I'm not Canadian, I just play one on TV, but....

[kingcobra]

You are right, other than I'm not at all sure surfing the net can be termed "following," at least in the sense that we define it in terms of stalking. I'm also not sure what constitutes "legitimate" collections of information, which isn't the same thing as inappropriate. I find this all at least as disturbing as you do though, I'm just not as confident that we can use the law against him as people have suggested. I certainly hope so though. The standard here is pretty high though is all I am saying.

With that said, by all means, let's use every availiable option to look to punish this a__hole.

 

[kingcobra]

Check out this link to see how frustrating it is to prosecute this stuff:

CBC News Indepth: Bullying

The quick and dirty here is that even in this extreme case the police were not able to provide any assistance to the young man. They fought for some time to get Yahoo to take down the site and they eventually succeeded. This to me is probably the best we can hope for here as well.

 

[rachelcoffe]

That's why it's cyberstalking. Just as in the everyday world, where there's a very marked difference between keeping tabs on someone you're critical of, and stalking them...there is an equally marked difference online.

I know your heart's in the right place, kingcobra, so no worries. But this isn't some vague, nebulous thing that no one can really define. Otherwise anyone could accuse another of cyberstalking when that's obviously not what's happening at all.

In this case, it's very clear that this goes well beyond any kind of reasonable activity, and squarely into the cyberstalking camp. For that reason, I'm very glad the police are being involved.

 

[Pipeous]

I am sure you would change your tune if you had been called an idiot, were out to get children hooked on nicotine like some sort of crak dealer by bad influence and misdirected and illegal advice, then they put a picture of your home, address, phone number and maybe even work schedule.... I can assume you' be fine then? well most of that has happened and other expletives. I don't care for myself what has been posted, I wasn't a target, just one of my posts on here put up. but the things he did to others in the picture section was slanderous and predatory

 

[kingcobra]

Pipeous I don't think you get it. What I am saying here is that I don't hold a lot of hope for this being prosecuted based upon the law here. Once again the standard is very high and in spite of an epidemic of what any reasonable person would see as cyber defamation it's very rare to see people even be charged let alone prosecuted, and with those that do, there are other criminal offenses that have been committed along with the defamation. There's always the option to sue but that's expensive and time consuming and requires the offender to have enough resources to be worth going after. It's a very sad situation actually. If you read the article I posted the link to, among other things the offending site accused the kid of raping little boys, all the family wanted to do was to have the police have the site taken down, and they told by the police that they could not do anything about it, not even investigate, since there wasn't enough of a legal basis to do so. Finally after 7 months of fighting with Yahoo including threatening legal action the site was removed. So all I wanted to do here is to let people know the kind of challenge we're up against here with this stuff.

 

[MustangSallie]

Pipeous I don't think you get it. What I am saying here is that I don't hold a lot of hope for this being prosecuted based upon the law here. Once again the standard is very high and in spite of an epidemic of what any reasonable person would see as cyber defamation it's very rare to see people even be charged let alone prosecuted, and with those that do, there are other criminal offenses that have been committed along with the defamation. There's always the option to sue but that's expensive and time consuming and requires the offender to have enough resources to be worth going after. It's a very sad situation actually. If you read the article I posted the link to, among other things the offending site accused the kid of raping little boys, all the family wanted to do was to have the police have the site taken down, and they told by the police that they could not do anything about it, not even investigate, since there wasn't enough of a legal basis to do so. Finally after 7 months of fighting with Yahoo including threatening legal action the site was removed. So all I wanted to do here is to let people know the kind of challenge we're up against here with this stuff.

Im not a Canadian and I don't pretend to know a lot about your laws, but the case in that article you linked to is almost 10 years old. I have to believe that the Canadians have gotten more serious about cyberstalking in the last 10 years as the internet has become ever more popular. I know the US has.

 

[kingcobra]

A lot of this has to do with the motivation of the police of course. There has been one recent instance of the crown seeking prosecution for criminal defamation, in R. v. John Kelly. The Calgary Police would love the following website removed:

ROTTENAPPLES.INFO - SITE PAGES

However as you can see the website remains, they ended up having to drop the criminal defamation charge allegedly due to the offenses not being prosecuted under it, and they had to resort to trying to charge him with other offenses including attempting to obstruct a police officer. Believe me they want this guy but they haven't been able to take him down. If this doesn't convince anyone that my misgivings are legitimate then nothing will

 

[rachelcoffe]

With all respect kingcobra...that article was from 2002, involving minors against minors. Kids. Yes, it was awful...but that was a different situation, and nearly a decade ago. (EDIT: What Mustang Sallie said!)

