UNIVERSITY PARK — About 4,000 students every year get more from their time at Penn State than just a diploma.

They leave with a notation of discipline on their transcript — often accompanied by a criminal record — that can haunt them as they apply for jobs, apartments, loans or grad school.

Some of those co-eds are even worse off. Their education gets derailed before they get their degrees by jail or disciplinary expulsion.

The office of judicial affairs works with local police, and often hands down a sentence separate from the court of law, and students who get into trouble often get a double whammy.

So, it’s a good idea to know the laws and the consequences before a good time turns into hard time.

Most people charged with lesser offenses, such as misdemeanors for DUI, simple assault, harassment or theft, are eligible for a probationary program called ARD — Accelerated Rehabilitative Disposition.

If you complete the program, which lasts about a year, you can apply to have the charge wiped from your record.

But your academic record can still suffer. Punishments from the Office of Judicial Affairs can range from a warning or mandated counseling to suspension and expulsion.

For more serious crimes, students facing criminal charges could spend time on court probation, in county jail, or even at a state prison.

And don’t forget — just be cause a charge was expunged from your record, it doesn’t mean it never happened. News media routinely report court proceedings, and once something is on the Internet, it never goes away.

One quick search will unearth your past for anyone curious enough to Google your name.

Here’s what you can expect:

DUI: Most first-time DUI offenders are eligible for ARD. If you don’t qualify for ARD, or don’t complete the program, you could get a mandatory 72 hours in jail, depending on your blood alcohol level.

If you get ARD and are charged with DUI again within 10 years, that first DUI charge will count against you when you are sentenced. The sentence for a second DUI is five to 90 days in jail.

Plus, for even your first DUI arrest, the fines can run into the thousands of dollars, and you can expect to lose your driver’s license for any where from 30 days to 18 months.

UNDERAGE DRINKING AND OTHER SUMMARY OFFENSES: Summary citations are sort of like traffic tickets. They carry a fine and no jail time, but a judge can impose community service or counseling as part of a sentence.

Urinating in public, acting disorderly, being drunk in public and drinking underage can all get you fines, some up to $300.

In 2008, state law changed to allow summary citations to be expunged from your record after five years — with a catch: You can only have one. Otherwise they stick to your record just like any other crime.

FIGHTING: Bad temper? Keep your fists to yourself or you could be looking at hard jail time for this crime.

Causing serious bodily injury to someone is aggravated assault and could land you behind bars for three years to 20 years.

For simple assault, a less serious offense, you would probably get probation, or up to a month in county jail.

Many cases where a single punch is thrown are reduced to harassment citations that result in fines, or if the victim agrees, ARD.

DRUGS: From big-time dealing to passing a joint to a friend, having drugs on a college campus is a serious crime.

Cases of simply possessing personal amounts of marijuana, or a marijuana pipe usually end with ARD or probation.

But if you’re caught dealing drugs — even passing a joint to a friend — you’ll be charged with a felony, and if you take the case to trial, a judge could sentence you to a mandatory two years in state prison under a state law passed to discourage dealing near schools.

The law establishing tougher penalties for selling in school zones was written to punish people pedaling near kids, but it also includes universities. Most of downtown State College and all of the University Park campus are in a school zone.

Outside the school zone, selling less than 2.5 grams of cocaine or between two and 10 pounds of marijuana can have you eating jail food for at least a year while contemplating a $5,000 fine.

Beware, college students often get caught up in drug rings that span several states, with ring leaders who, if caught, are looking at decades in the slammer.

BURGLARY: It might seem like a cool prank to steal the deer heads from your rival frat. But breaking and entering is a felony that can send you to the slammer for one to two years if someone is home.

That also means that if you get too drunk, forget where you live and stumble into a family’s home, you’re looking at hard jail time.

Entering a home when no one is there means a minimum six months in the county jail.

If you’re lucky you can bargain that down to a criminal trespass charge, but that will still taint your record for future employers and landlords.

SEXUAL ASSAULT: Most sexual assaults on campus happen between acquaintances who meet through friends or at parties.

Many times, the defendants say alcohol was involved and they can’t remember what happened or they believe the sex was consensual.

Be aware that, under state law, an intoxicated woman cannot legally give consent. In 2006, a 22-year-old student was sentenced to three to six years in state prison for a sexual assault that happened after he says he blacked out. Many other cases end with plea agreements that still call for county jail time, and charge of indecent assault or aggravated indecent assault on your record. Those don’t look good on resumes.

STALKING: Recognize that the relationship is over and don’t have any more contact after being told no.

Stalking charges can result in probation. But if you get caught a second time, even if it is not the same victim, the crime becomes a felony and will result in a minimum of 90 days in jail.

You’ll also be required to attend months of classes to change your behavior — more time and money lost.

THEFT: Low on toothpaste and cash? Don’t steal. Most stores downtown are equipped with surveillance cameras to catch you in the act.

A first offense could end up as a summary charge, but a second retail theft charge will land you on probation, and a third could mean jail time.

Same goes for stray books in the library. Many can be tracked by the serial number, and if they are tracked back to you, it can mean trouble. The more expensive the item, the more severe the sentence.

Find a credit card that’s not yours?

Swipe it in the ATM and you can count on probation or jail time, depending on how much you steal. Up to $2,000 will get you a month behind bars.

FAKE ID: Dying to get into a bar underage? Try that in State College — where most bars are equipped with bar-code scanners — and you’re likely to get slapped with a charge of giving false information.

If you’re lucky, police will cite you with a summary, but they can charge you with a misdemeanor resulting in probation.

If you’re caught making or selling a fake ID, expect a misdemeanor charge and probation.

RIOT: Think twice before you climb a telephone poll to celebrate that Penn State win.

Most of the students charged with rioting after the football team’s 2008 win over Ohio State got a choice: Spend 30 days in jail and admit to a misdemeanor disorderly conduct, or get a sentence of probation and live with a felony record for the rest of your life.

VANDALISM: Punching a hole in a wall or pulling the fire alarm as a prank can land you on court supervision with a hefty bill of restitution. Most people charged with this crime never see a jail cell, but end up working a lot of hours to pay for damage.

CHEATING: Punishment for cheating, according to Penn State university code, can range from a warning to removal from a program. Cheating can be plagiarism, fabrication of information, facilitation of acts of academic dishonesty by others, unauthorized possession of examinations, submitting work of another person or work previously used without informing the instructor, and tampering with the academic work of other students.

The UI Dean of Students office investigated 101 alcohol consumption and possession complaints in 2008-09, and University Housing investigated 649 underage alcohol infractions, according to the 2008-09 student discipline report, which is the most recent UI has made public.

“I am not quite sure how it will affect things. I am not a person who is inclined to predict (what will happen) when we are doing something brand new,” said Tom Baker, the associate dean of students and director of the student conduct office.

Still, Baker said that with his jurisdiction expanding this year with a new policy that will penalize students for arrests and citations they receive off campus as well as on campus, and with two more staff members, he expects to conduct more investigations.

UI imposed 361 disciplinary and other sanctions on UI students ranging from warnings to probation to substance abuse counseling to 16 suspensions of varying lengths, according to the 2008-09 report. That includes infractions beyond alcohol, but alcohol is by far the most common offense officials deal with, according to data in the report.

UI deals with fewer alcohol-related offenses then some schools. Penn State University’s judicial affairs office, for example, assigned sanctions for 913 alcohol offenses, according to its annual assessment report. However, Penn State also is a larger school.
It is difficult to compare alcohol offenses because of differing sizes of student bodies and how many students live on campus, Baker said.

Kate Fitzgerald, UI assistant director for residence life, said that because most of the students living in student housing have traditionally been too young to get into bars, the new ordinance probably will not have an effect on cases she sees.

“I don’t think so. Most students we see are coming from house parties,” Fitzgerald said.

In 2008-09, 16 students were suspended from the residence hall, which is separate from the suspension from the dean of students, according to the discipline report.

The biggest influence on alcohol infractions in the dorms is the cost of UI fines compared with fines for underage drinking in Iowa City, Fitzgerald said. When UI’s fines are lower, infractions go up, she said. When UI raises its fines to mirror the city’s fines, the infractions go down, she said.

Since the 21-only ordinance took effect, there is a $735 fine for being younger than 21 in an Iowa City bar after 10 p.m. The residence hall fines range from $200 to $700 depending on the severity of the offense, Fitzgerald said.

UI Department of Public Safety was the referral source for 88 percent of the cases Baker’s office investigated in 2008-09, according to the discipline report. DPS dealt with 697 alcohol-related incidents on campus in 2009, such as liquor law violations, drunkenness and drunken driving, and recorded 786 alcohol-related charges, according to a 2010 campus crime report to the Iowa state Board of Regents.

