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.

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 crew of the Victoria Clipper, the ferry that makes round trips between Seattle and that city on Vancouver Island, frequently sees the effects of Canada’s strict driving-under-the-influence laws.

During the May-to-September peak tourist season, four to five passengers a week are turned back by Canadian border agents at the Victoria dock.

In Washington state, driving under the influence is a gross misdemeanor. It’s a felony in the Great White North. Under its laws, Canada can bar visitors if they’ve been involved in criminal activity. And it does.
Since 9/11, both the U.S. and Canada have used ever-expanding criminal databases that they share with each other.
“I didn’t realize that there were that many drunks in the U.S.,” says Darrell Bryan, president and CEO of Clipper Navigation, speaking only half-jokingly about the number of tourists being turned back.
“We have witnessed firsthand people who haven’t told their partner that at some point in their life they had a DUI. The first the wife learned about it was when the husband was denied entry.”
Bryan says he’s complained to Canadian tourism officials, telling them this is lost business, penalizing people for long-ago mistakes.
Tourism spokesmen from Victoria, Vancouver and the Province of British Columbia say they are aware of American tourists being turned back for a DUI, but it’s not been a major issue of discussion.
Perhaps it will be more so in February, when Vancouver hosts the 2010 Winter Olympic Games, and 350,000 visitors from around the world are expected.
Bryan wonders whether the strict enforcement is worth it.
“You’re not the same person you were 10 years ago or 20 years ago,” he says.
Those long-ago mistakes can include shoplifting and misdemeanor drug possession.
But it’s not as if people with DUIs are rushing to publicize that fact and lobby to change Canadian regulations.
Some of those turned back likely wouldn’t generate the greatest sympathy.
Construction worker Donald Frederickson, 29, of Lynnwood, took the Victoria Clipper in late February with his fiancee. They were celebrating their engagement.
Frederickson says he’s been straight and sober for five years but had three DUIs in the early 2000s while living in Detroit. He’s currently not driving, he says.
The Victoria Clipper has five warning signs at various places at its Seattle waterfront location, telling passengers that those with a DUI can be denied entrance in Canada.
Frederickson says he never saw the warning signs. Canadian officials told him to get back on the Victoria Clipper returning to Seattle that afternoon, although he was allowed to walk around the city in the meantime.
He had budgeted $500 for the vacation. Frederickson says he lost two nights’ hotel lodging.
“I’m not happy with the way it turned out, but I understand where their policy comes from. From what I got to see of Victoria in a couple of hours, it was nice,” he says.
An Auburn couple in their 50s, also turned back at the Victoria dock, say they were embarrassed by the husband’s DUI from 9-1/2 years ago.
She’s in the real-estate business, deals with the public and does not want the family name made public.
She says her husband got the DUI after drinking with a bunch of buddies after work.
“We own homes, we pay our bills,” she says. “You don’t think about it because it was so long ago.”
She says they probably won’t try to go through the complex paperwork to have her husband deemed admissible to Canada.
“Why take the chance of being turned back again?” she says. “We can just go see more of Washington.”
Getting right with Canada
There are three ways to get admitted into Canada once you’ve been convicted of a DUI. But you have to be prepared for lots of hassles, paperwork, fees and months of waiting for the Canadian bureaucracy to process your application.
1. If the completion of your DUI sentence is less than 5 years old, the only way to get into Canada is with a temporary resident permit, which costs $200 Canadian. (Having had your DUI knocked down from a gross misdemeanor to negligent or reckless driving can still prevent you from going to Canada.)
You’ll need to show the reason for your visit is “urgent,” said Peter Lilius, immigration program manager for the Canadian Consulate in Seattle.
A ski trip to Whistler is not deemed urgent. Think more along the lines of having an ill relative in Canada or an important business meeting you need to attend.
Even then, being admitted is not guaranteed.
The officers at the port of entry, said Lilius, “have the discretion.”
Before driving to the border, you can click on the Seattle Canadian Consulate Web site at www.canadainternational.gc.ca/seattle.
You can download an application for a temporary visit and either mail it in or bring it in person.
“Processing times may be lengthy,” says the consulate.
The Web site also contains frequently asked questions about visiting that country.
2. If you completed your DUI sentence more than five years ago, you can apply for Approval of Rehabilitation. The nonrefundable fee is either $200 or $1,000 (Canadian), depending on the seriousness of your crime.
The Canadians want proof “that you have a stable lifestyle and that it is unlikely that you will be involved in any further criminal activity.”
It involves considerable paperwork. You will need to provide your FBI file. You will need to provide a “police certificate” of criminal history, if any, from every state in which you lived more than six months since age 18. You will need to explain each offense. You will have to provide dates and all your home addresses and places of employment since age 18.
Processing time can take a year or more.
But, if you’re approved, then you’ll no longer have problems at the border because of your past.
3. If you have had only one DUI, and sentencing was completed more than 10 years ago, you can drive to the border with basically the paperwork for the Approval of Rehabilitation.
A border officer can approve you on the spot, at no charge, and that past DUI will no longer be a problem when crossing the border.
Again, it’s at the officer’s discretion.
There also are law firms that specialize in helping you through the process.
David Andersson, a Canadian citizen who can practice law both in the U.S. and Canada, works with the law firm of Chang & Boos, which has offices in Bellingham.
Expect to pay $3,000 to $5,000 for them to handle the paperwork, which includes having someone from the firm accompany you to meet with Canadian border officials. Expect it to take three to six weeks from the start of paperwork to meeting with border officials.
Andersson says his firm handles only 10 to 15 such cases a year, a tenth of what it could do.
“I call it my drunk American practice,” he says.

