There has been recent news coverage of the conflict between Russia-backed South Ossetia and the government of Georgia. No, the estate of Ray Charles is not involved with the Kremlin. We’re talking the Black Sea here, people.

As if getting your city shelled with mortars and being under sniper fire were not bad enough, in the 21st century Information Age there is also a digital front to the fighting. Wired reports on the digital assault taking place:

The websites of Georgia’s government have been under denial-of-service attacks for weeks, with Russian hackers fingered as the culprits. Those online assaults have only intensified in recent days, as a shooting war between the two countries has broken out.

Galrahn at Information Dissimenation says that “Russia appears to have targeted the .ge domain for specific government websites, and are pounding the Georgian military networks, but other websites in Georgia in org, net, and other domains are still up, sporadically.” The Washington Post adds that “the Caucasus Network Tbilisi — key Georgian commercial Internet servers — remain under sustained attack from thousands of compromised PCs aimed at flooding the sites with so much junk Web traffic that they can no longer accommodate legitimate visitors.”

IntelFusion calls it a “full scale cyberwar being conducted by Russia against Georgia.” As always, however, its extremely difficult to sort out which hacks are being done with government involvement, which are being done with government wink-and-a-nod, and which have nothing to do with the government whatsoever.

Looks like warfare just went digital.

One of Google’s more popular slogans is “Don’t be evil.” A new one may turn out to be “Complete privacy does not exist.” Reputation.com Blog recently ran into this interesting story about digital privacy and Google Street View.

Pennsylvania residents Aaron and Christine Boring filed an invasion of privacy lawsuit against Google earlier this year because images of their home were published on the popular engine’s “Street View” mapping feature. Google has moved to dismiss, arguing that the couple:

live in a residential community in the twenty-first-century United States, where every step upon private property is not deemed by law to be an actionable trespass.

Google’s legal eagles go on to assert that

Today’s satellite-image technology means that even in today’s desert, complete privacy does not exist. In any event, Plaintiffs live far from the desert and are far from hermits.

The photos, such as they are, do not reveal much of the Boring home (no pun intended), and appear to be from the couple’s driveway, which is allegedly a private road in its own right. Google’s motion notes that the company intends to prove that there was no sign designating the road as private. True to their first motto, Google has removed its “Street View” photos of the Boring residence after the couple filed its lawsuit.

There has been quite a bit of buzz in the Internet recently surrounding the actions a rookie New York City cop took during a Critical Mass ride through Times Square. A bystander caught the officer on tape body checking a bicyclist to the ground.

The Smoking Gun got in on the action and promptly posted the official report the officer submitted about the incident, much of which is in direct contradiction to the events caught on camera.

Judging from the sources, the outrage from many people stems from the fact that the attack on the bicyclist seems unprovoked and overly violent. People expect the NYPD to be more courteous, or at least not tackle cyclists in the street, it seems.The officer has been stripped of his badge and gun pending review, and is reportedly on desk duty for the foreseeable future. This all sounds fairly standard for a police force with proper internal controls. Now we wait for the hearing and justice to prevail, yes?Not on the Internet, they don’t. If there is one thing to take away from this incident, it is that the mob justice of the Internet is swift and brutal. There are websites now that are providing more information than the bicycle tackling cop would probably ever have wanted to find about himself online.

We won’t link to those sites, but a cursory overview of some of them reveals:

The Officer’s Badge Number
The Officer’s Age
The Officer’s Full Name
The Officer’s Family Information (father and mother’s names, careers)
Where the Officer Attended High School (and class year)
The Officer’s Home Address (with both street and map views)
The Officer’s Phone Number
The Officer’s Facebook Profile
The Officer’s Past Legal Issues

If you have any private information on the Internet you must understand that this can become (and already is, to some extent) public information. Anyone with relatively basic computer skills can dig up and repost information. They can even make stuff up, if they like, and they have a platform from which to disseminate their views. In this instance a police officer upset some people and his actions were caught on tape (we won’t wade into the arguments for/against justification, that’s not our job). Now he has very quickly learned how online information can be wielded to attain what the internet perceives as justice.

The dean of an Indianapolis, Indiana high school, Roncalli High, and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese, have subpoenaed Palo Alto based social network giant Facebook for information regarding the identity of a person who setup a false profile on the site.

Someone posing as the dean for the interparochial archdiocesan Catholic high school (the term interparochial referring to the fact that the school receives financial and pastoral support from the parishes that comprise the South Deanery of the Indianapolis Archdiocese), began contacting Roncalli students with inappropriate messages, according to an attorney for the Archdiocese of Indianapolis.

Although Facebook removed the fake profile from its site after Roncalli officials contacted them about it last month, the lawsuit — which alleges harassment and identity deception against the anonymous troublemaker — was filed Thursday because Facebook’s privacy policy requires a court order or subpoena before it will release any identifying information about a user.

According to the Indianapolis Star, the Archdiocese doesn’t know whether a Roncalli student created the “fauxfile.” Although Facebook has declined to issue a statement on the matter, the information that they release could be as vague as an IP address.

The above article quotes several lawyers with differing views on digital speech. Some say that students posing as school officials online are defaming their administrators and can be held liable while others see the fake profile as parody speech protected by the First Amendment.

This is another example of where the law is behind current technology and only future rulings will decide what is a harmless prank and what is a crime online.

Mason High School students in Cincinatti, Ohio are dealing with the fallout from pictures of an assistant basketball coach engaged in what appears to be a round of beer pong during a party at his home. This would not be bad in and of itself, but the pictures suggest that there were people under 21 in attendance, and Mason Police are now investigating just what went on and who was there, according to the Enquirer (no, not the supermarket rag).

A private group of citizens calling themselves Citizens for Accountability and Results in Education (CARE), with a long history of criticizing the way the Mason school district has conducted business, presented the potentially incriminating photos to school officials this week. They claimed to have obtained them from an unnamed social networking site of one of the party participants. The photos were eventually turned over to the police.

We’ve covered stories like this before. They are nothing new with the inter-connectedness of the web growing by leaps and bounds seemingly every day. But what stuck out from the article for us was this quote from the coach’s attorney, Patrick Dunphy, to the Examiner:

“Any accusations that my clients participated in or hosted a party for Mason High School students where alcohol was served are absolutely untrue. […] “The accusation that my clients held a party in their home where alcohol was consumed by minors with their prior knowledge are absolutely false,” […] “Mrs. Crotty was out of state on the date apparently in question. […] I caution you that my clients are not public figures and that they will undoubtedly incur damage to their reputation in the community by the reckless reporting of unsubstantiated accusations.”

The attention paid to the reputations of his clients is certainly admirable and justified. Regardless of the outcome of the investigation, internet has once again proved to be a powerful reputation engine that can bring about consequences in the real world.