In contrast, Iowa State University, which has more students living on campus, had 827 incidents and 927 charges in 2009, according to the same report. At Penn State in 2008-09, campus police filed 2,350 arrests and citations, according to the PSU annual assessment.

Chuck Green, director of UI Department of Public Safety, said he does not know how UI compares with other schools for alcohol-related offenses, but he thinks the new 21-only could help bring down the number of infractions, he said.

“I believe it will have an impact on young people who don’t attend the university as well as those who do. If access is reduced, for UI affiliates and non-affiliates, it is reasonable to expect that consumption as well as alcohol-related infractions, overall, would be lower,” Green said.

Major court decisions on controversial social issues are sometimes ahead of their times. That was certainly the case with judicial rulings decades ago that struck down laws banning interracial marriage. But despite conservative claims that U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker’s ruling Wednesday to overturn California’s Proposition 8 ban on same-sex marriage is outside the mainstream, the reality is that his decision is in sync with public sentiment.

The gay rights movement has won Americans’ hearts and minds. The tide has turned. Opponents can try, but they can’t push it back.

Although nobody believes that homophobia has disappeared, polls show that public support for gay rights – including marriage – has increased dramatically in the past decade, especially in the last few years. Moreover, support for gay marriage is much higher among younger Americans, indicating that the future belongs to the advocates, not the opponents, of same-sex marriage. Soon, conservative politicians and groups will no longer be able to use gay marriage as a “wedge” issue to stir controversy and win elections.

The battle for gay marriage is often compared with the struggle to end the prohibition against marriage between blacks and whites. In fact, Americans’ attitudes about same-sex marriage changed much more quickly.

In 1948, when California’s Supreme Court legalized interracial marriage (the first state to do so) in Perez v Sharp, most Americans opposed it. In the 1950s, when half the states still had laws prohibiting interracial marriage, over 90% of Americans still considered it wrong. By 1967, when the U.S. Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, knocked down state anti-miscegenation laws everywhere, 16 states still had such laws on the books and 72% of the public still opposed interracial marriages.

It wasn’t until the 1990s that even half of Americans said they approved of marriage between blacks and whites. In 2007, the most recent poll on the topic, 77% of Americans supported interracial marriage. It may be shocking to some that 17% of Americans still disapprove of black-white marriages (6% had no opinion), but the shift in public opinion over five decades has been steady and irreversible.

The civil rights movement laid the foundation for the gay rights crusade, which adopted many of its strategies and tactics, including grassroots organizing, protest and civil disobedience, fighting for justice in the courts, lobbying for legislation, and campaigning to elect sympathetic candidates.

After the gay rights movement burgeoned in the 1970s, it took time for public opinion about homosexuals to shift. But as gay activism accelerated, and more and more people (including public figures) came out of the closet, attitudes changed, reflecting a profound transformation in public opinion.

More and more public figures – politicians, entertainers, teachers, judges, journalists, businesspersons, athletes and clergy — acknowledged their homosexuality. TV sit-coms began to have openly gay characters. Businesses began to appeal to gay consumers.

As advocates began to put specific issues on the agenda, public support increased for such questions as allowing openly gays and lesbians to teach in public schools, providing health benefits for gay partners, permitting gay couples to adopt children, ending anti-sodomy laws, outlawing job and housing discrimination against gays, funding for research to combat AIDS, and imposing penalties for people who commit hate crimes against gays. In 1993, for example, only 44% of Americans believed that gays should be allowed to openly serve in the military, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll. Today, more than 75% think so.

A growing number of Americans began realizing that they knew gay people. (By 2003, 58% of Americans said that had a friend, relative, or coworker who is gay or lesbian – the same as today).

People began to confront their own values and views about a subject that was once taboo in their own lifetimes. Today, 78% of Americans (and 88% of those who say they personally know someone who is gay or lesbian) say that they are comfortable around homosexuals.

Until the late 1990s, gay marriage wasn’t even an issue, and most pollsters didn’t bother asking the public how they felt about it. (One exception was the Field Poll, which first asked Californians in 1977 if they approved of extending marriage laws to same-sex couples. By a 59% to 28% margin, they said no).

But eventually the question of gay partnerships – civil unions and marriage – emerged as a topic of public debate and private conversations in every corner of the country. Not surprisingly, in the past decade, support for legalizing gay partnerships has skyrocketed. Initially, the idea of civil unions broke the comfort zone barrier. Americans are still more supportive of civil unions than of gay marriage, but the positive trend for both is indisputable.

In 2002, the New York Times began to publish announcements of same-sex civil unions and weddings. The following year — just seven years ago — a Washington Post/ABC News poll asked Americans if gay and lesbian couples should be allowed to form “legally recognized civil unions, giving them the legal rights of married couples in areas such as health insurance, inheritance and pension coverage.” Only 40% agreed. When they asked the same question earlier this year, 66% agreed. Over that same period, the proportion who say they favor gay marriage increased from 37% to 47%. Although different polls use a variety of wordings to gauge public opinion on the issue, they all show growing support for gay marriage.

Public support for same-sex marriage is strongest in the West and weakest in the South. But legalization of gay marriage depends not only on public opinion but also on the willingness of politicians and judges to tackle the issue. Gay marriage is now legal in Iowa, Vermont, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C.

In most states, it was the opponents, not the advocates, of gay marriage that forced the issue into the public debate. Hoping to whip up fears and energize conservative voters to go to the polls and help elect Republicans, they put measures on the ballots to ban same-sex marriage. In all 30 states where the issue has been put to the voters, they’ve rejected legalizing gay marriage.

These ballot outcomes have been setbacks in the battle for gay marriage. They may accurately reflect current public sentiment in those states, but they also reflect the effectiveness of the
opponents of gay marriage in mobilizing voters, raising and spending on ads and other propaganda, and framing the issue to win over “swing” voters.

This was certainly the case in California. For example, in July 2008, the Field Poll found that California voters approved of same-sex marriage by a 51% to 42% margin. But four months later, California voters approved Proposition 8 – which banned same-sex marriage — by a 52% to 48% margin.

What happened? First, a small number of voters misled pollsters (and perhaps even themselves) in voicing support for same-sex marriage, while others may have mistakenly thought that voting “yes” meant support for marriage equality. Second, too few pro-gay marriage Californians bothered to vote. Third, some lukewarm sympathizers were persuaded by TV ads or flyers to change their minds.

When the campaign was over, there was much fingerpointing, but eventually many gay rights activists began to seriously examine what they did right and wrong. Many of the organizers of the anti-Proposition 8 effort acknowledge that they ran a lousy campaign, especially in terms of generating turnout and responding to anti-gay attack ads. They also conducted thousands of interviews to determine who voted against gay marriage and why. The result is an important new study. It found that between mid-September and election day, approximately 5% of voters–at least 687,000– moved to favor the ban on same-sex marriage, mostly parents with children at home.

Yes, there is a hard core of anti-gay Americans who are more fervent in their views than their pro-gay marriage counterparts. Their activism fueled the campaigns against extending wedding vows to gays and lesbians. But, the study suggests, many people who voted against gay marriage are not haters. They support other aspects of gay rights and may eventually change their views on same-sex marriage.

A Field Poll conducted earlier this month and released on Wednesday found that California voters once again support allowing same-sex couples to marry by a 51% to 42% margin, with 7% uncertain.

But gay rights supporters know that for public opinion to influence public policy, it has to be mobilized. A vocal minority can have disproportionate influence if they are well-organized — a lesson the Tea Party has learned well. Judge Walker’s ruling is a victory for gay marriage proponents, but it doesn’t end the battle to win in the political arena – in California and elsewhere.

What is clear, however, is that the future belongs to marriage equality. Last month’s Field Poll revealed that age makes a big difference in attitudes toward same-sex marriage. Only 42% of California voters who are 65 or older endorsed gay marriage, compared with 46% of 50-64 year olds, 47% of 40-49 year olds, 53% of 30-39 year olds, and a whopping 68% of 18-29 years olds.

Among the in-between generation — the 40-49 year olds – 12% still register no opinion. Both older and younger Californians are clearer about where they stand on the issue. Only 5% of 18-29 year olds say they have no opinion about gay marriage.

