Blog Harassment : Terms of Service - part 4

Today is the day that Lori Christensen reports to server her sentence for harassment, 90 days with work release.  So it's not really like 90 days in jail; she will be on the job as if nothing had happened during the day, and only eat and sleep in the evenings at work. 

Presumably, to go to work, she'll have a full wardrobe of her clothing, but perhaps have to wear jail outfits in the clink.

Ms. Christensen still hasn't given an explanation for her recent behavior; last winter she told a reporter that she had had a psychological evaluation, and claimed that if she were a man she wouldn't be in trouble for doing what she does, and further justified her behavior by her assertion she had a good job and the largest house in the neighborhood.  Apparently she believes relative affluence or gender give her special dispensation.

I suspect that Ms. Christensen would be in MORE trouble, not less trouble, for her behavior had she been a man directing such harassment against a woman and children, including making masturbatory gestures or using a lot of obscenities in a threatening manner towards children, because the fear would be greater from those gestures of a potential threat of violence being implicit.

In his comments from the bench, the judge asserted that he believed Ms. Christensen was mentally ill, and another requirement of her sentence is that she gets counseling.  I would imagine that most of the time for counseling to work, someone has to want that counseling, and clearly Ms. Christensen appears not to do so. 

One has to wonder how much luck this harasser will have in selling her home, or in buying or even renting another one, given her background which now includes a felony conviction for harassment of a neighbor.

Which leads us to the most recent developments of our own mirror experience with harassment. 
Comments on this blog are moderated only because of problems with a few individuals; and of those individuals only one has been a persistent and recurring problem.  When that individual is not harassing this blog, we have gone to unmoderated status for months at a time.

We prefer unmoderated comments, and overwhelmingly, most of our commenters are civil and courteous and make substantive statements, regardless of whether or not they agree or disagree with our position on any issue or topic of the day.  We do not moderate comments in order to allow only one point of view.  We moderate comments to avoid abuse, abuse of us, abuse of our other commenters.

As was the case with Ms. Christensen and her neighbors, we cannot explain why we are targeted for abuse, but as was the case with Ms. Christensen who abused other neighbors besides the ones she targeted that resulted in a criminal felony charge, we have not been the only blog so targeted for unwelcome attention.  It seems part of the pattern of some harassers that they have to do these things to multiple people for whatever odd gratification it provides them.

And as was the case with Ms. Christensen, we've never had an explanation for why we, or anyone else, is subjected to this behavior.  We don't know why it starts up when it does, or why it ends and then resumes again months later.  We just know it does. 

And as was the case with Ms. Christensen, there is no plausible explanation for why someone feels empowered to do these things.  In Ms. Christensen's case, she claims she has the biggest house and the most important job.  How that allows her to behave as she does is inexplicable.  Our harasser also seems to believe that he is uniquely important in a way that permits him to act badly; in his case possibly he believes that holding a couple of patents makes him so singularly important that he is immue.  If he believed his Terms of Service/ Code of Conduct, or even laws do not apply to him, he was given a wake up call this weekend.

But they do, as they did with Ms. Christensen, they very much apply.  Specifically, Microsoft Terms of Service were applied this weekend to our harasser.

On Saturday our blog email account received this message from Microsoft, redacted to safeguard his actual name, as distinct from his blognomen / blog commenting identity that he uses consistently:

RE: SRX1xxxxx33xxxID - abuse complaint about KxxxxxRodxxxx,

Microsoft Customer Support

To penigma administrator

From:	Microsoft Customer Support
Sent:	Sat 6/02/12 12:06 PM
To:	penigma administrator (penigma2@hotmail.com)

Hello,
We have taken appropriate action on the account that you reported in compliance with the Hotmail Code of Conduct (COC). To view our Terms of Use, visit the following Web site:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-live/code-of-conduct

Sincerely,

Jay
Support Specialist
Windows Live Abuse Team

I don't know at this time exactly WHAT action was taken by Microsoft; they didn't advise if they had sent the abuser what one of my co-bloggers characterized as a 'nastygram' warning to stop, or if the account was simply terminated without advance notice.  I understand however from other people who have made complaints to Microsoft that they will go for the harsher option of those two, that they do not have much of a tolerance for violations of their terms of service or code of conduct. 

