http://onlineathens.com/stories/100106/news_20061001046.shtml
Police track rumor site's creator
North Oconee gossip put on MySpace
By Merritt Melancon | juliana.melancon@onlineathens.com | Story updated at 3:19 AM on Sunday, October 1, 2006
BOGART - The Oconee County Sheriff's Office still is hot on the heels of the mystery blogger who filled North Oconee High School's student body with suspicion after airing loads of their dirty laundry on the Internet networking site MySpace.
It's an episode many students at North Oconee are eager to forget. But officials and the sheriff's office are saying they need to find and punish the person who posted the "NOHS Gossip" MySpace site or it could lead to a proliferation of hurtful tabloid-style MySpace sites.
"If we don't take some kind of action, we are going to send the message that were not taking this seriously," said sheriff's Lt. David Kilpatrick, who's been trying to find the site's creator since Sept. 9. "The school has the responsibility to take every action they can to help keep slander down."
The site, which was up on MySpace between Sept. 1 and 9, was a 21st century version of a bathroom wall. The writer - who claimed to be female in an online profile - posted a long list of relationships and supposed sexual encounters of dozens of students.
The list was prefaced with a diatribe against rumor-spreading, and the writer claimed she was cataloging everything she had heard and not inventing new rumors.
The site also included a photo of two uniformed schoolgirls engaged in a fist fight.
By Sept. 9, the day when the majority of NOHS students found the site, dozens of messages left on the site threatened everything from social isolation to physical violence.
The school day was completely disrupted, according to Principal John Osborne, as distraught students fretted about who had posted the rumors and who had read them. The school's counseling office was busier than usual that day, he said.
Verbal confrontations erupted throughout the school, and though arguments never crossed the line to physical scuffles, nearly every class period was disrupted or delayed, he said.
"We had lot of jawing," Osborne said. "Everybody knew who did it and nobody knew who did it, but no one took the law into their own hands."
When the writer refused to come forward, Osborne contacted Kilpatrick, who has investigated computer-based and white collar crime for the sheriff's office for almost a decade, to help track down the site's creator.
Since gossip isn't a a crime, the sheriff's report lists the offense as distributing obscene materials to minors. The list describes sexual encounters and could be accessed by people under 18.
"There's a lot of difference between writing on a bathroom wall and distributing it all over the world on the Internet where anyone has access to it," Kilpatrick said. "That distributing obscene materials law also covers leaving sexually explicit material in a place where minors can find it."
Kilpatrick has subpoenaed MySpace to find the e-mail address and name of the person who started the site, but officials at MySpace only had an e-mail address at Yahoo Mail.
He subpoenaed Yahoo, but the e-mail account was created without a name. The account was started from a computer using BellSouth Internet access in Miami, but the trail ended there.
Kilpatrick says he plans to subpoena BellSouth soon to find the physical address of the person who pays for the Internet access. He admits he's not sure if he'd arrest the guilty gossiper, but said it still is important to find out who posted the site.
If a current student created the site, he or she could face a disciplinary hearing at the high school and probably would receive a punishment, "worse than suspension," Osborne said.
The MySpace site could not have been created on a school computer, since North Oconee, like most high schools, blocks networking and chat Web sites in on-campus computer labs. The student still could be expelled because the school's conduct code covers off-campus conduct that affects life on-campus.
Parents of the libeled students also might choose some sort of civil action, he said.
Meanwhile, students seem to have moved beyond the gossip. It happened before and will happen again, said Katy Teat, a senior at North Oconee.
"It was one day and then it settled down," Teat said. "This is high school, and there will something else to talk about next week."
Published in the Athens Banner-Herald on 100106