Explicit student gossip, threats

As of this writing, police in the Athens, Georgia, area were searching for the person who anonymously posted on a MySpace profile sexually explicit gossip about dozens of high school students. "The site, which was up on MySpace between Sept. 1 and 9, was a 21st-century version of a bathroom wall," the Athens Banner-Herald reports. "The writer - who claimed to be female in an online profile - posted a long list of relationships and supposed sexual encounters of dozens of students. The list was prefaced with a diatribe against rumor-spreading, and the writer claimed she was cataloging everything she had heard and not inventing new rumors." The Associated Press this week reported that "since gossip isn't a crime, the sheriff's report lists the offense as distributing obscene materials to minors." The police got the profile owner's email address from MySpace, but it was an anonymous Yahoo address with no name associated with it. They told the AP they plan to "subpoena BellSouth, the Internet service provider used to create the email address, to try to determine who paid for the Internet service." In a separate case and another Georgia high school, a freshman boy posted his MySpace page a "hit list" of people he wanted to harm, the Athens Banner-Herald reported. The 15-year-old boy "was charged early Thursday morning with making terroristic threats" and taken into custody.