How much legal trouble could I get into?

September 23, 2007 1:14 AM

I'm hosting one of those "confessional" websites, and I want to know how risky it is to post clearly-illegal "confessions".

I hate vague questions like this, and I hate even more that I have to ask one.

I host a confessions website, and most of them are simply explanatory, standard and neutral from a legal standpoint.

We've had about twenty come in that are blatantly illegal, perverse, and downright scary. If it were me I'd almost be inclined to just delete them, but I'm wondering if they can be posted to the website without exposing myself to law enforcement officers trying to track down who confessed such things.

This is the setup:

The confession form exists on my site, a standard shared server (Dreamhost). All it does is take a textarea field and email it to a Google Mail address I maintain. Then, I check the email, copy the confession and stick it into my site's database. This extra (pointless) step obfuscates things like IP addresses and timestamps so it's nearly impossible for me to figure out who confessed anything.

So, if I host a blatantly evil and illegal text confession on my site, how exposed am I? They can go nuts subpoenaing both my hosting provider (Dreamhost) and Google Mail, but could I be at risk of something ridiculous like a computer seizure?

Both involved servers are in the USA, but I live in Canada.

posted by geodave to law & government (10 comments total)

Ask your lawyer. If you don't have a lawyer the answer to the last question will certainly be yes, because you will be utterly unable to fight back without one.
posted by grouse at 1:39 AM on September 23, 2007

I've seen some pretty horrible stuff on postsecret... You may be able to escape legal liability by posting some sort of disclaimer on the page, or on the submission form; something like "All confessions should be viewed as works of fiction". Because, as you know, most of them will be fake. It's certainly not illegal to post fiction to a website, no matter what the content.
posted by tehloki at 3:28 AM on September 23, 2007

Why don't you email the people at postsecret and ask this very question? Just without IDing that you're making a copycat.
posted by a robot made out of meat at 5:11 AM on September 23, 2007

I have no opinion on your personal criminal liability -- just don't know the law in the area.

However, you are absolutely exposed to investigators in terms of subpoenas. Mitigating this, though, is that cops are busy and confined to their jurisdiction. It's unlikely a cop will see a confession online and then start a fishing expedition with you to find a culprit. It's only if cop decides that something you've posted is a confession to the crime he is already investigating that you'll be getting calls. The greatest risk of a fishing expedition would be if the posting implicates national security or if the confession is to a crime in a small enough jurisdiction that a cop from there would see it as an obligation to start an investigation even without more.
posted by MattD at 6:51 AM on September 23, 2007

Do people identify where they are?

Even if someone posts "I just murdered my family in cold blood and took perverse glee in doing it. My neighbors are next," I think there are profound jurisdictional issues. Are they in the Canada or US or some other country? It'd be a mess. (The mere US-Canada thing might shelter you somewhat, in fact, although I wouldn't be surprised if our countries honor each other's subpoenas / search warrants?)

I think the bigger concern is if someone posts, "I just killed my family and I'm going to kill my neighbors tomorrow" and then actually does it. Do you have a duty to report that? But to who?

And I'm not sure your setup really makes it impossible to figure out "whodunnit." You can link the time of the e-mail you receive back to the server's access logs and get the IP that way.

Typical disclaimer: IANAL.
posted by fogster at 8:15 AM on September 23, 2007

Even if someone posts "I just murdered my family in cold blood and took perverse glee in doing it. My neighbors are next," I think there are profound jurisdictional issues.

This is a very good point. Law enforcement doesn't have the resources (time, staffing, etc.) to go investigating anonymous, vague confessions that probably didn't even occur within a given jurisdiction. If, on the other hand, there is a confession that has enough detail to capture the interest of law enforcement ("I am a chemical engineer in a large southern city who killed all four of his children in the summer of 2004," etc., then you might have investigators knocking at your door.)

I would say, as a practical matter, that law enforcement has very little interest in monitoring vague confessions on the web. Everybody knows that what's posted on the web has to be taken with a huge grain of salt.
posted by jayder at 8:38 AM on September 23, 2007

I would say, as a practical matter, that law enforcement has very little interest in monitoring vague confessions on the web. Everybody knows that what's posted on the web has to be taken with a huge grain of salt.

This isn't true for all agencies. If you post a submission which said "I'm going to slap the president when I meet him" or "I'd take him out if I could" or something along those lines, you can expect a visit from the Secret Service.
posted by Jairus at 9:32 AM on September 23, 2007

And I'm not sure your setup really makes it impossible to figure out "whodunnit." You can link the time of the e-mail you receive back to the server's access logs and get the IP that way.

Yes and no. The site gets thousands of hits per day, and the time the email is received by the gmail account isn't the same second it's sent by the form, because there's a pause based on network congestion and server load. I've tested it, sometimes it takes minutes, sometimes just seconds. Even if it was within 10 seconds, that'd only give me a list of about 10 IPs or more it could have come from. Maybe there's another flaw I'm not thinking of, though.

As for the rest, thank you enormously. I'm definitely taking all of this into consideration and I think without specific threats, and the disclaimer that the site is fiction, I should be reasonably "under the radar" while still recognizing that the risk is not zero.

I wish I could best-answer all of these.
posted by geodave at 11:35 AM on September 23, 2007

It's certainly not illegal to post fiction to a website, no matter what the content.

Not true, if it's pornographic and involves children.
posted by desjardins at 12:40 PM on September 23, 2007

The EFF is your friend. Scroll down to the section labelled 'Anonymity'.

Since the site is not fictional, your disclaimer isn't worth a hill of beans. If you post something traffic-generating, like a confession to a murder, or libel against housing lenders, you should expect unwelcome attention from law enforcement and attorneys. You need to be very cautious - disclaimers and anonymity don't protect you from the consequences of violating the law, and you risk civil liability too.

The penet remailer story has a chilling effect on anyone who remembers it: the Church of Scientology's deep pockets funded lawyers who eventually succeeded in shutting down an anonymous remailer in Finland. Take a look at some of these links before you make up your mind how you want to handle these issues.
posted by ikkyu2 at 3:13 PM on September 23, 2007