Plenty of adult cyberstalkers since then have been charged - by the police, not lawsuits - and found guilty. They don't just get a fine & a take-down notice, either: they go to jail.

As I said earlier...stalking is defined by the impact on the one being stalked, not by the intent of the stalker. In our specific case with this crazy, the impact and the intent are very clear. This is not some nebulous issue...nor is there a high burden of proof placed on the victims. Cyberstalking is very clearly defined in the law, and we have all the proof we need.

 

[kingcobra]

Ah well, I have rested my case, and I only wish you all the best of luck with this

 

[MustangSallie]

Check out this reference: What is Cyberstalking | Canadian Clearinghouse on Cyberstalking

It seems to me that this guy has crossed several of these lines. I wish all of you who have been targeted by this guy luck in bringing him down.

 

[kingcobra]

Let's finally take a look at the law here. There are no provisions in the Canadian Criminal Code that address cyberstalking specifically, and it falls under the section pertaining to criminal harrassment:

Criminal Harassment

264. (1) No person shall, without lawful authority and knowing that another person is harassed or recklessly as to whether the other person is harassed, engage in conduct referred to in subsection (2) that causes that other person reasonably, in all the circumstances, to fear for their safety or the safety of anyone known to them.

So that's the standard here, and I'll leave it up to those more familiar with the offending website to decide whether this is the case, although I suspect that there haven't been any such threats made either directly or indirectly.

Your link provides some definitions of cyberstalking, I'm talking what could be defined as the criminal version of it here in Canada, which isn't the same thing

I'm seriously done with this now, I promise

 

[slickplaid]

There is a simple and relatively painless way to make that website go away (at least temporarily).

NicFits.ca is hosted by Yola.com

In their Terms of Service it states that:

You may not upload, publish, post, distribute or disseminate any material that defames, abuses, harasses, stalks, threatens or otherwise violates the legal rights (such as rights of privacy and publicity) of others.

and

You may not upload, publish, post, distribute or disseminate any third party files and or content that contain material, in any form, protected by intellectual property laws (or by rights of privacy and/or publicity) unless you own or control the rights thereto or have received all necessary consents. You may not post private individual or company information without the expressed permission of such parties.

Contact Us

If we can get enough people to register their complaints about this website, it will be taken down due to a Terms of Service violation. The email for filing a complaint is abuse@yola.com and the phone number is 1-866-764-0701 (US and Canada).

You can also fill out the form for reporting abuse: Report Abuse | Yola

I would recommend that you quote the above TOS violations if you are an individual. If you are one of the companies in question that have been posted on that site, you might be able to report it as a DMCA request with the images from your website (but, I doubt it will be as effective).

If you believe a site violates any of our Terms of Service – not specifically addressed in another section of these Report Abuse pages – then please submit the following to abuse@yola.com:
What you need to do:

We may remove a website hosted by Yola at our discretion, if you provide a detailed description and evidence that the site violates the Yola Terms of Service. We will review all complaints, but please note, we are not obligated to remove a site that violates our Terms of Service, nor do these rules create any third party rights or any private right of action.

Hope this helps!

Edit:
After writing this, I think some explanation of how to verify that this site is hosted with Yola.com.

If you look at the DNS whois for nicfits.ca, you'll notice three things:

1. The Nameservers (NS entries) are pdns{1..6}.ultradns.{org,net,info,co.uk}
2. The contact email for the Start of Authority (SOA) record is tech@synthasite.com
3. The IP for the server is 72.52.4.95 (Hollywood, FL, US)

I'm going to work backwards to simplify how to verify my claims.

1. Go to Yola's website gallery. Look at the RMI website. Look familiar?
2. You can check out Craveable Creations DNS information or Digital Retouching's DNS, sites you'll notice are featured business websites on Yola. It is identical to NicFits.ca's which if you use Yola's DNS tools, you'll have the same nameservers as these other sites.
3. In the page source, they use Yola's Quantcast analytics tracking.

There are a few more things to pin down that it's hosted by Yola, but hopefully this should be enough to convince anyone who had any questions about it. If you really feel like you need more verification, cURL the headers of any site that is said to be hosted by Yola and you'll see the results are almost always identical (Using lighttpd/1.5.0, Varnish as a reverse proxy, PHP/5.2.4-2ubuntu5.1{0,7}, etc)

 

[kanadiankat]

You are right, other than I'm not at all sure surfing the net can be termed "following," at least in the sense that we define it in terms of stalking. I'm also not sure what constitutes "legitimate" collections of information, which isn't the same thing as inappropriate. I find this all at least as disturbing as you do though, I'm just not as confident that we can use the law against him as people have suggested. I certainly hope so though. The standard here is pretty high though is all I am saying.