Nationwide polls show a similar dynamic. A Washington Post/ABC News poll conducted in February found that 30% of Americans over 65 believe gay marriages should be legal, compared with 47% of those in the 30-64 age group, and 65% of those between 18 and 29. In fact, in 38 states, a majority of those age 18-29 support same sex marriage, according to an analysis by Columbia University political scientists Jeffrey Lax and Justin Phillips. The 12 other states (except Utah) are all in the South, and in six of those states (Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Louisiana, Georgia, and Kentucky) more than 44% support gay marriage.

Given these trends, is there any doubt that a substantial majority of Americans will soon favor gay marriage?

In other words, the time when conservatives can use same-sex marriage as a “wedge” issue is coming to an end. For sure, some politicians – especially in some conservative states, Congressional districts, and state legislative districts – will continue to find it useful to bash gay marriage in order to win votes. But the days of gay-bashing as a political strategy are numbered.

The opponents of same-sex marriage claim that Judge Walker’s ruling on Proposition 8 was a fluke. The Liberty Counsel, a right-wing legal group, called the decision “simply the whim of one judge.” The conservative Family Research Council criticized Walker’s decision as “far Left,” despite the fact that he was first nominated to the federal bench by President Ronald Reagan, renominated twice by President George H.W. Bush, and strongly endorsed by conservative former Governor Pete Wilson.

The Proposition 8 advocates plan to appeal Judge Walker’s ruling to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and, if necessary, to the United States Supreme Court. That process could take another year or two. By then, it is likely that an even more Californians, and Americans, will favor same-sex marriage. If the composition of the current Supreme Court doesn’t change, it is possible that it will rule to maintain the Proposition 8 ban on same-sex marriage. But if they do, they will be even further behind where the American people are. It may set back the fight for social justice by a few years, but it will surely not reverse growing support for gay marriage.

We’ve seen dramatic changes in public opinion before – on such issues as women’s suffrage, sexual harassment, interracial marriages, racial and sexual discrimination in jobs and housing, women’s roles at home and work, government’s role in protecting the environment, fuel efficiency in cars, and disability rights.

In each case, grassroots movements made a big difference. Their role is to put new issues on the public agenda – to make people think about things they hadn’t thought about before. Initially, this makes people feel uncomfortable. It sometimes even triggers a backlash among some people who resist change. But eventually most people come to accept the reality — and fairness – of new ideas and behaviors. The radical ideas of one generation become the common sense of the next.

When children born this year reach voting age 18 years from now, they will surely wonder how it was even possible that America once deprived gays and lesbians the right to marry. They will take same-sex marriage for granted.

Hopefully, however, they will learn in their history classes and on TV about the grassroots movement that catalyzed the dramatic changes in public opinion, laws and court rulings that made America a more humane country, especially for the married gay and lesbian couples they call their neighbors, friends, aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters, and parents.

Four years ago, Stacy Snyder, then a 25-year-old teacher in training at Conestoga Valley High School in Lancaster, Pa., posted a photo on her MySpace page that showed her at a party wearing a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup, with the caption “Drunken Pirate.” After discovering the page, her supervisor at the high school told her the photo was “unprofessional,” and the dean of Millersville University School of Education, where Snyder was enrolled, said she was promoting drinking in virtual view of her under-age students. As a result, days before Snyder’s scheduled graduation, the university denied her a teaching degree. Snyder sued, arguing that the university had violated her First Amendment rights by penalizing her for her (perfectly legal) after-hours behavior. But in 2008, a federal district judge rejected the claim, saying that because Snyder was a public employee whose photo didn’t relate to matters of public concern, her “Drunken Pirate” post was not protected speech.

When historians of the future look back on the perils of the early digital age, Stacy Snyder may well be an icon. The problem she faced is only one example of a challenge that, in big and small ways, is confronting millions of people around the globe: how best to live our lives in a world where the Internet records everything and forgets nothing — where every online photo, status update, Twitter post and blog entry by and about us can be stored forever. With Web sites like LOL Facebook Moments, which collects and shares embarrassing personal revelations from Facebook users, ill-advised photos and online chatter are coming back to haunt people months or years after the fact. Examples are proliferating daily: there was the 16-year-old British girl who was fired from her office job for complaining on Facebook, “I’m so totally bored!!”; there was the 66-year-old Canadian psychotherapist who tried to enter the United States but was turned away at the border — and barred permanently from visiting the country — after a border guard’s Internet search found that the therapist had written an article in a philosophy journal describing his experiments 30 years ago with L.S.D.

According to a recent survey by Microsoft, 75 percent of U.S. recruiters and human-resource professionals report that their companies require them to do online research about candidates, and many use a range of sites when scrutinizing applicants — including search engines, social-networking sites, photo- and video-sharing sites, personal Web sites and blogs, Twitter and online-gaming sites. Seventy percent of U.S. recruiters report that they have rejected candidates because of information found online, like photos and discussion-board conversations and membership in controversial groups.

Technological advances, of course, have often presented new threats to privacy. In 1890, in perhaps the most famous article on privacy ever written, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis complained that because of new technology — like the Kodak camera and the tabloid press — “gossip is no longer the resource of the idle and of the vicious but has become a trade.” But the mild society gossip of the Gilded Age pales before the volume of revelations contained in the photos, video and chatter on social-media sites and elsewhere across the Internet. Facebook, which surpassed MySpace in 2008 as the largest social-networking site, now has nearly 500 million members, or 22 percent of all Internet users, who spend more than 500 billion minutes a month on the site. Facebook users share more than 25 billion pieces of content each month (including news stories, blog posts and photos), and the average user creates 70 pieces of content a month. There are more than 100 million registered Twitter users, and the Library of Congress recently announced that it will be acquiring — and permanently storing — the entire archive of public Twitter posts since 2006.

In Brandeis’s day — and until recently, in ours — you had to be a celebrity to be gossiped about in public: today all of us are learning to expect the scrutiny that used to be reserved for the famous and the infamous. A 26-year-old Manhattan woman told The New York Times that she was afraid of being tagged in online photos because it might reveal that she wears only two outfits when out on the town — a Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt or a basic black dress. “You have movie-star issues,” she said, “and you’re just a person.”

We’ve known for years that the Web allows for unprecedented voyeurism, exhibitionism and inadvertent indiscretion, but we are only beginning to understand the costs of an age in which so much of what we say, and of what others say about us, goes into our permanent — and public — digital files. The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is threatening, at an almost existential level, our ability to control our identities; to preserve the option of reinventing ourselves and starting anew; to overcome our checkered pasts.

In a recent book, “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age,” the cyberscholar Viktor Mayer-Schönberger cites Stacy Snyder’s case as a reminder of the importance of “societal forgetting.” By “erasing external memories,” he says in the book, “our society accepts that human beings evolve over time, that we have the capacity to learn from past experiences and adjust our behavior.” In traditional societies, where missteps are observed but not necessarily recorded, the limits of human memory ensure that people’s sins are eventually forgotten. By contrast, Mayer-Schönberger notes, a society in which everything is recorded “will forever tether us to all our past actions, making it impossible, in practice, to escape them.” He concludes that “without some form of forgetting, forgiving becomes a difficult undertaking.”

It’s often said that we live in a permissive era, one with infinite second chances. But the truth is that for a great many people, the permanent memory bank of the Web increasingly means there are no second chances — no opportunities to escape a scarlet letter in your digital past. Now the worst thing you’ve done is often the first thing everyone knows about you.

THE CRISIS — AND THE SOLUTION?
All this has created something of a collective identity crisis. For most of human history, the idea of reinventing yourself or freely shaping your identity — of presenting different selves in different contexts (at home, at work, at play) — was hard to fathom, because people’s identities were fixed by their roles in a rigid social hierarchy. With little geographic or social mobility, you were defined not as an individual but by your village, your class, your job or your guild. But that started to change in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, with a growing individualism that came to redefine human identity. As people perceived themselves increasingly as individuals, their status became a function not of inherited categories but of their own efforts and achievements. This new conception of malleable and fluid identity found its fullest and purest expression in the American ideal of the self-made man, a term popularized by Henry Clay in 1832. From the late 18th to the early 20th century, millions of Europeans moved from the Old World to the New World and then continued to move westward across America, a development that led to what the historian Frederick Jackson Turner called “the significance of the frontier,” in which the possibility of constant migration from civilization to the wilderness made Americans distrustful of hierarchy and committed to inventing and reinventing themselves.

In the 20th century, however, the ideal of the self-made man came under siege. The end of the Western frontier led to worries that Americans could no longer seek a fresh start and leave their past behind, a kind of reinvention associated with the phrase “G.T.T.,” or “Gone to Texas.” But the dawning of the Internet age promised to resurrect the ideal of what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton has called the “protean self.” If you couldn’t flee to Texas, you could always seek out a new chat room and create a new screen name. For some technology enthusiasts, the Web was supposed to be the second flowering of the open frontier, and the ability to segment our identities with an endless supply of pseudonyms, avatars and categories of friendship was supposed to let people present different sides of their personalities in different contexts. What seemed within our grasp was a power that only Proteus possessed: namely, perfect control over our shifting identities.

