Mom in Cyberbullying Suicide Case Launches Foundation

By Kim Zetter May 30, 2008 | 12:24:02 PMCategories: Crime
from Wired ..

Tina Meier, the mother of the Missouri teen who committed suicide after being bullied online has launched a foundation to educate kids and parents about cyberbullying and work on legislation to address the growing phenomenon.

The Megan Meier Foundation's web site has resources for educators, parents and teens that include a list of emoticons and their meanings to help parents understand the online language their kids are using as well as explanations about the kinds of technologies kids are using to communicate with one another. The site features the stories of other teens who have also been bullied online.

Photo: AP

See Also:

• Experts Say MySpace Suicide Indictment Sets 'Scary' Legal Precedent
• Teen Involved in MySpace Suicide Hoax Says Adult Also Participated
• No Charges Will Be Filed In Cyberbullying Case
• Federal Grand Jury Issues Subpoenas in Teen Cyberbullying Case
• Megan Meier Suicide Stokes the Internet Fury Machine
• Prosecutor Will Review Megan Meier Cyberbullying Case

Megen Meier story followup; New Era is Social Networking? Matthew Good

New Era In Social Networking?

A few months ago I talked about Megan Meier, a young girl who encountered verbal and emotional abuse from a classmate’s mother via MySpace. That abuse eventually led to Megan committing suicide, and sparked a whole series of internet debates about where the fault for something like that lies and how accountable social networks should be for the actions of their users.

Today Facebook announced that they will be implementing over 40 safeguards to help protect its users from sexual predators and online cyberbullying:

Facebook, the world’s second-largest social networking Web site, will add more than 40 safeguards to protect young users from sexual predators and cyberbullies, attorneys general from several states said Thursday.

Facebook and officials in 49 states and the District of Columbia agree to safeguards to protect young users.

The changes include banning convicted sex offenders from the site, limiting older users’ ability to search online for subscribers under 18 and building a task force seeking ways to better verify users’ ages and identities.

“The agreement marks another watershed step toward social networking safety, protecting kids from online predators and inappropriate content,” said Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who announced the agreement Thursday with his counterparts in several other states.

Obviously I think that’s a huge step forward for the internet, especially since both Facebook and MySpace have agreed to adopt the guidelines set out in the agreement. And while it’s impossible to protect everyone from harm on these networks, I definitely think it’s a move in the right direction.

About This Entry

• Author: Duane Storey
• Date: May 8th, 2008
• 
  

To save you from going to facebook (highly surveilled, folks!)

Also, over five years ago, I saw the plans for a RR stretching up across BC to get supplies up to Alaska. This has NOT shown up yet, but it shall. WATCH! I saw it in a RR magazine - and itsa comin'.

Another boondoggle project in the making, ruled by AMERICAN business interests on Canadian soil. That was tipped me off to the coming breakdown in Canadian sovereignty years back.

Once again, without sovereignty there are no guarantees of HUMAN RIGHTS; no courts to resort to as the RULE OF LAW goes down the tube.

Ah, how the ptb loves to reduce things to charts, graphics, excel worksheets, working group papers and other easy-to-quantify items! Humans be damned! Environment be DAMNED!

Once "they" figured out how to sell water (it's no longer freestanding) LEGALLY, the rest of The Project has been easy for them. Watch all government/business projects that have containment of water attached like the Alberta tar sands project! They're the final chapter on the assault to mankind rather than putting people (and other living things) first.

The north american trade corridors

(Click a region)

Following the implementation of NAFTA, coalitions of interest have been formed in order to promote specific transport channels, to develop the infrastructures of these channels and to propose jurisdictional amendments to facilitate the crossing of borders. These coalitions include businesses, government agencies, civil organizations, metropolitan areas, rural communities and also individuals, wishing to strengthen the commercial hubs of their regions. The North American trade corridors are bi- or tri-national channels for which various cross-border interests have grouped together in order to develop or consolidate the infrastructures. The North American corridors are considered multimodal in the sense that they bring into play different modes of transport in succession. The infrastructures may include roads, highways, transit routes, airports, pipelines, railways and train stations, river canal systems and port facilities, telecommunications networks and teleports.

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The Pacific corridor

The Pacific corridor includes the entire geographic band formed by the Rocky Mountain range and the Pacific coast. A huge transport network (highways, railways, airports and port infrastructures) facilitates trade between Western Canada, the U.S. East Coast and Mexico. The traffic in the Pacific corridor mainly uses Highway I-5 in the United States, which joins together the major cities along the Pacific coast. At the U.S.-Mexican border, the corridor passes through two major ports of entry: San Diego/Tijuana, the busiest crossing point on the entire border, and Calexico/Mexicali, where there is a high concentration of maquiladoras.