SENATE AMENDED
PRIOR PRINTER’S NOS. 283, 1688, 2386,
2415 PRINTER’S NO. 3801
THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF PENNSYLVANIA
HOUSE BILL
No. 264 Session of
2009
INTRODUCED BY SOLOBAY, BROWN, CALTAGIRONE, CARROLL, COHEN,
CREIGHTON, DERMODY, GEORGE, GIBBONS, GOODMAN, HALUSKA,
KILLION, KORTZ, KOTIK, KULA, MAHONEY, MELIO, MUNDY,
M. O’BRIEN, SIPTROTH, THOMAS, WALKO, WANSACZ, WHITE AND
GEIST, FEBRUARY 5, 2009
SENATOR GREENLEAF, JUDICIARY, IN SENATE, AS AMENDED, MAY 25,
2010
AN ACT
Amending Titles 18 (Crimes and Offenses) and 42 (Judiciary and
Judicial Procedure) of the Pennsylvania Consolidated
Statutes, further providing for expungement of criminal
history record and for juvenile records; and providing for
expungement fee; AND MAKING AN EDITORIAL CHANGE.
The General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
hereby enacts as follows:
Section 1. Sections 9122(a)(3), (b) and (f) of Title 18 of
the Pennsylvania Consolidated Statutes, amended November 26,
2008 (P.L.1670, No.134), are amended to read:
SECTION 1. SECTIONS 9105 AND 9122(A)(3), (B) AND (F) OF
TITLE 18 OF THE PENNSYLVANIA CONSOLIDATED STATUTES ARE AMENDED
TO READ:
§ 9105. OTHER CRIMINAL JUSTICE INFORMATION.
NOTHING IN THIS CHAPTER SHALL BE CONSTRUED TO APPLY TO
INFORMATION CONCERNING JUVENILES, EXCEPT AS PROVIDED IN SECTION
9123 (RELATING TO JUVENILE DELINQUENCY AND SUMMARY RECORDS),
UNLESS THEY HAVE BEEN ADJUDICATED AS ADULTS, NOR SHALL IT APPLY
TO INTELLIGENCE INFORMATION, INVESTIGATIVE INFORMATION,
TREATMENT INFORMATION, INCLUDING MEDICAL AND PSYCHIATRIC
INFORMATION, CAUTION INDICATOR INFORMATION, MODUS OPERANDI
INFORMATION, WANTED PERSONS INFORMATION, STOLEN PROPERTY
INFORMATION, MISSING PERSONS INFORMATION, EMPLOYMENT HISTORY
INFORMATION, PERSONAL HISTORY INFORMATION, NOR PRESENTENCE
INVESTIGATION INFORMATION. CRIMINAL HISTORY RECORD INFORMATION
MAINTAINED AS A PART OF THESE RECORDS SHALL NOT BE DISSEMINATED
UNLESS IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE PROVISIONS OF THIS CHAPTER.
§ 9122. Expungement.
(a) Specific proceedings.–Criminal history record
information shall be expunged in a specific criminal proceeding
when:
* * *
(3) a person 21 years of age or older who has been
convicted of a violation of section 6308 (relating to
purchase, consumption, possession or transportation of liquor
or malt or brewed beverages) which occurred on or after the
day the person attained 18 years of age petitions the court
of common pleas in the county where the conviction occurred
seeking expungement and the person has satisfied all terms
and conditions of the sentence imposed for the violation,
including any suspension of operating privileges imposed
pursuant to section 6310.4 (relating to restriction of
operating privileges). Upon review of the petition, the court
shall order the expungement of all criminal history record
information and all administrative records of the Department
of Transportation relating to said conviction.
(b) Generally.–Criminal history record information may be
expunged when:
(1) An individual who is the subject of the information
reaches 70 years of age and has been free of arrest or
prosecution for ten years following final release from
confinement or supervision.
(2) An individual who is the subject of the information
has been dead for three years.
(3) (i) An individual who is the subject of the
information, petitions the court for the expungement of a
summary offense and has been free of arrest or
prosecution for five years following the conviction for
that offense.
(ii) Expungement under this paragraph shall only be
permitted for a conviction of a summary offense.
(4) (i) An individual who is the subject of the
information petitions the court for expungement of a
misdemeanor of the third degree an d has been free o f
arrest or prosecutio n for seven year s following fina l
release from confinement or supervision fo r seven years .
SUPERVISION.
(ii) This paragraph shall not apply to any
individual who has been convicted of:
(A) An offense punishable by imprisonment of
more than one yea r .
(B) Four or more offenses punishable by
imprisonment of one or more years.
(C) A violation of section 2701 (relating to
simple assault).
(D ) A violation of section 3126 (relating t o
indecent assault).
(E ) A violation of section 3129 (relating t o
sexual intercourse with animal).
(F ) A violation of section 5511 (relating t o
cruelty to animals).
(G ) A violation of any provision of Chapter 6 1
(relating to firearms and other dangerous articles).
(H ) Any offense where an individual is require d
to register pursuant to 42 Pa.C.S. § 9795.1 (relating
to registration).
(I ) A violation of 75 Pa.C.S. Ch. 38 (relatin g
to driving after imbibing alcohol or utilizing