But the hope that we could carefully control how others view us in different contexts has proved to be another myth. As social-networking sites expanded, it was no longer quite so easy to have segmented identities: now that so many people use a single platform to post constant status updates and photos about their private and public activities, the idea of a home self, a work self, a family self and a high-school-friends self has become increasingly untenable. In fact, the attempt to maintain different selves often arouses suspicion. Moreover, far from giving us a new sense of control over the face we present to the world, the Internet is shackling us to everything that we have ever said, or that anyone has said about us, making the possibility of digital self-reinvention seem like an ideal from a distant era.

Concern about these developments has intensified this year, as Facebook took steps to make the digital profiles of its users generally more public than private. Last December, the company announced that parts of user profiles that had previously been private — including every user’s friends, relationship status and family relations — would become public and accessible to other users. Then in April, Facebook introduced an interactive system called Open Graph that can share your profile information and friends with the Facebook partner sites you visit.

What followed was an avalanche of criticism from users, privacy regulators and advocates around the world. Four Democratic senators — Charles Schumer of New York, Michael Bennet of Colorado, Mark Begich of Alaska and Al Franken of Minnesota — wrote to the chief executive of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, expressing concern about the “instant personalization” feature and the new privacy settings. The reaction to Facebook’s changes was such that when four N.Y.U. students announced plans in April to build a free social-networking site called Diaspora, which wouldn’t compel users to compromise their privacy, they raised more than $20,000 from more than 700 backers in a matter of weeks. In May, Facebook responded to all the criticism by introducing a new set of privacy controls that the company said would make it easier for users to understand what kind of information they were sharing in various contexts.

Facebook’s partial retreat has not quieted the desire to do something about an urgent problem. All around the world, political leaders, scholars and citizens are searching for responses to the challenge of preserving control of our identities in a digital world that never forgets. Are the most promising solutions going to be technological? Legislative? Judicial? Ethical? A result of shifting social norms and cultural expectations? Or some mix of the above? Alex Türk, the French data-protection commissioner, has called for a “constitutional right to oblivion” that would allow citizens to maintain a greater degree of anonymity online and in public places. In Argentina, the writers Alejandro Tortolini and Enrique Quagliano have started a campaign to “reinvent forgetting on the Internet,” exploring a range of political and technological ways of making data disappear. In February, the European Union helped finance a campaign called “Think B4 U post!” that urges young people to consider the “potential consequences” of publishing photos of themselves or their friends without “thinking carefully” and asking permission. And in the United States, a group of technologists, legal scholars and cyberthinkers are exploring ways of recreating the possibility of digital forgetting. These approaches share the common goal of reconstructing a form of control over our identities: the ability to reinvent ourselves, to escape our pasts and to improve the selves that we present to the world.

REPUTATION BANKRUPTCY AND TWITTERGATION
A few years ago, at the giddy dawn of the Web 2.0 era — so called to mark the rise of user-generated online content — many technological theorists assumed that self-governing communities could ensure, through the self-correcting wisdom of the crowd, that all participants enjoyed the online identities they deserved. Wikipedia is one embodiment of the faith that the wisdom of the crowd can correct most mistakes — that a Wikipedia entry for a small-town mayor, for example, will reflect the reputation he deserves. And if the crowd fails — perhaps by turning into a digital mob — Wikipedia offers other forms of redress. Those who think their Wikipedia entries lack context, because they overemphasize a single personal or professional mistake, can petition a group of select editors that decides whether a particular event in someone’s past has been given “undue weight.” For example, if the small-town mayor had an exemplary career but then was arrested for drunken driving, which came to dominate his Wikipedia entry, he can petition to have the event put in context or made less prominent.

In practice, however, self-governing communities like Wikipedia — or algorithmically self-correcting systems like Google — often leave people feeling misrepresented and burned. Those who think that their online reputations have been unfairly tarnished by an isolated incident or two now have a practical option: consulting a firm like ReputationDefender, which promises to clean up your online image. ReputationDefender was founded by Michael Fertik, a Harvard Law School graduate who was troubled by the idea of young people being forever tainted online by their youthful indiscretions. “I was seeing articles about the ‘Lord of the Flies’ behavior that all of us engage in at that age,” he told me, “and it felt un-American that when the conduct was online, it could have permanent effects on the speaker and the victim. The right to new beginnings and the right to self-definition have always been among the most beautiful American ideals.”

ReputationDefender, which has customers in more than 100 countries, is the most successful of the handful of reputation-related start-ups that have been growing rapidly after the privacy concerns raised by Facebook and Google. (ReputationDefender recently raised $15 million in new venture capital.) For a fee, the company will monitor your online reputation, contacting Web sites individually and asking them to take down offending items. In addition, with the help of the kind of search-optimization technology that businesses use to raise their Google profiles, ReputationDefender can bombard the Web with positive or neutral information about its customers, either creating new Web pages or by multiplying links to existing ones to ensure they show up at the top of any Google search. (Services begin from $10 a month to $1,000 a year; for challenging cases, the price can rise into the tens of thousands.) By automatically raising the Google ranks of the positive links, ReputationDefender pushes the negative links to the back pages of a Google search, where they’re harder to find. “We’re hearing stories of employers increasingly asking candidates to open up Facebook pages in front of them during job interviews,” Fertik told me. “Our customers include parents whose kids have talked about them on the Internet — ‘Mom didn’t get the raise’; ‘Dad got fired’; ‘Mom and Dad are fighting a lot, and I’m worried they’ll get a divorce.’ ”

Companies like ReputationDefender offer a promising short-term solution for those who can afford it; but tweaking your Google profile may not be enough for reputation management in the near future, as Web 2.0 swiftly gives way to Web. 3.0 — a world in which user-generated content is combined with a new layer of data aggregation and analysis and live video. For example, the Facebook application Photo Finder, by Face.com, uses facial-recognition and social-connections software to allow you to locate any photo of yourself or a friend on Facebook, regardless of whether the photo was “tagged” — that is, the individual in the photo was identified by name. At the moment, Photo Finder allows you to identify only people on your contact list, but as facial-recognition technology becomes more widespread and sophisticated, it will almost certainly challenge our expectation of anonymity in public. People will be able to snap a cellphone picture (or video) of a stranger, plug the images into Google and pull up all tagged and untagged photos of that person that exist on the Web.

In the nearer future, Internet searches for images are likely to be combined with social-network aggregator search engines, like today’s Spokeo and Pipl, which combine data from online sources — including political contributions, blog posts, YouTube videos, Web comments, real estate listings and photo albums. Increasingly these aggregator sites will rank people’s public and private reputations, like the new Web site Unvarnished, a reputation marketplace where people can write anonymous reviews about anyone. In the Web 3.0 world, Fertik predicts, people will be rated, assessed and scored based not on their creditworthiness but on their trustworthiness as good parents, good dates, good employees, good baby sitters or good insurance risks.

Anticipating these challenges, some legal scholars have begun imagining new laws that could allow people to correct, or escape from, the reputation scores that may govern our personal and professional interactions in the future. Jonathan Zittrain, who teaches cyberlaw at Harvard Law School, supports an idea he calls “reputation bankruptcy,” which would give people a chance to wipe their reputation slates clean and start over. To illustrate the problem, Zittrain showed me an iPhone app called Date Check, by Intelius, that offers a “sleaze detector” to let you investigate people you’re thinking about dating — it reports their criminal histories, address histories and summaries of their social-networking profiles. Services like Date Check, Zittrain said, could soon become even more sophisticated, rating a person’s social desirability based on minute social measurements — like how often he or she was approached or avoided by others at parties (a ranking that would be easy to calibrate under existing technology using cellphones and Bluetooth). Zittrain also speculated that, over time, more and more reputation queries will be processed by a handful of de facto reputation brokers — like the existing consumer-reporting agencies Experian and Equifax, for example — which will provide ratings for people based on their sociability, trustworthiness and employability.

To allow people to escape from negative scores generated by these services, Zittrain says that people should be allowed to declare “reputation bankruptcy” every 10 years or so, wiping out certain categories of ratings or sensitive information. His model is the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which requires consumer-reporting agencies to provide you with one free credit report a year — so you can dispute negative or inaccurate information — and prohibits the agencies from retaining negative information about bankruptcies, late payments or tax liens for more than 10 years. “Like personal financial bankruptcy, or the way in which a state often seals a juvenile criminal record and gives a child a ‘fresh start’ as an adult,” Zittrain writes in his book “The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It,” “we ought to consider how to implement the idea of a second or third chance into our digital spaces.”

