May 11 2009
Teenage Phone Prankster: Mom says his rights have been violated
After reading the story about Ashton Lundeby of North Carolina, and the statements made about his many prank phone calls on the Fox News site, I followed the link to wired dot com (do yourself a favor and avoid reading the comments on the story). Ashton’s mom Annette Lundeby was aware of what her son was doing and thought that some of the prank phone calls were funny. She probably thinks that open-heart surgery is a gas too, but who was in charge in this woman’s home? Did she know about the money the kid was making off other kids around the United States, and did she profit as well?
Probably half the adults in America today, have at some stupid point in their quest for maturity made prank phone calls, but they were kids and not the mother of a financial prankster. During my late teens and early twenties I worked for 7-11 as a cashier and received numerous request to let Olive Oil out of the can. There were the nightly calls when some young prankster would say that Sir Walter Raleigh had been confined long enough and should be allowed to go free, but the caller would eventually stop calling and my job continued un-annoyed with calls to free separate and unrelated criminals who had errantly become packaged in a can. Ours were the silly pranks, though annoying to those receiving them, that did little harm and none were the wiser when we grew to adulthood with a taste of shame for our acts.
Ashton Lundeby; however, was an Internet criminal whose prank calls were shutting down schools, and frightening others—not an innocent act. Ashton, aka Tyrone to some Internet participants, was making a financial statement as well as harassing others. Some raise the freedom of speech act in his defense. We’re allotted the freedom of speech by the Constitution, but what we do with that freedom might be judged in a court of law and by our peers to be an out-right crime. There are those in Washington D. C. trying to bring about a law that would allow the president of the United States to shut down the Internet and take control in the event of an emergency, and acts like those of Ashton’s might well give them the leverage they seek to make it law. At some point, we the people, have to decide what is tolerable and what is not on the Internet, and how much freedom we are willing to forego over teenage pranks and adult perversions.
The next time you log-on to your computer/Internet, bare in mind the millions that use the same service and think about your actions in that context. If your attitude and the attitude of your household has become cavalier toward the use of the Internet, then perhaps you should confine your conversational interactions with others to a cell phone, where presumably “anything goes.”