drugs).
(J ) A violation of Pt. II, Art. B (relating t o
offenses involving danger to the person) if the
victim was a law enforcement officer engaged in the
performance of duty and the perpetrator knew the
victim was a law enforcement officer at the time of
the offense.
(5) Expungement under this section shall be at the
discretion of the court. In considering whether to grant the
petition for expungement, the court shall consider all
relevant factors, including all of the following:
(i) The nature of the offense.
(ii) The nature and disposition of any related
charges.
(iii) The impact of the offense upon any victims of
the offense.
(iv) Any reasons the Commonwealth may give for
wishing to retain the records.
(v) The petitioner’s age, criminal record and
employment history.
(vi) The length of time that has elapsed between the
arrest and the petition to expunge.
(vii) The specific adverse consequences the
petitioner may endure should expunction be denied.
* * *
(f) District attorney’s notice.–The court shall give [ten
days] 30 days’ prior notice to the district attorney of the
county where the original charge was filed of any applications
for expungement under the provisions of subsection (a)(2) or
(b).
Section 2. Section 9123(a) of Title 18 is amended to read:
§ 9123. Juvenile DELINQUENCY AND SUMMARY records.
(a) Expungement of juvenile DELINQUENCY AND SUMMARY
records.–Notwithstanding the provisions of section 9105
(relating to other criminal justice information) and except upon
cause shown, expungement of records of juvenile delinquency
cases and cases involving summary offenses committed while the
individual was under 18 years of age, wherever kept or retained,
shall occur after 30 days’ notice to the district attorney,
whenever the court upon its motion or upon the motion of a child
or the parents or guardian finds:
(1) a complaint is filed which is not substantiated or
the petition which is filed as a result of a complaint is
dismissed by the court;
(2) six months have elapsed since the final discharge of
the person from supervision under a consent decree and no
proceeding seeking adjudication or conviction is pending;
(2.1) the individual is 18 years of age or older and has
been convicted of a violation of section 6308 (relating to
purchase, consumption, possession or transportation of liquor
or malt or brewed beverages) which occurred while the
individual was under 18 years of age and the individual has
satisfied all terms and conditions of the sentence imposed
for the violation, including any suspension of operating
privileges imposed pursuant to section 6310.4 (relating to
restriction of operating privileges). Expungement shall
include all criminal history record information and all
administrative records of the Department of Transportation
relating to the conviction;
(2.2) the individual is 18 years of age or older and the
individual has satisfied all terms and conditions of the
sentence imposed following a conviction for a summary
offense, with the exception of a violation of section 6308,
committed while the individual was under 18 years of age and
the individual has not been convicted of a felony,
misdemeanor or adjudicated delinquent and no proceeding is
pending seeking such conviction or adjudication;
(3) five years have elapsed since the final discharge of
the person from commitment, placement, probation or any other
disposition and referral and since such final discharge, the
person has not been convicted of a felony, misdemeanor or
adjudicated delinquent and no proceeding is pending seeking
such conviction or adjudication; or
(4) the individual is [18] 17 years of age or older, the
attorney for the Commonwealth consents to the expungement and
a court orders the expungement after giving consideration to
the following factors:
(i) the type of offense;
(ii) the individual’s age, history of employment,
criminal activity and drug or alcohol problems;
(iii) adverse consequences that the individual may
suffer if the records are not expunged; and
(iv) whether retention of the record is required for
purposes of protection of the public safety.
* * *
Section 3. Title 42 is amended by adding a section to read:
§ 1725.7. Expungement fee.
In addition to any other fee authorized by law, a person who
is filing a petition for expungement under 18 Pa.C.S. § 9122
(relating to expungement), shall pay a fee of $100 to the clerk
of courts at the time the petition for expungement is filed. The
clerk of courts shall ensure that $50 of the expungement fee
shall be directed to the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania
Courts and that $50 of the fee shall be directed to the
Pennsylvania State Police.
Section 4. This act shall take effect in 60 days.