Another proposal, offered by Paul Ohm, a law professor at the University of Colorado, would make it illegal for employers to fire or refuse to hire anyone on the basis of legal off-duty conduct revealed in Facebook postings or Google profiles. “Is it really fair for employers to know what you’ve put in your Facebook status updates?” Ohm asks. “We could say that Facebook status updates have taken the place of water-cooler chat, which employers were never supposed to overhear, and we could pass a prohibition on the sorts of information employers can and can’t consider when they hire someone.”

Ohm became interested in this problem in the course of researching the ease with which we can learn the identities of people from supposedly anonymous personal data like movie preferences and health information. When Netflix, for example, released 100 million purportedly anonymous records revealing how almost 500,000 users had rated movies from 1999 to 2005, researchers were able to identify people in the database by name with a high degree of accuracy if they knew even only a little bit about their movie-watching preferences, obtained from public data posted on other ratings sites.

Ohm says he worries that employers would be able to use social-network-aggregator services to identify people’s book and movie preferences and even Internet-search terms, and then fire or refuse to hire them on that basis. A handful of states — including New York, California, Colorado and North Dakota — broadly prohibit employers from discriminating against employees for legal off-duty conduct like smoking. Ohm suggests that these laws could be extended to prevent certain categories of employers from refusing to hire people based on Facebook pictures, status updates and other legal but embarrassing personal information. (In practice, these laws might be hard to enforce, since employers might not disclose the real reason for their hiring decisions, so employers, like credit-reporting agents, might also be required by law to disclose to job candidates the negative information in their digital files.)

Another legal option for responding to online setbacks to your reputation is to sue under current law. There’s already a sharp rise in lawsuits known as Twittergation — that is, suits to force Web sites to remove slanderous or false posts. Last year, Courtney Love was sued for libel by the fashion designer Boudoir Queen for supposedly slanderous comments posted on Twitter, on Love’s MySpace page and on the designer’s online marketplace-feedback page. But even if you win a U.S. libel lawsuit, the Web site doesn’t have to take the offending material down any more than a newspaper that has lost a libel suit has to remove the offending content from its archive.

Some scholars, therefore, have proposed creating new legal rights to force Web sites to remove false or slanderous statements. Cass Sunstein, the Obama administration’s regulatory czar, suggests in his new book, “On Rumors,” that there might be “a general right to demand retraction after a clear demonstration that a statement is both false and damaging.” (If a newspaper or blogger refuses to post a retraction, they might be liable for damages.) Sunstein adds that Web sites might be required to take down false postings after receiving notice that they are false — an approach modeled on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which requires Web sites to remove content that supposedly infringes intellectual property rights after receiving a complaint.

As Stacy Snyder’s “Drunken Pirate” photo suggests, however, many people aren’t worried about false information posted by others — they’re worried about true information they’ve posted about themselves when it is taken out of context or given undue weight. And defamation law doesn’t apply to true information or statements of opinion. Some legal scholars want to expand the ability to sue over true but embarrassing violations of privacy — although it appears to be a quixotic goal.

Daniel Solove, a George Washington University law professor and author of the book “The Future of Reputation,” says that laws forbidding people to breach confidences could be expanded to allow you to sue your Facebook friends if they share your embarrassing photos or posts in violation of your privacy settings. Expanding legal rights in this way, however, would run up against the First Amendment rights of others. Invoking the right to free speech, the U.S. Supreme Court has already held that the media can’t be prohibited from publishing the name of a rape victim that they obtained from public records. Generally, American judges hold that if you disclose something to a few people, you can’t stop them from sharing the information with the rest of the world.

That’s one reason that the most promising solutions to the problem of embarrassing but true information online may be not legal but technological ones. Instead of suing after the damage is done (or hiring a firm to clean up our messes), we need to explore ways of pre-emptively making the offending words or pictures disappear.

EXPIRATION DATES
Jorge Luis Borges, in his short story “Funes, the Memorious,” describes a young man who, as a result of a riding accident, has lost his ability to forget. Funes has a tremendous memory, but he is so lost in the details of everything he knows that he is unable to convert the information into knowledge and unable, as a result, to grow in wisdom. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, in “Delete,” uses the Borges story as an emblem for the personal and social costs of being so shackled by our digital past that we are unable to evolve and learn from our mistakes. After reviewing the various possible legal solutions to this problem, Mayer-Schönberger says he is more convinced by a technological fix: namely, mimicking human forgetting with built-in expiration dates for data. He imagines a world in which digital-storage devices could be programmed to delete photos or blog posts or other data that have reached their expiration dates, and he suggests that users could be prompted to select an expiration date before saving any data.

This is not an entirely fanciful vision. Google not long ago decided to render all search queries anonymous after nine months (by deleting part of each Internet protocol address), and the upstart search engine Cuil has announced that it won’t keep any personally identifiable information at all, a privacy feature that distinguishes it from Google. And there are already small-scale privacy apps that offer disappearing data. An app called TigerText allows text-message senders to set a time limit from one minute to 30 days after which the text disappears from the company’s servers on which it is stored and therefore from the senders’ and recipients’ phones. (The founder of TigerText, Jeffrey Evans, has said he chose the name before the scandal involving Tiger Woods’s supposed texts to a mistress.)

Expiration dates could be implemented more broadly in various ways. Researchers at the University of Washington, for example, are developing a technology called Vanish that makes electronic data “self-destruct” after a specified period of time. Instead of relying on Google, Facebook or Hotmail to delete the data that is stored “in the cloud” — in other words, on their distributed servers — Vanish encrypts the data and then “shatters” the encryption key. To read the data, your computer has to put the pieces of the key back together, but they “erode” or “rust” as time passes, and after a certain point the document can no longer be read. Tadayoshi Kohno, a designer of Vanish, told me that the system could provide expiration dates not only for e-mail but also for any data stored in the cloud, including photos or text or anything posted on Facebook, Google or blogs. The technology doesn’t promise perfect control — you can’t stop someone from copying your photos or Facebook chats during the period in which they are not encrypted. But as Vanish improves, it could bring us much closer to a world where our data didn’t linger forever.

Kohno told me that Facebook, if it wanted to, could implement expiration dates on its own platform, making our data disappear after, say, three days or three months unless a user specified that he wanted it to linger forever. It might be a more welcome option for Facebook to encourage the development of Vanish-style apps that would allow individual users who are concerned about privacy to make their own data disappear without imposing the default on all Facebook users.

So far, however, Zuckerberg, Facebook’s C.E.O., has been moving in the opposite direction — toward transparency rather than privacy. In defending Facebook’s recent decision to make the default for profile information about friends and relationship status public rather than private, Zuckerberg said in January to the founder of the publication TechCrunch that Facebook had an obligation to reflect “current social norms” that favored exposure over privacy. “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds but more openly and with more people, and that social norm is just something that has evolved over time,” he said.

PRIVACY’S NEW NORMAL
But not all Facebook users agree with Zuckerberg. Plenty of anecdotal evidence suggests that young people, having been burned by Facebook (and frustrated by its privacy policy, which at more than 5,000 words is longer than the U.S. Constitution), are savvier than older users about cleaning up their tagged photos and being careful about what they post. And two recent studies challenge the conventional wisdom that young people have no qualms about having their entire lives shared and preserved online forever. A University of California, Berkeley, study released in April found that large majorities of people between 18 and 22 said there should be laws that require Web sites to delete all stored information about individuals (88 percent) and that give people the right to know all the information Web sites know about them (62 percent) — percentages that mirrored the privacy views of older adults. A recent Pew study found that 18-to-29-year-olds are actually more concerned about their online profiles than older people are, vigilantly deleting unwanted posts, removing their names from tagged photos and censoring themselves as they share personal information, because they are coming to understand the dangers of oversharing.
Still, Zuckerberg is on to something when he recognizes that the future of our online identities and reputations will ultimately be shaped not just by laws and technologies but also by changing social norms. And norms are already developing to recreate off-the-record spaces in public, with no photos, Twitter posts or blogging allowed. Milk and Honey, an exclusive bar on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, requires potential members to sign an agreement promising not to blog about the bar’s goings on or to post photos on social-networking sites, and other bars and nightclubs are adopting similar policies. I’ve been at dinners recently where someone has requested, in all seriousness, “Please don’t tweet this” — a custom that is likely to spread.

