Fake Facebook Nazi Convicted
Dyron Hart, a twenty year old former student of Nicholls State University, Thibodaux, Louisiana, was just convicted of communicating threats through interstate commerce by making racist death threats through a fictitious Facebook account. On November 5, 2008 Hart created a Facebook account with a fictitious name and used a picture of a white supremacist for the profile. Hart, an African American, used the profile to pretend to be a person upset about the election of President Obama and used the account to communicate death threats to an African American classmate at Nicholls State University. Hart is scheduled to be sentenced November 18, 2009, and faces a maximum of five years imprisonment, a $250,000 fine, and three years post imprisonment supervised release.
With the advent of internet and social networking, a new breed of harassment and hate crimes has emerged. The ability to take on new identities while maintaining one's original identity in the "real" world is now very easy. Whether as an imprudent practical joke or for a malicious reason, individuals can easily communicate what they believe to be anonymous threats through the internet. However, the increases in technology have also greatly improved the investigator's ability to track criminal activities on the internet, creating a false sense of anonymity in many users, both criminal and non-criminal.