STATE COLLEGE — The night that freshman Joseph Dado was found dead at the bottom of a campus stairwell, Penn State’s vice president for student affairs, Damon Sims, says he made a conscious decision not to have a knee-jerk reaction.

It was only four weeks into the fall semester, but already Penn State had been named the nation’s No. 1 party school by the Princeton Review. About a dozen alcohol-related sexual assaults had been reported both on campus and in downtown State College. A 19-year-old from Bellefonte who’d been drinking had nearly died in August after somersaulting more than 30 feet from an apartment balcony. And now a student was dead, having fallen while trying to make his way to his dorm room after a party.

Alcohol, it seemed, would be a much-talked about issue this year.

“What I did not want to do is what I’ve seen done countless times, year after year after year, where institutions decry the problem, make broad pronouncements about how they will not tolerate X, Y and Z, and then continue to sort of function in the same way, and nothing really changes,” Sims said during an interview with the Centre Daily Times.

“We needed to actually try to think about how we would change the outcome, and understand that this was never going to be, in my mind, a problem that was solved overnight. It’s a very slow process, and you have to be committed to it for a long time.”

Sims and State College Borough Manager Tom Fountaine sat down with CDT reporters at the end of the spring semester to talk about what town and gown are doing in hopes of making lasting changes in the drinking culture.

Starting in the fall, the university will unveil a more intense counseling program for students who end up being treated in the emergency room for alcohol overdoses. It will send letters of concern to parents of incoming students, and is considering, at the gates of Beaver Stadium, requiring that students previously ejected for drunken behavior take Breathalyzer tests. Community members are planning events to bring town and gown together, and the borough is looking at making public restrooms available.