But what happens when people transgress those norms, using Twitter or tagging photos in ways that cause us serious embarrassment? Can we imagine a world in which new norms develop that make it easier for people to forgive and forget one another’s digital sins?

That kind of social norm may be harder to develop. Alessandro Acquisti, a scholar at Carnegie Mellon University, studies the behavioral economics of privacy — that is, the conscious and unconscious mental trade-offs we make in deciding whether to reveal or conceal information, balancing the benefits of sharing with the dangers of disclosure. He is conducting experiments about the “decay time” and the relative weight of good and bad information — in other words, whether people discount positive information about you more quickly and heavily than they discount negative information about you. His research group’s preliminary results suggest that if rumors spread about something good you did 10 years ago, like winning a prize, they will be discounted; but if rumors spread about something bad that you did 10 years ago, like driving drunk, that information has staying power. Research in behavioral psychology confirms that people pay more attention to bad rather than good information, and Acquisti says he fears that “20 years from now, if all of us have a skeleton on Facebook, people may not discount it because it was an error in our youth.”

On the assumption that strangers may not make it easy for us to escape our pasts, Acquisti is also studying technologies and strategies of “privacy nudges” that might prompt people to think twice before sharing sensitive photos or information in the first place. Gmail, for example, has introduced a feature that forces you to think twice before sending drunken e-mail messages. When you enable the feature, called Mail Goggles, it prompts you to solve simple math problems before sending e-mail messages at times you’re likely to regret. (By default, Mail Goggles is active only late on weekend nights.) Acquisti is investigating similar strategies of “soft paternalism” that might nudge people to hesitate before posting, say, drunken photos from Cancún. “We could easily think about a system, when you are uploading certain photos, that immediately detects how sensitive the photo will be.”

A silly but surprisingly effective alternative might be to have an anthropomorphic icon — a stern version of Microsoft’s Clippy — that could give you a reproachful look before you hit the send button. According to M. Ryan Calo, who runs the consumer-privacy project at Stanford Law School, experimenters studying strategies of “visceral notice” have found that when people navigate a Web site in the presence of a human-looking online character who seems to be actively following the cursor, they disclose less personal information than people who browse with no character or one who appears not to be paying attention. As people continue to experience the drawbacks of living in a world that never forgets, they may well learn to hesitate before posting information, with or without humanoid Clippys.

FORGIVENESS
In addition to exposing less for the Web to forget, it might be helpful for us to explore new ways of living in a world that is slow to forgive. It’s sobering, now that we live in a world misleadingly called a “global village,” to think about privacy in actual, small villages long ago. In the villages described in the Babylonian Talmud, for example, any kind of gossip or tale-bearing about other people — oral or written, true or false, friendly or mean — was considered a terrible sin because small communities have long memories and every word spoken about other people was thought to ascend to the heavenly cloud. (The digital cloud has made this metaphor literal.) But the Talmudic villages were, in fact, far more humane and forgiving than our brutal global village, where much of the content on the Internet would meet the Talmudic definition of gossip: although the Talmudic sages believed that God reads our thoughts and records them in the book of life, they also believed that God erases the book for those who atone for their sins by asking forgiveness of those they have wronged. In the Talmud, people have an obligation not to remind others of their past misdeeds, on the assumption they may have atoned and grown spiritually from their mistakes. “If a man was a repentant [sinner],” the Talmud says, “one must not say to him, ‘Remember your former deeds.’ ”
Unlike God, however, the digital cloud rarely wipes our slates clean, and the keepers of the cloud today are sometimes less forgiving than their all-powerful divine predecessor. In an interview with Charlie Rose on PBS, Eric Schmidt, the C.E.O. of Google, said that “the next generation is infinitely more social online” — and less private — “as evidenced by their Facebook pictures,” which “will be around when they’re running for president years from now.” Schmidt added: “As long as the answer is that I chose to make a mess of myself with this picture, then it’s fine. The issue is when somebody else does it.” If people chose to expose themselves for 15 minutes of fame, Schmidt says, “that’s their choice, and they have to live with it.”

Schmidt added that the “notion of control is fundamental to the evolution of these privacy-based solutions,” pointing to Google Latitude, which allows people to broadcast their locations in real time.

This idea of privacy as a form of control is echoed by many privacy scholars, but it seems too harsh to say that if people like Stacy Snyder don’t use their privacy settings responsibly, they have to live forever with the consequences. Privacy protects us from being unfairly judged out of context on the basis of snippets of private information that have been exposed against our will; but we can be just as unfairly judged out of context on the basis of snippets of public information that we have unwisely chosen to reveal to the wrong audience.

Moreover, the narrow focus on privacy as a form of control misses what really worries people on the Internet today. What people seem to want is not simply control over their privacy settings; they want control over their online reputations. But the idea that any of us can control our reputations is, of course, an unrealistic fantasy. The truth is we can’t possibly control what others say or know or think about us in a world of Facebook and Google, nor can we realistically demand that others give us the deference and respect to which we think we’re entitled. On the Internet, it turns out, we’re not entitled to demand any particular respect at all, and if others don’t have the empathy necessary to forgive our missteps, or the attention spans necessary to judge us in context, there’s nothing we can do about it.

But if we can’t control what others think or say or view about us, we can control our own reaction to photos, videos, blogs and Twitter posts that we feel unfairly represent us. A recent study suggests that people on Facebook and other social-networking sites express their real personalities, despite the widely held assumption that people try online to express an enhanced or idealized impression of themselves. Samuel Gosling, the University of Texas, Austin, psychology professor who conducted the study, told the Facebook blog, “We found that judgments of people based on nothing but their Facebook profiles correlate pretty strongly with our measure of what that person is really like, and that measure consists of both how the profile owner sees him or herself and how that profile owner’s friends see the profile owner.”

By comparing the online profiles of college-aged people in the United States and Germany with their actual personalities and their idealized personalities, or how they wanted to see themselves, Gosling found that the online profiles conveyed “rather accurate images of the profile owners, either because people aren’t trying to look good or because they are trying and failing to pull it off.” (Personality impressions based on the online profiles were most accurate for extroverted people and least accurate for neurotic people, who cling tenaciously to an idealized self-image.)

Gosling is optimistic about the implications of his study for the possibility of digital forgiveness. He acknowledged that social technologies are forcing us to merge identities that used to be separate — we can no longer have segmented selves like “a home or family self, a friend self, a leisure self, a work self.” But although he told Facebook, “I have to find a way to reconcile my professor self with my having-a-few-drinks self,” he also suggested that as all of us have to merge our public and private identities, photos showing us having a few drinks on Facebook will no longer seem so scandalous. “You see your accountant going out on weekends and attending clown conventions, that no longer makes you think that he’s not a good accountant. We’re coming to terms and reconciling with that merging of identities.”

Perhaps society will become more forgiving of drunken Facebook pictures in the way Gosling says he expects it might. And some may welcome the end of the segmented self, on the grounds that it will discourage bad behavior and hypocrisy: it’s harder to have clandestine affairs when you’re broadcasting your every move on Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. But a humane society values privacy, because it allows people to cultivate different aspects of their personalities in different contexts; and at the moment, the enforced merging of identities that used to be separate is leaving many casualties in its wake. Stacy Snyder couldn’t reconcile her “aspiring-teacher self” with her “having-a-few-drinks self”: even the impression, correct or not, that she had a drink in a pirate hat at an off-campus party was enough to derail her teaching career.

That doesn’t mean, however, that it had to derail her life. After taking down her MySpace profile, Snyder is understandably trying to maintain her privacy: her lawyer told me in a recent interview that she is now working in human resources; she did not respond to a request for comment. But her success as a human being who can change and evolve, learning from her mistakes and growing in wisdom, has nothing to do with the digital file she can never entirely escape. Our character, ultimately, can’t be judged by strangers on the basis of our Facebook or Google profiles; it can be judged by only those who know us and have time to evaluate our strengths and weaknesses, face to face and in context, with insight and understanding. In the meantime, as all of us stumble over the challenges of living in a world without forgetting, we need to learn new forms of empathy, new ways of defining ourselves without reference to what others say about us and new ways of forgiving one another for the digital trails that will follow us forever.

The accident that killed Kathryn Underdown had all the markings of a drunken-driving case. The car that hit her as she rode her bicycle one May evening in Miller Place, N.Y., did not stop, the police said, until it crashed into another vehicle farther down the road.

The driver could not keep her eyes open during an interview with investigators, according to the complaint against her, and her speech was slow and slurred. But the driver told the police that she had not been drinking; instead, the complaint said, she had taken several prescription medications, including a sedative and a muscle relaxant.

