Our own Taco Bill, whose day job resides in the fringes of the law enforcement business, has raised an excellent point in response to our recent blurb regarding the use of phony social-networking postings.
Charles Robinson of Yahoo! Sports has reported that some teams are setting up ghost profiles in order to obtain information from potential draft picks.
The only problem? The practice potentially violates federal law.
Prosecutors in Los Angeles, the locale of the MySpace servers, brought criminal charges against Missouri resident Lori Drew after she created a phony MySpace profile to harass a local girl, who eventually committed suicide.
The logic of 18 U.S.C. § 1830 is pretty simple. Violating the terms of service applicable to MySpace or any other social networking site violates federal law. And since the MySpace terms of service prohibit the user from promoting false and misleading information, creating a phony profile and assuming a phony identity exceeds the terms of service, and likewise crosses the line of legally permissible conduct.
In Lori Drew’s case, the egregious facts surely influenced the decision to pursue criminal charges. But with prosecutorial discretion extremely broad, and no NFL team in L.A., a zealous hotshot (or, as the case may be, an overofficious jerk) hoping to prove a point could decide to sink his or her teeth into this one, if for no reason other than to ensure that the general public realizes that creating false accounts on MySpace and Facebook is a no-no.
Though it remains a longshot that any NFL team would ever actually be prosecuted for this kind of conduct, the irony here — as Taco Bill points out — is that the efforts of the various pro football teams to spot players who might be inclined to break the law are potentially relying upon tactics that actually break the law.