Sims said he doesn’t think excessive drinking is worse at Penn State than elsewhere. But it’s noticed here, he said, because we talk about it.

There was a fair amount to talk about this past year. State Patty’s Day, for example, set a record for arrests. The student-created celebration also spawned other, more modest student drinking days. A hazing incident at a Penn State fraternity sent some students to the hospital with alcohol poisoning. And before the semester ended, a drunken student was badly injured when he stepped in front of a police cruiser during Blue- White weekend.

Administrators haven’t publicly said how they plan to tackle the problem — until now.

“Now we’re at a point where I think at least virtually everybody who needs to agrees we have a serious issue here that we need to behave differently toward,” Sims said. “I think there’s more of a willingness to do that, and probably less likelihood that people will push back against what we think are going to be very well-intentioned, thoughtful, evidence- based in many instances, initiatives designed to mitigate the problem and yet balance the many interests involved.”

Losing patience

When 21-year-old student Kevin Ignatuk stepped into the path of a police cruiser in April, with a blood-alcohol level of .322 percent, it was the third time his drinking had gotten him into trouble.

It’s time, Sims says, to be less patient.

“We don’t feel now we’re always getting their attention the way that we should,” he said. So students who have multiple alcohol-related offenses may face stiffer consequences.

For example, one consequence already in place at some peer institutions: A student who is removed from a football game for drunken behavior has to pass a Breathalyzer before going into the next game.

Counseling to help students recognize a growing problem also will be a major focus this fall, Sims said.

Right now, the alcohol intervention program for students who are treated for overdoses in Mount Nittany Medical Center’s emergency room draws about 400 to 500 students a year. Sims said students aren’t required to participate, and it hasn’t been as effective as the university would like.

So, this fall the university is moving to BASICS — Brief Alcohol Screening and Intervention for College Students — a model recognized by the National Institutes of Health. Students whose drinking gets them into trouble will be given the choice of facing the university’s judicial system or paying $200 for BASICS.

The university is hiring four counselors who will talk with the students to determine the extent of their problems and possibly refer them for additional treatment.

About 2,000 students a year could go through the program. Students who complete it will get a clean university record — but only the first time.

“I’m convinced these professionally trained counselors will really know how to do that work, and will make an impact on students’ attitudes and behaviors,” Sims said.

As a Penn State parent who has been on the receiving end of the dreaded late night phone call, J. Stidd feels the judicial process needs to have some teeth.

“If you can hold academic enrollments over their heads, loss of financial investments, tuition payments negated without completion of terms, that’s the kind of thing that’s going to get somebody’s attention,” he said. “You don’t bend over backwards the second or third time.”

Stidd’s son, Aaron, was 20 when he was struck by a drunken driver speeding through the crosswalk at Atherton Street and Beaver Avenue. Aaron Stidd will probably never recover from his debilitating brain injuries.

For years before the crash, J. Stidd worked in the state prisons, determining how severely inmates should be reprimanded for offenses committed behind bars. So he talks matter-offactly about punishment.

But when Stidd talks about prevention, his rough-around- the-edges persona fades quickly.

“If there’s something that (my wife) and I could do to assist or to prevent this from happening to another family,” he said. “If we can say or do anything … I would say or do anything. But the reality is that it’s still going to happen. You have to curb it, minimize it. That’s what your goal should be.”

Policies and prevention

The high-rise housing in Beaver Canyon and mix of fraternities and residences in the Highlands neighborhood couldn’t be a worse recipe for town-gown tensions, Sims said.

But when those apartments and fraternities were built, there were far fewer students attending Penn State.

In 1970, 26,174 students were enrolled at University Park. By 1990, that number was 38,779. In 2009, enrollment hit 44,832. The sheer number of students has added a new dimension to what many insist is an ages-old problem.

Fountaine and State College Borough Council members praised the efforts of student organizations and community members, launched in the wake of Dado’s death, to tackle the problem of excessive drinking.