She was charged with vehicular manslaughter and driving under the influence of drugs — an increasingly common offense, law enforcement officials say, at a time when drunken-driving deaths are dropping and when prescriptions for narcotic painkillers, anti-anxiety medications, sleep aids and other powerful drugs are rampant.

The issue is vexing police officials because, unlike with alcohol, there is no agreement on what level of drugs in the blood impairs driving.

The behavioral effects of prescription medication vary widely, depending not just on the drug but on the person taking it. Some, like anti-anxiety drugs, can dull alertness and slow reaction time; others, like stimulants, can encourage risk-taking and hurt the ability to judge distances. Mixing prescriptions, or taking them with alcohol or illicit drugs, can exacerbate impairment and sharply increase the risk of crashing, researchers say.

“In the past it was cocaine, it was PCP, it was marijuana,” said Chuck Hayes of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. “Now we’re into this prescription drug era that is giving us a whole new challenge.”

The police also struggle with the challenge of prosecuting someone who was taking valid prescriptions.

“How do we balance between people who legitimately need their prescriptions and protecting the public?” said Mark Neil, senior lawyer at the National Traffic Law Center, which works with prosecutors. “It becomes a very delicate balance.”

Some states have made it illegal to drive with any detectable level of prohibited drugs in the blood. But setting any kind of limit for prescription medications is far more complicated, partly because the complex chemistry of drugs makes their effects more difficult to predict than alcohol’s. And determining whether a driver took drugs soon before getting on the road can be tricky, since some linger in the body for days or weeks.

Many states are confronting the problem as part of a broader effort to keep so-called drugged drivers, including those under the influence of marijuana and other illegal drugs, off the road.

“We have a pretty clear message in this country that you don’t drink and drive,” said R. Gil Kerlikowske, President Obama’s top drug policy adviser, who wants to reduce drugged-driving accidents by 10 percent over the next five years. “We need very much to have a similar message when it comes to drugs.”

There is no reliable data on how many drivers are impaired by prescription drugs, but law enforcement officials say the problem is growing so quickly that states are putting hundreds of police officers through special training to spot signs of drug impairment and clamoring for better technology to detect it.

Even the prevalence of drug-impaired driving is unknown, since many states combine the arrest data with that for drunken driving. Mr. Kerlikowske points to a 2007 survey by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which screened 5,900 nighttime drivers around the country and found that 16.3 percent tested positive for legal or illegal drugs.

The tests could not determine which drivers were impaired by drugs, but Mr. Kerlikowske said the results suggested a problem that had “flown below the radar” for too long.

“You don’t want to scare people,” he said, “but you certainly want to make them aware of the dangerousness. You can be as deadly behind the wheel with prescription drugs as you can with over-the-limit alcohol, and you are responsible for your own actions.”

In interviews, law enforcement officials around the country said anyone who drives while taking prescription drugs is at risk of arrest, not only those who drive recklessly. In one recent case near Bangor, Me., a pickup truck on a rural road was not swerving, speeding or otherwise hinting that its driver was impaired. A police officer stopped the truck because of its noisy muffler, then saw that the driver’s eyes were bloodshot and his speech slurred.

A Breathalyzer test found that the driver, Chester Annance, had not been drinking. Yet he was arrested based on the officer’s suspicion that he was on drugs, and a blood test later found opiate painkillers in his system.

Mr. Annance was convicted this month of driving under the influence of drugs. He received seven days in jail, a three-year license suspension and a fine. He is appealing the conviction.

“You don’t need to wait for a crash to happen before you charge someone,” said R. Christopher Almy, the district attorney in Bangor.

Defense lawyers say that in their zeal to make a statement about drug-impaired driving, the police are casting too wide a net and unfairly punishing people who are taking prescriptions as directed.

Tara Jenswold-Schipper, an assistant attorney general in Wisconsin, said she usually stuck to cases where drivers had mixed drugs, exceeded the proper dose or taken controlled medications without a prescription.

In one such case in that state, a former physician slammed his S.U.V. into a Honda Accord in April 2008, killing the pregnant driver and her 10-year-old daughter. Prosecutors said the physician, Mark Benson, had high levels of the sleep aid Ambien in his system, as well as Xanax, an anti-anxiety drug, and oxycodone, an opiate painkiller. Mr. Benson was sentenced to 30 years in prison.

Defendants can try to prove that they did not realize their medication would affect their driving, prosecutors said, but that argument may not hold up if the bottle had a warning label.

“Would you go home and start a chain saw and cut down a tree?” said Lt. Col. Thomas C. Hejl, the assistant sheriff in Calvert County, Md. “Why should you get behind the wheel of a vehicle when the same medication has the same side effects?”

Unable to prove impairment with blood tests, prosecutors in drugged-driving cases rely heavily on the testimony of “drug recognition experts,” law enforcement officers trained to spot signs of impairment in drivers. But there are only about 7,000 such officers nationwide, Mr. Hayes said, not nearly enough to respond to every traffic stop that may involve drugs.

“When they are involved,” he said of the experts, “our chances of convicting people are much higher.”

But persuading a jury to convict someone of impaired driving due to prescription drugs remains difficult except for the most egregious cases, said Douglas F. Gansler, the attorney general in Maryland.

“Because most people on the jury will also likely be taking prescription drugs for some ailment,” Mr. Gansler said, “whether it’s Lipitor or allergy pills or whatever it might be, they might think, ‘I don’t want that to become criminal.’ ”

York County’s district attorney likes having the option; defense lawyers would like to see the mandatory minimum repealed.

Most of the City of York falls within a drug-free school zone, so an adult convicted of even a first-time offense could face time in state prison.

It’s up to the district attorney whether to invoke mandatory minimum sentences of two to four years for drug offenses that occur within 1,000 feet of school property.

If the district attorney does so, a judge must hand down that sentence — whether or not he or she agrees with it.

The law doesn’t distinguish whether it’s someone selling drugs in a house within the drug-free school zone during the middle of the night, or a drug dealer selling to children near a school.

The Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing is recommending that legislators repeal the drug-free school zone mandatory sentences and let judges to determine the sentence based on already-existing guidelines that would include increased time.

Some, however, say they want to see defendants receive the stiffest penalty possible.

The commission said mandatory sentences are used inconsistently across the state, said Mark Bergstrom, executive director of the commission. Some district attorneys invoke it every time. Others rarely use it, he said.

In addition, there’s no required link between the drug deals and the school zone, Bergstrom said. The zone extends 1,000 feet from the edge of the school property, so it includes people living blocks away.

Another tool in the arsenal

York County District Attorney Tom Kearney said his office determines

whether to invoke the mandatory sentence based on the facts of the case. It’s a tool in his arsenal that he likes to have.
Kearney said he wants to punish anyone who commits a crime, but he’s more interested in using that type of sentencing on dealers than sending an 18-year-old high school student upstate because he got caught up in something.

“I like the flexibility the legislation has provided to me,” he said. “What we want to get are the bad guys.”

However, Kearney said he can understand the concern about the lack of consistency in the use of drug-free school zone mandatory sentences across the state.

If someone commits the same crime both York and Adams counties, but they’re treated differently in each county, Kearney said, he can see some justification in the sentencing commission being concerned about that.

“At the end of the day, I believe it’s a political decision,” Kearney said.

Legislature unlikely to change law

In general, legislators will need to address mandatory minimum sentences for first-time, non-violent offenders because the state prison population keeps going up while crime has been decreasing, state Rep. Eugene DePasquale, D-West Manchester, said.

However, he cautions against lessening any offense in a school zone because it puts children in danger.

State Rep. Seth Grove, R-Dover Township, said the intent of the law is to make sure that drug dealers don’t set up shop, and the 1,000 feet helps to protect the sanctity of that area.

“It’s to protect the kids going to school,” he said.

Dallastown Area School District Supt. Stewart Weinberg said the drug-free school zones help to keep drugs off of school property, and he’s not interested in lessening the penalties.

If someone’s dealing at 2 a.m. out of a house, what’s going to stop that person from doing it when school is in session, he asked.

If the penalties are lessened, “you’re not helping me create a safe environment for students and staff,” Weinberg said.

Grove said he’s not sure the votes are there to change the law.

Defense attorneys would like to see repeal

Two local defense attorneys, however, said the mandatory minimum drug-free school zone sentences can be unfair, and they hope the legislature will repeal it.

“It just takes too much power away from the judge,” defense attorney Richard Robinson said.

