What do we do with youth justice privacy laws?
Facebook vs. court bans
What a web we've woven with the Internet - you can't move your mouse without getting caught in it, for good or ill. The good is plain enough to see: want to book a flight? You can do it at your leisure from the comfort of your Lazy-Boy. Forgotten how to fillet fish? Google tells you. In fact, information on almost anything you can think of is seconds away, courtesy of the Web.
And that's the rub, of course: too much information. Information on how to build a bomb, how to lure unsuspecting children, how to justify whatever racist belief you happen to hold. And increasingly, information that until recently was tightly controlled by our judicial system - specifically, the names of suspects arrested under the Youth Criminal Justice Act.
Under the act, the public is prevented from learning the names of people under 18 charged with Criminal Code offences. The philosophy is simple: young people shouldn't be stigmatized for life for a mistake they made in youth.
Lots of people oppose such anonymity, especially for serious crimes like murder, but media take the ID ban very seriously, since breaching it can result in arrest and imprisonment - not the favourite pastimes of even the most feisty editor. Yet twice in recent weeks, the identities of young suspects in serious crimes have been made public in Canada, both times on the Web.
The highest-profile case involved 14-year-old Stefanie Rengel, who was stabbed to death in Toronto Jan. 1. Within hours, friends had set up a tribute page on Facebook featuring pictures of her, and stories about her life. Postings also featured the names of the suspects police charged with her murder: a 14-year-old girl and a 17-year-old boy.
Facebook administrators removed the posts when asked to by police, but not before the names were seen by what amounts to a potentially limitless audience, given the realities of e-mail, text-messaging and Web archives.
With a few key strokes and a home computer, those Web posters had undone what a generation of judges and editors had created: an anonymous system of youth justice. In the world of the court and the press, this is a very big deal and it poses a huge question: what to do about it?
Does the dissemination of names over the Internet contravene the Youth Criminal Act, which says no person "shall publish the name" of a suspect? In effect, does a website like Facebook constitute a publisher? If it does, do you charge the poster, or the company that owns the platform he or she posted on? And what if that platform is based in another country - as Facebook is? Does Canadian law have any jurisdiction over an American company?
These are tough questions. But the courts will have to deal with the issue if they hope to keep any information hidden in a world which increasingly expects everything to be revealed at the tap of a finger.
Editorial
13 January 2008