But they say they were disappointed when the Interfraternity Council, about six months after it banned drinking at Wednesday night pledge events, loosened those restrictions as a reward to some fraternities for good behavior.

“We know students who went through the semester said it worked,” said Councilwoman Theresa Lafer. “We know we cannot change the whole country’s drinking habits, but we can change expectations for kids who come here.”

Lafer said she thinks efforts such as LateNight Penn State — which offers alcohol-free events — must continue. So should another student idea: having student auxiliary teams walking through neighborhoods on weekend nights.

“I think we are going to have to look and see if there are any other ways of enforcing the laws that are already on the books,” Lafer said. “We can’t afford more police and we’re already spending half our budget to protect people.”

State College Police Chief Tom King said he plans to spend the summer looking at programs that would focus on issues in the Highlands and Holmes-Foster areas.

“I would like to find a way, though difficult with staffing levels, to have a neighborhood patrol team that can focus on alcohol, noise, vandalism issues,” he said. “But I’m struggling with the fact that I’m down three officers at this point, and it just takes staff to get that done.”

Using student auxiliary officers could be one solution.

Police say they’ll also continue a successful program in which they contact hosts prior to large parties to remind them of their responsibilities and obligations.

“It’s been proven that you need to mix in preventative things to really make the biggest impact with alcohol-related problems,” King said.

Council President Ron Filippelli said he was disappointed the borough didn’t pass an ordinance that would have allowed, under certain circumstances, party hosts to be fined up to $600 when their guests break the law.

“I think with all the attention being paid to the alcohol problem over the last year very little came out of it in terms of public policy,” Filippelli said. “I’d like to see other ideas come forward for controlling alcohol and large parties.”

One change Filippelli and others would welcome is legislation that would allow municipalities to increase fines for certain offenses. The $300 to $400 fine for summary offenses hasn’t increased in 40 years.

Sen. Jake Corman, R-Benner Township, has been meeting with local leaders about taking that idea to the legislature. He says he’s not sure, right now, if it’s the best plan, but hopes to have a proposal by the end of the summer.

The Centre County Public Issues Forum talked about dealing with dangerous and underage drinking at a community forum in March. Cochairwoman Lou Ann Evans said participants liked the idea of having more events that would attract a mix of community members and students.

A task force is working those ideas.

“One of the ideas that people seem to really support was having an event like a block party when students come to town in the fall — welcoming them and getting to know them so that kids know their neighbors and neighbors know the kids,” Evans said. “What we heard from the students and the community was that if there is a relationship between people, it changes how you treat one another. So you’re less likely to throw beer bottles on Mrs. Smith’s lawn if you know Mrs. Smith.”

Taking on tailgates

Other changes in the works include making all Penn State dorms alcohol-free by 2011-12, sending letters to parents of incoming first-year students and finding ways of dealing with problem tailgating lots.

Fountaine said the borough plans to put portable bathrooms in town before the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts and will decide whether they should be permanent. Restrooms in the borough parking garages will now be kept open 24 hours a day.

Tailgating, Sims said, generally isn’t a problem. But there are a few lots “which have become outrageously bad places.”

“We are intent on doing something different about that,” he said.

The annual Penn State Pulse survey of students’ drinking behavior found these percentages of high-risk drinkers*:

54%

men

55%

white

52%

women

38%

nonwhite

61% 40%

off campus on campus

59% 47%

age 21+ < 21

55%

47%

GPA <3.0 GPA 3.6-4.0

60% 53%

GPA 3.0-3.29 GPA 3.3-3.59

*High-risk drinking is defined as having four or more drinks in a two-hour period for women and five or more drinks in a two-hour period for men at least once during the previous two weeks.

Student Affairs, the police, University Athletics and others will be involved. Options could include turning the problem lots into alcohol-free zones.

The Penn State Alumni Association is also getting involved. Executive Director Roger Williams said association President Barry Simpson is appointing an ad hoc committee that will focus on supporting town-gown activities that mitigate the culture of excessive drinking.

The committee will help design messages aimed at alumni, but, Williams said, they don’t want to “chide” association members.