Robinson said he represented a student at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster County who was selling marijuana in his dorm room to some friends. The student did not have a prior history.

The district attorney threatened to invoke the mandatory minimum, which would have sent the student to state prison for two years. At the end of the day, the student received probation.

“They have a hammer over your head,” Robinson said.

Defense attorney Christopher Ferro said he agrees that it takes the discretion out of a judge’s hands to judge each defendant on the merits of the facts.

It’s an arbitrary distinction of where the school zone is, and it doesn’t really take into account whether there were minors involved.

“It’s justice by tape measure, which makes no sense,” he said.

One of the most unfair aspects is that the law disproportionately affects defendants in urban areas because of the number of school buildings.

“It’s almost impossible to go anywhere in York City, and you’re not in a drug-free school zone,” he said.

READ THE REPORT

To read the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing’s 2009 annual report, visit http://pcs.la.psu.edu/

The court last week unanimously upheld a police department’s search of an officer’s personal, sometimes sexually explicit, messages on a government-owned pager, saying the search did not violate his constitutional rights.

The common-sense message to all employees: If you want privacy, use your own cell phone, pager or computer.

“They were really clear they were dealing with police officers in that setting,” said Michael Foreman, the director of the Civil Rights Appellate Clinic at Penn State Dickinson School of Law. It might be hard to transfer that ruling to a schoolteacher or someone working at a private business, he said. “But I think the court is signaling in the electronic age, there is less expectation of privacy in general.”

Officials from Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, Highmark Blue Shield and Rite Aid were not available Friday to discuss their policies about monitoring employees’ use of work computers or other technology.

State workers using office technology shouldn’t expect privacy, said a spokesman for the Office of Administration.

“Those devices, your computer, your BlackBerry, other technology issued to you from the commonwealth is our property, and we reserve the right to monitor your use of them to make sure you are not going to sites that are not work-related and engaging in behavior that is not work-appropriate,” spokesman Dan Egan said.

Of course, everyone does a certain amount of personal work.

“You need to tell your spouse to pick up eggs and milk after work?” Egan said. That’s OK as long as it doesn’t conflict with work and is not excessive. “There is a certain amount of personal and work life that is blending from time to time,” he said.

Private businesses aren’t that different. They tell individuals: “When I give you this technology, you have no expectation of privacy,” Foreman said.

At the age of nineteen, way back in 1992, I purchased a beer in a Philadelphia bar.

No, I hear you cry, it cannot be true! I know, readers. You are hurt. You are shocked. You never thought I could be capable of such depravity. Well, frankly, I didn’t either. Little did I suspect when I bundled off to the University of Pennsylvania in the fall of 1990 that I had stumbled into a den of iniquity where underaged drinking sometimes took place.

I cannot excuse it. I allowed myself to be led astray. Yes, one sultry July evening, I allowed myself to be persuaded–by a malefactor or malefactors who shall remain nameless–to enter one Murphy’s Tavern on 45th and Spruce and purchase, to quench my thirst, a Rolling Rock.

Not that! Nay, never that! Believe me, your wailing and gnashing of teeth wounds me as deeply as it wounds you. In my defense, I can only say that I had no idea PBR was going to win the hipster coolness wars.

While consuming my one (1) beer, I was apprehended by agents of the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board. They called my parents, fined me, and made me attend a class on the horrors of underaged drinking (did you realize that drinking can lead to uncontrollable vomiting?) It was during that class, with the errors of my ways now readily apparent, that I made a pledge to myself to quit underaged drinking with all due speed. And on January 29th, 1994, I honored that pledge.

I thought I had put all this behind me. Indeed, I was so informed, when I completed my State of Pennsylvania Mandatory Alcohol Education Class; provided I didn’t reoffend, they said, the record would be expunged. We might consider the matter closed, and never speak of it again. With time, and perhaps a name change and a relocation to a town across the country, I might hope to live down my shame and become a contributing member of society once again.

Alas, they never told the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation that it was over. And thus, it is not over. I went to apply for a District of Columbia driver’s license this morning, only to be informed that I cannot, because the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania wants to suspend my driver’s license.

The problem, you see, is that at the time of my conviction, I did not have a Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Driver’s License. Indeed, I had no driver’s license at all, being one of those benighted city people who get their first driver’s license at the age of 23. The laws of the State of Pennsylvania, however, say that the Department of Transportation is entitled to suspend the driver’s license of anyone arrested for underaged drinking. And the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Department of Transportation is, apparently, determined to exercise this privilege. Thus, the spectacle of a 35 year old woman being informed that she is about to have her driver’s license suspended for underaged drinking.

To add insult to injury, I am expected to fill out a form and, at my own expense, mail it to the DOT in order to commence this suspension.

This would be funny and mildly annoying if it were not for the fact that until they clear the suspension, I cannot get a DC driver’s license, because states are required to scan for violations from other states before they issue a new license. (No word on how I got one out of the State of New York). And until I get a DC driver’s license, I cannot register the car I just bought. The DMV here, after much wrangling, gave me temporary tags, but it looks like I’m going to have to garage the thing for three months unless the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania relents. Which, at this time, they show no evidence of doing.

Now for the painless segue from idiotic bureaucratic snafu to moral: this just goes to show why ironclad bureaucratic rules are such a bad idea. The federal law is meant to protect dangerous drivers whose licenses have been suspended from getting a license in another state–an excellent program. It is not, or so I mote, intended to allow the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to suspend my license for an underaged drinking conviction that took place 16 years ago. Indeed, I don’t think that even the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania law was intended to do something so moronic–it isn’t as if I deliberately (or even accidentally) failed to comply; I simply didn’t have a driver’s license for them to confiscate. Since I didn’t get one until I was well over the legal drinking age, I’m pretty sure that a moment’s consideration would lead any reasonable bureaucrat to dismiss this idiocy.

But of course, we don’t have reasonable bureaucrats. We have rules. Rules that Must Be Followed No Matter What. Neither Pennsylvania nor DC can, apparently, do anything at all to prevent the Wheels of Justice from punishing me for a long-past transgression that did not even involve a motor vehicle.

“Immigration Act of Canada , section: 36 (1) to (3)

Immigration/Exclusion of Visitors, Inadmissibility to Canada for Criminal Conviction

36. (1) A permanent resident or a foreign national is inadmissible on grounds of serious criminality for

(a) having been convicted in Canada of an offence under an Act of Parliament punishable by a maximum term of imprisonment of at least 10 years, or of an offence under an Act of Parliament for which a term of imprisonment of more than six months has been imposed;

(b) having been convicted of an offence outside Canada that, if committed in Canada, would constitute an offence under an Act of Parliament punishable by a maximum term of imprisonment of at least 10 years; or

(c) committing an act outside Canada that is an offence in the place where it was committed and that, if committed in Canada, would constitute an offence under an Act of Parliament punishable by a maximum term of imprisonment of at least 10 years.

(2) A foreign national is inadmissible on grounds of criminality for

(a) having been convicted in Canada of an offence under an Act of Parliament punishable by way of indictment, or of two offences under any Act of Parliament not arising out of a single occurrence;

(b) having been convicted outside Canada of an offence that, if committed in Canada, would constitute an indictable offence under an Act of Parliament, or of two offences not arising out of a single occurrence that, if committed in Canada, would constitute offences under an Act of Parliament;

**(c) committing an act outside Canada that is an offence in the place where it was committed and that, if committed in Canada, would constitute an indictable offence under an Act of Parliament; or**

(d) committing, on entering Canada, an offence under an Act of Parliament prescribed by regulations.”

Note the language in (c) states “committing an act”; and (c) is separate from (b) – “having been convicted of an offence.” Before getting to probation, you likely had an administrative suspension of your driving privileges. An administrative suspension would be enough evidence to believe you probably drove under the influence (a probable cause standard). All that is needed to be indicted under an Act of Parliament is probable cause. Thus, you would be inadmissible.

Even if you were not administratively suspended, you likely had to concede the evidence against you was strong enough to convict you to get on probation.

Further, as Attorney Scott Wonder has advised in the past, look to the pamphlet on admission into Canada:

“In general, temporary residents and applicants applying for permanent residence are considered to be
criminally inadmissible if the person:

• was convicted of an offence in Canada;
• was convicted of an offence outside of Canada that is considered a crime
in Canada; and/or
• committed an act outside of Canada that is considered a crime under the laws of the
country where it occurred and would be punishable under Canadian law.

Note: In order to determine inadmissibility, foreign convictions and laws are equated to
Canadian law as if they had occurred in Canada.”

Even if not convicted, under the “committed an act” language, you are criminally inadmissible.