To the north, Washington State and British Columbia have established the U.S.-Canada International Mobility and Trade Corridor in order to facilitate cross-border trade at the 4 land-based crossing points there between Canada and the United States. NAFTA encouraged the creation of a network of business people in the Pacific corridor. The Rocky Mountain Corridor, for example, is an association of small and medium businesses in the three countries, doing business in the region. North of the 49th parallel, two initiatives aim to develop the trade potential of the corridor: the north-west corridor aiming to link Western Canada with the trade flows of NAFTA, and the Alaska Railroad connection, project, aiming to facilitate land-based access to Alaska.

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The central western corridor

The central western corridor includes the largest concentration of maquiladoras and the 2nd largest trade volumes of all the North American corridors. It uses one of the oldest trade routes on the continent, nicknamed the “Camino Real”, or “King’s Road”. The route links Chihuahua in Mexico to Denver, Colorado, via the “Paso del Norte”, the ports of entry of El Paso/Ciudad Juarez between Chihuahua and Texas, and Santa Teresa in New Mexico. The surface trade flows (by truck and rail) circulate along Highway I-25 in the United States which, together with Highway I-90, brings the corridor north to Montana. Plans are to continue the Camino Real to Great Falls, where the corridor could join up with Canamex, a North American highway project, to enter Canada.

Canamex is a planned four-lane highway extending from Mexico City to Edmonton, Alberta, in Canada. The project has recently received the support of a certain number of states and provinces including Arizona, Sonora and Alberta. The Canadian Government is providing financial support for the building of the North South Trade Corridor in Alberta, the Canadian section of Canamex. The U.S. Congress has designated the completion of Canamex as a high priority in the American road system. Canamex currently uses Highway I-15 in the United States. The external relations secretariat of Mexico has taken on the promotion of the project.

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The central eastern corridor

The central eastern region has two trade corridors, one urban, which passes through the largest North American cities and the industrial basins of the central eastern region, and another which is rural and which passes through the Great Plains in the U.S. and through the Canadian Praries. The urban corridor of NAFTA brings half of the North American population to within a single day’s journey by highway between Montréal, Canada, and Mexico. The corridor passes through the industrial stronghold of Canada and its largest market. It enters the United States at Port Huron and at Windsor, where it crosses the Ambassador bridge, the busiest bridge in North America, to join Detroit, Michigan, where the giants of the automobile industry are located. In the United States, the urban corridor follows “Corridor 18”, which extends to the lower Rio Grande valley in Texas, through Indianapolis, Indiana and Memphis, Tennessee.

The second corridor includes the Great Plains: North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas; and the Canadian Prarie provinces: Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Alberta. A certain number of associations have been formed following the creation of NAFTA, in order to revitalize the rural communities of the central eastern region, by taking advantage of the transcontinental trade flows. The Central North American Trade Corridor Association, The Northern Great Plains Initiative, the Ports-to-Plains Trade Corridor an the Mid-Continent Trade Corridor are networks of business people, civil organizations and government agencies aiming to foster growth and employment in the central eastern region by means of a direct transcontinental link between Canada, the United States and Mexico. A network of cities, the North American International Trade Corridor Partnership (NAITCP), aims to build a huge regional market by holding regular trilateral meetings between member cities, and by facilitating contact between businesses in the corridor. In particular, the NAITCP has put together a huge directory of enterprises in the corridor, which may be consulted on-line, and organizes virtual trade missions.

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The Atlantic corridor

The Atlantic corridor includes four economic areas: (1) the Canada-U.S. East Coast; (2) the Champlain-Husdon corridor; (3) the Appalachian region and (4) the Gulf of Mexico. The corridor provides an intermodal transport system linking a 4-lane north-south highway, 3 major North American rail networks, 14 interstate highway systems, 6 interprovincial systems, one trans-Canadian highway and all the marine and airport facilities of the Atlantic coast. Transcontinental trade along this corridor uses the corridor of the Gulf of Mexico or the maritime routes of the U.S. East Coast.

