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Apr 2, 2012, 12:33pm EDT |
Ugly New Reputation-Smearing Tactic: Going After A Toddler's Internet Footprint
Kashmir Hill
Welcome to The Not-So Private Parts where technology & privacy collide
Natalia Randazza, 3, already has to worry about her online reputation thanks to a blogger targeting... [+] her father
These days, you shouldn't worry just about your own online reputation but that of your children should you get on the bad side of a person who is willing to resort to ugly tactics in digital battles.
Crystal Cox, a Montana woman who calls herself an "investigative journalist," was slapped with a $2.5-million judgment last year for defaming an investment firm and one of its lead partners. Cox had taken control of the Google footprint of Obsidian Finance and its principal Kevin Padrick by writing hundreds of posts about them on dozens of websites she owned, inter-linking them in ways that made them rise up in Google search results. It ruined Obsidian's business due to prospective clients being put off by the firm's seemingly terrible online reputation. After Obsidian sued Cox, she contacted them offering her "reputation services;" for $2,500 a month she could "fix" the firm's reputation and help promote its business. (In some circles, we call that "extortion.")
Nonetheless, when the outrageously high judgment came down, some bloggers rushed to Cox's defense, in great part because the judge declared Cox not to be a member of the media in a poorly-written opinion that some interpreted to mean that bloggers generally couldn't claim legal protections for members of the press. So First Amendment-loving lawyers, including Eugene Volokh of the Volokh Conspiracy and Matthew Zimmerman at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, offered Cox their services in appealing the case and attempting to get a new trial. (They were denied this week, with the judge clarifying that bloggers can be journalists, but that Cox is a serial harasser, not a journalist.) Another lawyer, Marc Randazza, had also spoken with Cox about her case; after deciding not to work with him, Cox sent him an email letting him know that she "needed to make money" and was willing to offer him her reputation management services. In fact, she had already bought his domain name (marcrandazza.com). Randazza writes on his blog:
Apparently I was not sufficiently threatened by this tactic, so Cox went on to register:
fuckmarcrandazza.com, marcrandazzasucks.com, marcjrandazza.com, marcjohnrandazza.com
She also registered a great many Blogger accounts bearing my name, including markrandazza.blogger.com.
via Judge rules, again, that blogger Crystal Cox is not a journalist. You know why? Because she ISN'T a journalist. « The Legal Satyricon.
(For disclosure's sake, I should mention that Cox also began blogging about me repeatedly around this time using the same tactics she used on Obsidian and Padrick, because I was the first to write a critical article about her tactics. When David Carr of the New York Times followed suit he also attracted her ire. In addition to frequent blog posts about Carr she bought the url 'davidcarrsucks.com'.)
Because Randazza (like David Carr and myself) writes frequently online he had a pretty solid handle on his online reputation (unlike bankruptcy lawyer Kevin Padrick), so Cox was unable to make much headway in ruining his Google search results with her domain-name buying and blogging. So she moved on to Randazza's family members who did not have much online content associated with their names. She bought the domain name for Marc's wife, Jennifer Randazza (and has already started dominating her first page of Google results with her hyperbolic posts). When Randazza still wouldn't buy her services Cox moved on to a younger member of the family:
When this didn't get the desired response, Cox turned to a place where even the lowest of the low would not stoop — she focused her stalkerish attention on my three-year-old daughter and registered NataliaRandazza.com.
The search engine results for three-year-old Natalia Randazza are at this time dominated by content from her father, including a 'the baby has arrived' blog post with accompanying wrinkly newborn photo and a few YouTube baby videos (classics like "Natalia's first bath"). There's also a page by some confused data grabber that suggests Natalia and Marc Randazza are business associates. Perhaps due to the negative attention Cox took down the content she had started publishing on the nataliarandazza.com site.
Randazza's struggle with Cox is representative of a much larger battle being waged on the Internet pitting free speech against our rights to protect our reputations. Randazza, a lawyer who has in his career fought to protect lots of troubling speech, understands this tension more than most. Yet he writes:
Fortunately, I had a large enough public reputation and the Google juice to withstand her attacks.
Kevin Padrick didn't have that luxury.
Other people won't have that luxury.
My three year old daughter doesn't have that luxury...
There is no doubt that the blogging community needs as many protections as it can get, and I believe many bloggers who I read, talk to and work with would qualify for protection under Oregon's shield statute. Crystal Cox did not, does not, and cannot advance this goal. If the blogging community wishes to stand among those with the title of "journalist," then it must reject people like Crystal Cox, and relegate them to their own bizarre, obsessive and child-targeting corner of the Internet.
She is not one of us.
She harms us.
Cox is an outlier. Her tactics are extreme ones. But we do now live in a world where money can be made from ruining reputations and then offering to fix them. In the business world there is RipOffReport.com, a site that hosts negative reviews of businesses and offers a paid "ambassador program" to those businesses to help them improve the reviews on the site. There's also a series of sites that dig up people's mug shots from public records and post them so that they appear in those people's search results; they then offer to take them down for a fee.
How do we draw the line between speech rights and digital forms of extortion? It is not a new question for us in the Internet age, but it remains an unanswered one.