With that said, by all means, let's use every availiable option to look to punish this a__hole.

If this site were the only thing the individual in question had done - perhaps it would be difficult to prosecute.

BUT it's not. Many of the peeps featured on the site have numerous threatening phone calls, numerous threatening emails, tweets about them (saying basically the same things), etc - from this same person, under dozens of different aliases. A case for criminal harassment could have been made ages ago - but it would have been very difficult to prove.

This site, though, is the first real collected body of evidence of all the harassment in one place. So if every person on it took it to the police.....

I'm not a police officer and I don't play one on TV - but harassment is not just a bad feeling - it's a criminal act.

 

[kanadiankat]

From the Canadian Department of Justice (handbook for police and prosecutors)

Criminal harassment can be conducted through the use of a computer system, including the Internet.10 Although this type of conduct is described in various ways, not all such conduct falls within Canada’s definition of criminal harassment. For example, “cyber-stalking” or “on-line harassment” is often used to refer to (1) direct communication through e-mail; (2) Internet harassment, where the offender publishes offensive or threatening information about the victim on the Internet; and (3) unauthorized use, control or sabotage of the victim’s computer.11 In some cyber-stalking situations, criminal harassment charges may be appropriate; however, depending on the activity involved, charges under sections 342.1 (unauthorized use of a computer), 342.2 (possession of device to obtain computer service) and subsection 430(1.1) (mischief in relation to data) should also be considered. Activities that can be considered cyber-stalking can include delivering threatening or harassing messages through one or more of the following:

e-mail;
chat rooms;
message boards;
newsgroups; and
forums.
Other variations of cyber-stalking include the following:

sending inappropriate electronic greeting cards;
posting personal advertisements in the victim’s name;
creating Web sites that contain threatening or harassing messages or that contain provocative or pornographic photographs, most of which have been altered;
sending viruses to the victim’s computer;
using spy-ware to track Web site visits or record keystrokes the victim makes; and
sending harassing messages to the victim’s employers, co-workers, students, teachers, customers, friends, families or churches or sending harassing messages forged in the victim’s name to others.12

 

[Kams Cats]

I think Kingcobra is just thinking about the failures of the justice system and concerned that you guys might be beating your head against a tree. Even when you have the law on your side, sometimes the system just doesn't work as well as it should.

I personally would love to see them made an example of.

 

[kanadiankat]

I think Kingcobra is just thinking about the failures of the justice system and concerned that you guys might be beating your head against a tree. Even when you have the law on your side, sometimes the system just doesn't work as well as it should.

I personally would love to see them made an example of.

I agree. Justice systems are faulty in most places. Terrible crimes go unpunished. Minor crimes go to the wall and prosecutors prefer a guilty plea to a trial.

The only way this person is going to feel the short arm of the law - is for everyone who is on that page to speak up and out.

A single complaint won't do much. A few complaints might earn a visit from police. Multiple complaints - with several having already been harrassed by the same person for months now - that might stand out a bit.

Add to that - digging for the phone numbers, addresses and photographs of private individuals (even if some are quite wrong) - it might just be one of those cases that can go somewhere.

Barring that - the behavior has escalated over the past few months - it may escalate further - and that will get attention.

I would really encourage anyone who is affected by that site to make a complaint. Even if your not sure that it's serious. Your complaint will help those who are seriously affected.

 

[Switched]

I'm just glad Rachel has found somebody else to argue with

 

[Danesnpits]

Ah well, I have rested my case, and I only wish you all the best of luck with this

I bet if you were on that site you would be singing a new tune, lucky for you your name wasn't mentioned.

 

[Mindfield]

Aw, I kind of feel left out. The yammering crazy guy with the inflatable cigarette on his head hasn't noticed me or said nasty things about me.

Hey! Hey, crazy nicotine guy! Look! I'm vaping nicotine! NICOTINE! It's in my lungs! It's in the air! Hey, look, nicotine rings! Look, check this out, new veins! In my head! Like the guy from Scanners! And, and, I'm bumping up the voltage, see? Bumping up the voltage, so it gets hotter and more vapour and more nicotine because I crave nicotine! It even tastes like french toast! Because I also crave french toast! With nicotine!

Damn, now I want some real french toast.

 

[Crazy Canuck]

Thanks Mindfield... Thankfully I swallowed just before reading, or there would have been water all over my monitor!!!