The first area includes all the trade travelling along the U.S. East Coast on Highway I-95. It has the appearance of a geographic band about 5,500 km long and 50 km wide, passing through a large number of jurisdictions. Indeed, the area includes a population of over 55 million inhabitants spread out across 4 Canadian provinces and in 188 counties in 13 American states. Another part of the north-east trade passes through the Champlain-Hudson trade corridor. This corridor extends from Québec City to New York City. The Champlain/Lacolle border crossing is one of the three largest commercial ports of entry between Canada and the United States. The corridor between Québec and New York possesses advanced transport infrastructures that include Canadian Highways 20 and 15, U.S. Highway I-87, a fully modernized rail network and marine channels. The Appalachian region follows the contours of the mountain range that runs from the south of New York State to northern Mississippi. It covers over 518,000 km2 and includes a population of 23 million people, 42% of whom are in rural areas (as compared to 20% of the U.S. population as a whole). The highway infrastructure of the Appalachian region – the Appalachian Development Highway System – supports an international Appalachian corridor linking Ontario to the southern extremity of Florida, passing through Baltimore, Washington, Norfolk and Charlotte. The Continental 1coalition has the aim of developing an international corridor for trade and tourism between Toronto, Ontario and Miami, Florida. Finally, the Gulf Corridor links the three Mexican states of Coahuila, Nuevo León and Tamaulipas to the entire north-eastern part of the continent. It passes through the cities of Monterrey, San Antonio, Austin, Houston and Baton Rouge, to join the traffic of the Atlantic coast. The border crossing at Nuevo Laredo/Laredo between Nuevo León and Texas is the busiest U.S.-Mexico border crossing, with over 3 million trucks per year.

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© copyright Forum sur l'Intégration Nord-Américaine Tous droits réservés. fina - nafi.org info@fina - nafi.org

F.Y.I. Nothing is as simple as it seems.

If you use Facebook you need to check this out:

http://albumoftheday.com/facebook/

 

This is an excellent video clip of who owns
Facebook and the potential they have to use any
information about you including your credit
rating etc etc etc!!!!!!!

Check out the connections to CIA and information collection and storage. scary stuff
Also look at this from Common  Ground...

http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/forums/lofiversion/index.php/

Common Ground Common Sense 

http://www.commongroundcommonsene.org/forums/lofiversion/index.php/f4.html

Issues that Affect Our Lives


http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/forums/lofiversion/index.php/f7.html

Civil Rights and Civil Liberties

http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/forums/lofiversion/index.php/f77.html

Civil 
Rights and Civil Liberties Archive

http://www.thecolorofinfinity.com/blog/archives/2005/07/big_brothers_bi.html

http://www.thecolorofinfinity.com/blog/arc...rothers_bi.html


Big Brothers, Big Facebook: Your Orwellian Community

A few days ago I stumbled across a couple
articles mentioning TheFacebook, and a little
start-up capital they happened to get in the sum
of $13 million. The number intrigued me, so I did
a little more research, a little more stumbling,
and found something that even I still have a hard
time accepting. So, here's what I came up with:

(p.s. - I'm hoping that someone from EFF or 
people concerned with privacy rights will take 
notice. This really worries me and a lot of my friends.)

TheFacebook.com, created in February of 2004 by 
21 year old Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg, is a 
student social network now active at more than 
800 campuses, with more than 2.8 million 
registered users. [1]

Among its features, TheFacebook allows a user to upload a picture of 
themselves and can include information about favorite music, books, movies, their 
address, phone number, e-mail, clubs, jobs, educational history, and even political 
affiliations. Facebook is extremely popular, attracting on average 80 percent of a school's 
undergraduate population. However, there are some questions raised regarding privacy
concerns on the site, and when some digging is done to find out who is really
behind the site's management, there are more questions than answers.

The first venture capital money to come into 
TheFacebook, $500,000 worth, came from venture 
capitalist Peter Thiel, founder and former CEO of 
Paypal. [1]

A Stanford graduate and former columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Thiel is 
author of the book "The Diversity Myth," [2] 
which received praises from notable 
neo-conservatives such as William Kristol. [3]
In fact, Thiel is on the board of the radical conservative group
 VanguardPAC. [4]

Further funding came in the form of $12.7 million 
from venture capital firm Accel Partners. Accel's 
manager James Breyer was former chair of the 
National Venture Capital Association (NVAC). [1]

Breyer served on NVAC's board with Gilman Louie, 
CEO of In-Q-Tel, [5] a venture capital firm 
established by the Central Intelligence Agency in 
1999. [6] This firm works in various aspects of 
information technology and intelligence, 
including most notably "nurturing data mining technologies."

Breyer has also served on the board of BBN Technologies, a research and development firm 
known for spearheading the ARPANET, or what we know today as the Internet. [7]
In October of 2004, Dr. Anita Jones climbed on board, becoming a part of a firm packed
with leaders from other areas of Silicon Valley's venture capital community, including
none other than Gilman
Louie. But what is most interesting is Dr. Jones' experience prior to joining BBN.