“Our members are among the most loyal, supportive and certainly best behaved of Penn State alumni,” Williams said.

“As far as I can see they are not the problem, but they can be part of the solution.”

From its beginning State College has been a college town welcoming students and embracing their traditions. That is why our fraternity district was built within a neighborhood where professors and their families lived, frequently with student tenants. Our downtown grew naturally across the street from Penn State.

Over time the increase of students outpaced the population of the town and now students outnumber permanent residents. This makes the once easy connection with students more difficult, sometimes impossible. Still, just about everybody who lives here has a proud connection to Penn State.

Student life commonly includes drinking. In the past few years, however, dangerous drinking has accelerated. Issues related to alcohol abuse threaten the high standard of living neighborhoods have traditionally enjoyed.

When town and gown are in sync, life is very good in Happy Valley. When town and gown are at odds, not so much.

The growing trend among students is to drink more hard liquor in dorm rooms and apartments before going to a party, and to get drunker. Too many drink with the intent of getting drunk. Blood-alcohol levels are at all-time, life-threatening highs and trips to Mount Nittany Medical Center are on the increase. Plus Facebook, cell phones and Twitter have exponentially expanded the possibility of adding strangers into the mix. All these indicators are pointing in the wrong direction.

The welcoming, small town community of State College, the opportunities at Penn State and outstanding work of many students are being overshadowed by the unacceptable behavior of a few thousand people. What a tragedy that Penn State and State College are becoming known in the media for binge drinking.

The happiest students I see are fully engaged in exploring their talents — journalism students calling me at midnight, engineering students working on a project, EcoAction members engaging all of us to celebrate Earth Day, demanding environmental change, etc. Students are an important part of our town and contribute their energy in many ways — as volunteers and athletes and through cultural and academic achievement.

Not surprisingly, students and nonstudents tend to live in different worlds. I recently was told that students love State College because it is perceived as a “safe bubble” where they don’t have to be afraid to walk home unaccompanied at 2 or 3 a.m. Ironically and tragically, it is about this time of day that others fear the most, because this is when vandalism, property damage, assaults and home invasions are on the rise.

These trends are unhealthy for the drinker, the neighborhoods and our town. Students in the process of becoming adults need to learn responsible drinking habits.

The mindless destructiveness of drinking has no place in our town. We are better than that. The destructive and dangerous behavior of insanely drunk people is destroying the fabric of our neighborhoods and sense of community.

The issue will take a long time to correct. Three interwoven issues must be addressed.

1. To keep State College a good place to live, everyone must feel this is their town, too.

Part of being an adult and a resident of State College is the responsibility to be respectful of fellow residents.

To have a happy life here, students must feel a personal connection to our town. Some students, especially freshmen, find university life overwhelming and are unable to cope. Getting drunk may seem like a solution. Other, better alternatives could emerge if students living in the borough felt they belonged here, were welcomed by members of our community and were treated with respect.

Look around our town and you will see the common foundation of our connection to this place and to each other. Many residents of State College either work at Penn State, are retired from Penn State or were students who stayed and now work for Penn State.

The majority of borough residents are students. At move-in time, residents of downtown neighborhoods can join the existing LION (Living in One Neighborhood) Walk initiated three years ago, or start their own welcome program.

Lion Walk has teams comprising a Penn State administrator (including Graham Spanier), a borough official, a police officer and a student, to personally welcome students at their doorstep. A neighborhood LION Walk could easily take this to the next, more personal level.

At our annual block parties, neighborhoods should feel encouraged and comfortable to invite their student neighbors, too.

Students need to be made aware of their rights and responsibilities. We want students to feel welcome and part of our town. Their ideas, energy and studies at Penn State are a big part of what makes State College a great college town.

2. There must be increased consequences for causing problems

There are consequences to all human activity; that is how we learn. Without appropriate consequences for destructive behavior there will be no change in the destructive behaviors that are afflicting our town.

Holding people accountable for their actions is part of the answer. Borough Council is now considering a series of ordinances to increase police focus on the people and properties that are repeat offenders. Another recommendation, not yet on the agenda, would require large party registration that also educates the host about how to hold a large party without causing harm to others.

