Shooter's online rants were like trees in forest

By Jocelyn Noveck

updated 6:51 p.m. ET Aug. 5, 2009

NEW YORK - In hindsight, it seems so obvious. We look back at the creepy online ramblings of a tortured soul like George Sodini and realize we should have known all along of the horrors to come.

That is, if anyone actually read Sodini's Web page before he sprayed bullets into a suburban Pittsburgh fitness class, killing three women and then himself.

But in an age where publishing your thoughts online is as easy as scribbling them in a notebook — where millions broadcast the details of their lives to anyone who will listen — were Sodini's murderous rants the equivalent of a cybertree falling in a cyberforest?

Certainly, anyone happening upon Sodini's tortured online thoughts before his rampage Tuesday would have had ample cause for alarm.

His date of death is listed right at the top, under his name and birthdate: "DOD 8/4/2009." Later, a description of his first attempt at what he calls "this project," in January. "It is 8:45 p.m.: I chickened out! I brought the loaded guns, everything. Hell!"

And then, on Monday: "Tomorrow is the big day."

It was more than enough to alert authorities, to be sure, even without Sodini's hate-infused musings on his inability to find a girlfriend and how long it had been since he'd had sex. But did anyone know?

"Perhaps no one at all ever read this Web site," says Chris Hoofnagle, a lecturer at the Berkeley Law School who specializes in Internet privacy. "There's this obscurity in being in a cacophony of different voices."

How many voices? According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, some 14 percent of adult Internet users said in a 2007 survey that they had created or worked on their own Web page.

To put that in perspective, 79 percent of U.S. adults are Internet users, according to an April 2009 Pew survey. "So assuming the segment of people who have created or worked on their own Web page is at least as big as it was in 2007, that 14 percent of Internet users would translate into roughly one in 10 U.S. adults," says Pew researcher Mary Madden.

At the same time, and perhaps as a result, we as a society are becoming more and more comfortable with less and less privacy, Madden says. For example, a quarter of Internet users have posted some kind or writing online using their real name.

"In the age of digital footprints, those people who don't have some kind of online trails left behind them are really becoming the exception rather than the rule," Madden says.

Comments made on Web page, not social network
So Sodini certainly had an online trail. But it was on a personal Web page, not on a social network, and that makes a big difference, notes Madden.

"His Web page may have been posted to an audience of one," she says. By contrast, "people become more accountable when they're connected to a network. There are cases where kids post things on their pages — perhaps suicidal tendencies — and that will raise an alarm."

In February, Jesse Coltrane in Camden, N.J., was corresponding with a despondent California teenager when suddenly he saw, on his webcam, the teen starting to cut the skin of his forearm with a razor blade. The teen then logged off his computer.

Coltrane called Sacramento police. By the time officers found the teen he had decided not to go through with the attempt.

Months earlier, on the other hand, some Internet users did nothing as they watched a Florida college student, Abraham Biggs, kill himself by overdosing on pills in front of his webcam on a site for bodybuilders. Biggs' father said those who watched — and the Web site operators, too — shared blame for his son's death.

While that latter case evokes images of an Internet-age Kitty Genovese story — hers is the now-challenged tale of a New York woman killed in 1964 while callous bystanders ignored her calls for help — one can't say the same in the case of one man venting on a Web page.

"There are a lot of personal Web sites where people vent," says Hoofnagle, the Berkeley lecturer.

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