The po­lice in­ter­ven­tion made in the mat­ter of for­mer jour­nal­ist Sasha Mo­hammed, whose com­put­er was traced as the source of threat­en­ing e-mails sent to Trinidad Ex­press ed­i­tor-in-chief Omatie Ly­der and re­porter An­na Ram­dass, opens a new chap­ter in com­mu­ni­ca­tions pro­to­cols in Trinidad and To­ba­go and sends a res­o­nant mes­sage to our In­ter­net com­mu­ni­ty. Mo­hammed was warned, "stern­ly" ac­cord­ing to re­ports, by of­fi­cers at­tached to the Cy­ber­crime Unit of the Po­lice Ser­vice that the trac­ing of In­ter­net records led in­ves­ti­ga­tors fol­low­ing the trail of "Jan­ice Thomas" to the IP ad­dress in use when the of­fend­ing e-mail was sent from her home.

As the own­er of the com­put­er, Mo­hammed was cau­tioned that she was re­spon­si­ble for its use and more specif­i­cal­ly, li­able for its mis­use, even if the fig-leaf de­fence that some­one else might have been us­ing the equip­ment were raised. The six-month long in­ves­ti­ga­tion rais­es new is­sues and aware­ness around the in­creas­ing use of In­ter­net anonymi­ty to en­gage in abu­sive and con­fronta­tion­al be­hav­iour that would be en­tire­ly out of place in civ­il com­pa­ny. First among these new de­vel­op­ments is a demon­stra­bly ca­pa­ble and en­gaged Cy­ber­crime Unit ca­pa­ble of meet­ing the needs and con­cerns of cit­i­zens who find them­selves tar­get­ed by per­sons mo­ti­vat­ed by the veil of anonymi­ty of­fered by the pro­to­cols of the In­ter­net. The oth­er con­cern that in­di­vid­u­als mo­ti­vat­ed to ha­rass us­ing the tools of the In­ter­net is the will­ing­ness of lo­cal In­ter­net Ser­vice Providers to re­spond to le­git­i­mate and well-served court or­ders re­quir­ing com­pli­ance with the laws of Trinidad and To­ba­go.

In a world in which some providers of In­ter­net ser­vices have some­times been slug­gish to re­spond to le­gal re­quests and even proved com­bat­ive­ly re­sis­tant to such re­quests, the en­force­ment of lo­cal laws is en­riched by such com­pli­ance if it is of­fered in re­sponse to for­mal le­gal re­quests backed up by re­al cas­es un­der in­ves­ti­ga­tion. The In­ter­net, through­out its his­to­ry, has strug­gled to find a bal­ance be­tween the open­ness of its ar­chi­tec­ture, the anonymi­ty that's so read­i­ly af­ford­ed to in­di­vid­ual par­tic­i­pants, the need for peo­ple to pro­tect their pri­va­cy when us­ing the Web and the need for ef­fec­tive polic­ing that's ca­pa­ble of re­spond­ing to le­git­i­mate com­plaints that arise in such an en­vi­ron­ment. While there are tech­nolo­gies that ex­ist which make such traces dif­fi­cult to com­plete, it is a sim­ple mat­ter of fact that it is of­ten the least savvy users who are most prone to make rash use of the tech­nolo­gies avail­able to them.

There is no bet­ter il­lus­tra­tion of this syn­drome than the com­ment­ing sys­tems that are avail­able on the Guardian Me­dia web­site and at the Trinidad Ex­press. Both news­pa­per's sites have had to aban­don stock com­ment­ing sys­tems for more ro­bust tech­nolo­gies which make it eas­i­er to screen the open­ly li­bel­lous and hos­tile con­tri­bu­tions that fil­ter in among the valu­able and wel­comed com­ments of our read­er­ship. The pres­ence of In­ter­net trolls is an un­avoid­able by-prod­uct of any In­ter­net based sys­tem which is held open to pub­lic com­men­tary and in the case of a news­pa­per's web­site, such mis­use opens the pub­li­ca­tion to le­gal ac­tion as part of its pub­lish­ing process.

Blog­gers and com­men­ta­tors who host their own com­men­tary sites or pub­lish us­ing pub­lic tools such as Face­book have tend­ed to as­sume that their state­ments ex­ist in a par­al­lel dig­i­tal uni­verse that's some­how pro­tect­ed from the laws of li­bel. These com­ments are not priv­i­leged un­der law, and the Mo­hammed case proves not on­ly that iden­ti­ties can be un­cov­ered along the per­sis­tent elec­tron­ic trails that mes­sages and posts leave be­hind, but that par­tic­u­lar­ly of­fen­sive out­bursts can be held to the same stan­dards as tra­di­tion­al­ly broad­cast or pub­lished com­ments and state­ments. The am­pli­fi­ca­tion of lo­cal voic­es and in­creased op­por­tu­ni­ty to com­mu­ni­cate opin­ions and points of view has not re­moved any of the re­spon­si­bil­i­ties or li­a­bil­i­ties of pub­lic dis­course which have gov­erned the tra­di­tion­al me­dia's re­la­tion­ship with so­ci­ety and to­day's blog­gers and com­men­ta­tors on the In­ter­net would be sen­si­ble to be guid­ed by the new re­al­i­ties that the Mo­hammed case has brought to the ta­ble.