State College is joining with other municipalities to lobby for a dramatic increase in fines for summary offenses (public drunkenness, etc.) These fines, set by the Pennsylvania General Assembly, have been unchanged for 30 years. Research shows increasing the consequences for illegal actions does change behavior.

The borough will continue to lobby for an alcohol tax to offset the enormous cost of enforcement (60 percent of all police offenses are alcohol related). Beer sales from package stores are limited to two six-packs per individual purchase, but the same person can purchase 50 quarts of Captain Morgan at the liquor store. Hard liquor sales could be limited, too.

Penn State has a special role to play, since it is the reason students are here and is the institution they look to for direction. Police cooperation between town and gown is excellent; citations for off-campus behavior are sent daily to campus Judicial Affairs for review.

In the eyes of most students, on-campus consequences for off-campus behavior is of greater concern than being arrested. Penn State could send a very strong message of deterrence by articulating and enforcing prescribed consequences for specific violations, in addition to its active role of intervention and education.

Penn State is also considering a proposal to make freshman dormitories substance free in fall 2010. Such a policy is a good first step in sending the message that alcohol is unnecessary for a complete college experience.

Students play an essential role in reducing alcohol-related crime. Breaking into someone’s home, destroying someone else’s property is not cool; it is disgusting. We must do whatever it takes to get this message across.

One way is to have student leaders participate in peer-to-peer panels and work in conjunction with local magistrates in alcohol-related cases, recommending appropriate community service. In some cases, the peer panel could meet with both the offender and the victim, providing feedback and recommendations to the court

3. Mitigating the environment that leads to binge drinking

Although a minority of students is responsible for creating the disgraceful acts causing such turmoil, we are all responsible for solving this problem

Let’s face it, nothing will change significantly until the students are on board, and we have a way to go. In March, student leaders spoke out asking for moderation and restraint. Meanwhile, while social-networking sites invited people to attend and news stories about State Patty’s Day went global. The result was a resounding failure for our town.

A broad spectrum of student leaders, elected officials, administrators and residents are actively engaged in discussions. The Penn State and State College communities are talking openly and honestly about the serious problems that result from dangerous drinking. The dialogue needs to continue and become another town-gown tradition.

People are complex. We are each capable of being very sensitive and totally insensitive. We can all learn from our actions. That is the critical issue we have to bank on. And there are signs of change: the Interfraternity Council voted for a dry Rush Week in January.

Surprising to some, the result was better than ever: more pledges than expected. The students who pledged said getting to know the fraternity members made them interested in joining. What’s next? Students can do a better job of looking out for each other — not allowing friends to drink so much that they get into trouble. This is true friendship.

Today’s students are unique. This age group — 19 to 29 — are known as “millennials.” Unlike their parents, the baby boomers, millennials have grown up in an increasingly affluent time. They are savvy consumers, barraged by advertisements offering electronics, clothes and alcohol that bring the promise of bring status and popularity.

Our neighborhoods are the mortar that holds our town together, providing the caring protection of people who look out for everyone. State College neighborhoods have a lot to share with their student neighbors, and vice versa, once we reconnect.

Alcohol-related offenses affect everyone. Similar problems of dangerous drinking on campus have increased nationwide, and Penn State is no exception. This makes our leadership on the issue even more important, more urgent. Although we must all work a bit harder to recapture the spirit of State College, it is worth it.

As mayor, I consider this is a top priority for our town.

Elizabeth Goreham, former president of State College Borough Council, took office as mayor in January.

Read more: http://www.centredaily.com/2010/04/19/1921250/in-taking-leadership-stand-we.html#ixzz0lZxC0V9X

Kruger, who was not on the Collegian staff at the time of the riot, was charged in 2008 with two counts of felony riot, failure to disperse, disorderly conduct and criminal mischief, according to court documents.

But in September 2009 both felony counts and the count of misdemeanor failure to disperse were dismissed, according to court documents.

Kruger’s attorney Andrew Shubin did not comment on the terms of Kruger’s entrance into the ARD program, but he said this leaves Kruger with no criminal history in connection to the riot.