There’s quite a lot to be said for technology that allows us to pull out a smartphone and have a nice voice tell us the quickest route over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house. But for all of its upsides, this same technology can also have a dark side; in the hands of the wrong people, it can even facilitate certain kinds of crimes — such as stalking.
“Like domestic violence, stalking is a crime of power and control,” says the National Institute of Justice. “Stalking is … defined as a course of conduct directed at a specific person that involves repeated … visual or physical proximity, nonconsensual communication, or verbal, written, or implied threats, or a combination thereof, that would cause a reasonable person fear,” adds Patricia Tjaden and Nancy Thoennes in their paper “Stalking in America: Findings From the National Violence Against Women Survey.”
“Cyberstalking” is the use of electronic means to stalk victims — and while it may not involve actual physical contact, it can share some of the same behaviors as real-life stalking. With advances in technology, particularly the availability of “spyware” apps that use global positioning satellite (GPS) technology — technology that comes with every smartphone — it has become a real problem for many folks.
“What we’re seeing is that technology is now the new tool to perpetuate that surveillance,” said Cindy Southworth of the National Network to End Domestic Violence, an organization representing state domestic-violence groups.1
Stalkers these days can hack into phones, email, and social media accounts to track a person’s whereabouts, eavesdrop on private conversations, and harass or threaten people using unauthorized information gained by using the latest technology. And hacking into a phone or tablet isn’t necessarily complicated: all it takes is someone installing a spyware app on your phone when you’re not looking (just Google “spyware app” to see what we mean). It’s even possible for these cybercreeps to switch on your computer or tablet’s built-in camera without you realizing it.
NPR surveyed more than 70 domestic violence shelters — in big cities like New York and San Francisco and smaller towns in the Midwest and the South — and they discovered that 85 percent of shelters housed victims whose abusers tracked them using GPS.2
While every state (including North Carolina) has passed cyberstalking laws, according to Popular Science Magazine, those laws have dealt almost entirely with email and other forms of communication, such as text messages and faxing — and not the kind of advanced surveillance technologies miniature video cameras and GPS that are commonly available on the devices we use everyday.
Until now.
Bipartisan legislation, Senate Bill 238, passed unanimously by the General Assembly and signed into law by Governor Pat McCrory in October, makes it a crime to install an electronic tracking device (this would include installing a spyware app on someone’s phone) to track someone’s location without their consent.
Certainly there are legitimate reasons for using tracking systems, and the new law makes exceptions for them. They include: law enforcement officers performing official duties; legal guardians tracking minors or disabled adults; the owner of fleet vehicles to track their vehicles; private investigators who are investigating criminal behavior, finding lost or stolen property, or if the person they’re investigating has threatened someone with injury or death, and employers who provide communication devices to their employees or contractors for use in connection with their work. Using phones or other tracking devices to cyberstalk, however, is clearly an illegitimate use. Recalling some cases of domestic abuse committed using advanced technology can be quite chilling.
In one instance occurring in St. Louis, “it started with harassing phone calls, then quickly escalated to more. He would drive by her house in the overnight hours, taking pictures of her through her bedroom window. He scattered nails and screws in her driveway. He dug scratches into her car finish. Then the woman — who is in her 30s, lives in St. Louis and is afraid to give her name because of the experience — made a frightening discovery: Hidden in the undercarriage of her vehicle was a white plastic device held together with a magnet and electrical tape. It was a GPS tracker. Every street she traveled, every turn she took, everywhere she went — he knew.”
In another case, a Kansas man was convicted of multiple felonies after using a GPS device to track his ex-girlfriend from her home in Wichita to a friend’s house in Kane County, Ill., where he choked her and threatened to stab her. She lived, but a victim in another Illinois case was not so lucky. That woman, Jitka Vesel, 36, was fatally shot in April 2011 by a Canadian man she had briefly dated three years earlier, after he tracked her car with a GPS device. The man, Dmitry Smirnov, then 21, was sentenced to life in prison.”
The U.S. Department of Justice reports that of the 3.4 million known stalking cases each year, one out of 4 involve the use of some type of technology. Electronic monitoring plays a role in one of 13 cases, and GPS tracking is used in one-tenth of those.3
Endnotes
- NPR: “Smartphones Are Used To Stalk, Control Domestic Abuse Victims”
- NPR: “Smartphones Are Used To Stalk, Control Domestic Abuse Victims”
- St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “Stalkers find friend in GPS technology“