Jones herself served on the Board of Directors for In-Q-Tel, and was previously the
Director of  Defense Research and Engineering for the U.S. Department of Defense.
Her responsibilities included serving as an advisor to the Secretary of Defense
and overseeing the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

While the nearly $13 million that came from Accel to fund The Facebook
certainly looks suspicious and unfortunately disturbing after reviewing all of this
information, the only problem on the 
surface seems to be the appearance of
some incestuous relationships between the Pentagon, 
the CIA, and these venture capital firms.
But this goes further than just the initial 
appearances. DARPA shot to national fame in 2002 
when John Markoff of the New York Times announced 
the existence of the "Information Awareness 
Office" (IAO). [8] According to Wikipedia, "the 
IAO has the stated mission to gather as much 
information as possible about everyone, in a 
centralized location, for easy perusal by the 
United States government, including (though not 
limited to) Internet activity, credit card 
purchase histories, airline ticket purchases, car 
rentals, medical records, educational 
transcripts, driver's licenses, utility bills, 
tax returns, and any other available data." [9] 
Protests came from civil libertarians on both the 
right and the left who saw the IAO as a new 
Orwellian arm of the United States government. 
After Congress investigated DARPA's project, 
funding was cut off and IAO was essentially dead in the water.

The Information Awareness Office seems to have 
survived some of its original purposes in a 
mutated form, found in today's Facebook. In fact, 
one of IAO's original example technologies 
included "human network analysis and behavior 
model building engines," [10] a surprising echo 
of the social networking mapping that Facebook 
does using SVG visualizations. [11] Add that to 
the information that Facebook collects and 
compare it to the startlingly similar goal of the 
IAO. It appears at first glance that DoD, along 
with the CIA, has managed to circumvent its 
previous Congressionally established limitations 
and find corporate sponsorship for its programs, 
under the thin veil of a useful social network for unwitting college
 students.

And those college students continue to log on to 
TheFacebook, completely unaware of the massive 
affronts to their privacy. The so-called "Privacy 
Policy" [12] of Facebook includes a statement 
saying that they "may share your information with 
third parties, including responsible companies 
with which we have a relationship." It goes on to 
say that, "We may be required to disclose 
customer information pursuant to lawful requests, 
such as subpoenas or court orders, or in 
compliance with applicable laws. Additionally, we 
may share account or other information when we 
believe it is necessary to comply with law or to 
protect our interests or property. This may 
include sharing information with other companies, 
lawyers, agents or government agencies."

Some of the aspects of the privacy policy are 
downright creepy and confusing. This particular 
gem is especially disturbing: "Thefacebook also 
collects information about you from other 
sources, such as newspapers and instant messaging 
services. This information is gathered regardless 
of your use of the Web Site." And there's no 
telling when the privacy policy may change. As of 
when this was written (July 1, 2005), the policy 
was effective as of June 28, 2005.

Who knows where the information they collect 
about these three million college students, 
alumni, and professors is going, or what they 
intend to do with it. The fact that these 
companies and agencies are all so closely 
related, and that The Facebook has almost no 
organizational transparency are all cause for 
concern. Hopefully we can soon uncover the truth.

[1] "Accel Partners Invests In Thefacebook.com"
[Accel.com]


[2] Peter Thiel's book, "The Diversity Myth" [Amazon.com]


[3] Kristol's commentary, as well as others, can be found here:


[4] VanguardPAC Board of Advisors [TheVanguard.org]


[5] In-Q-Tel - About Us [In-Q-Tel.org]


[6] "Jim Breyer of Accel Partners Elected 
Chairman of National Venture Capital Association" [NVCA.org]


[7] General Catalyst Partners :: News - "BBN 
Technologies Appoints Dr. Anita K. Jones to Board of Directors"
(This includes information about BBN's 
involvement in ARPANET, as well as Jones' past with DARPA and In-Q-Tel)
Link

[8] New York Times - "Many Tools Of Big Brother 
Are Now Up And Running" by John Markoff and John 
Schwartz, December 23, 2002, Late Edition - 
Final, Section C, Page 1, Column 2 [NYTimes.com]


[9] Information Awareness Office [Wikipedia.org]
Link

[10] The Internet Archive's archived page of 
DARPA's Information Awareness Office
Link

[11] Thefacebook.com FAQ - Visualizations 
Thefacebook.com]
Link

[12] Thefacebook.com Privacy Policy 
Thefacebook.com]

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