bullying, the mouthing-off, the instant reaction and hurt occurs over the internet.
‘Every week, if not every day, I would be dealing with young people who have lost it on the internet and who have sent out messages that are bullying, that put people down. And some of them are pretty terrible – telling kids to die. Or creating groups that pull down other children. These things are alive and well.’’
The HDCA has helped, in that now she can sit young people down and say, ‘‘If you carry on with this, you are breaking the law and could end up in court’’. She wants more counsellors in primary schools, to deal with relationship issues early, so they don’t escalate and interfere with learning, or lead to kids dropping out of school or disconnecting from friends.
Karla Sanders, who founded online bullying organisation Sticks ’n Stones, says there’s still a dismissive attitude in some quarters that concern about online bullying is just millennials being snowflakes – there’s no-one physically there, just turn the damn thing off.
The HDCA has had little impact on their work, as young people mostly don’t know it exists, Sanders says.
She asked young people she deals with what the biggest cyber issues are for them. The most common was not one that HDCA can help with – the scourge of comparing yourself with other people’s perfect Instagram lives.
However, several mentioned anonymous messaging apps. One, called Sarahah, was designed for offices, to allow people to provide anonymous feedback on workmates’ performance. Instead, teenagers use it as an add-on to messaging app Snapchat, to ask ‘‘What’s my best feature?’’ or ‘‘What do you really think about me?’’
Sticks ’n Stones started in 2013 with a cyber focus, but they realised online bullying doesn’t happen in isolation.
‘‘What our young people are reporting is that the people who are being incredibly insensitive, cruel and tormenting other people online tend to be doing those things offline as well.’’
Sanders believes the best way to prevent online bullying is to get in early, before young people are using social media.
‘‘We’re trying to look at how do we change the belief that you can say what you want and people just need to laugh it off.’’
* Name changed to prevent further harassment