In this case this individual has used this email for years.

The above was in response to a complaint which indicated an approximate number of abusive or unwanted comments dating back to 2009 to this blog, as well as email contacts.  We stopped counting at 200 and we provided not only the most current emails and their headers, but the same email address appearing in examples of comments that were offensive and unwanted from those earlier periods of harassment by frequent and unwanted comments.

This is one of the comments we copied in the abuse complaint -- there were a lot from which to choose.  Although redacted, it shows the function of the email account to make the comment, and it documents the blogging/ commenter identity used, highlighted in red:

Date: Thu, 22 Oct 2009 08:05:52 -0700
From: krxxxx@hotmail.comTo: pxxxxxxx2@hotmail.com
Subject: [A Penigma - a mystery, under a pseudonym] New comment on Leaving Afghanistan.
K-Rod has left a new comment on your post "Leaving Afghanistan":
Oh my f in god!!!
You are so god darned ignorant. I've dealt with a few stupidly ignorant people in my day, but this really takes the cake.
Jesus F in C on a pogo stick; you really should be committed for the things you say. I honestly don't frickin believe it.

Publish this comment.

Reject this comment.

Moderate comments for this blog.

and this is a more recent comment from the blog that matches up with some of the same identify information above, one of a couple:

Mxxxx Bxxx hates women?  Is it true? Did I hear that Xxx was caught having a sexual affair with a 17 year old boy?

By KRod on Dividing Americans, Hitting Women, Hating Immigran... at 1:11 PM

We explained to microscoft that we were no longer willing to tolerate the harassment, and that this was part of a larger action that we were taking, first pursuing civil legal remedies, and if those were insufficient, that we were prepared to pursue criminal remedies with the support of law enforcement and our area prosecutor.  We -- I -- offered to provide the contact information for our attorney and for the LEOs, so that Microsoft customer support could verify the data.  The other comments in our collection include obscenities, religiously demeaning comments, false accusations of criminal conduct, and comments which we felt rose to the standard of hate speech.  We also made it clear that the comments were continuing after we had made it clear that they were unwelcome, and that the frequency of the comments was also a facet of the harassement.  (Both frequency and intensity were facets of Lori Christensens's harassing.)

Our harasser appears to continue to read our blog, using a VPN.  A VPN is a way to disguise someone's actual location and IP information to make it more difficult to identify them.  I am as techno-naive as any blogger could be (but I'm learning!), so this was just one of the techno tidbits that has had to be explained to me.  For those of you who want to have it explained to you, good ol' wikipedia has an entry for Virtual Private Network:

A virtual private network (VPN) is a private network that interconnects remote (and often geographically separate) networks through primarily public communication infrastructures such as the Internet. VPNs provide security through tunneling protocols and security procedures ^[1] such as encryption. For example, a VPN could be used to securely connect the branch offices of an organization to a head office network through the public Internet. A VPN can also be used to interconnect two similar-type networks over a dissimilar middle network for example, two IPv6 networks over an IPv4 network ^[2].
There are two main types of VPN: remote-access VPNs and Site-to-site VPNs. Remote-access VPNs allow individual users to connect to a remote network such as roaming salespeople connecting to their company's intranet. Site-to-site VPNs allow inter-connection of networks of multiple users for example, branch offices to the main company network. VPNs hence reduce costs as they eliminate the need for dedicated leased lines between networks, but instead use existing infrastructures to connect networks while adding a layer of security.
VPNs typically require remote users to be authenticated and make use of encryption techniques to prevent disclosure of private information to unauthorized parties present on the network(s) the VPN goes through.

The short version, without the technical explanation is that a VPN can hide who you are and where you are.  If someone is harassing you, they may rely on such a cover to their identity.  In this case, our harasser only did so later in the harassment.  Another way to locate and identify an harasser is by email headers.  But I will save describing that for a separate post as our particular harasser is sufficiently techno-savvy to have switched to using a private network that is associated with spammers and other less than acceptable, very dubious activity.  That too was part of the information provided to Microsoft.

If we are lucky, at least one other blogger may be joining us in the protest to Microsoft of the use of this email address for purposes of harassment of a blog.  If we get permission, that will be detailed in further parts of this topic.