Impersonating bloggers

It’s been brought to my attention that certain anonymous individual(s) have been going around in the cyberspace ’stalking’ targeted bloggers by hacking into their email accounts. The culprit(s) would then send emails containing possibly ‘weird messages’ to friends of the bloggers concerned. The process of impersonation of these bloggers has begun. The late Rustam Sani was one of the victims of this cruel game of blogger impersonation.

Writer Helen Ang of The People’s Parliament has a story to tell about this, and she also has a suggestion of how to combat this cyber-menace:

Let’s compile now a dossier of the known episodes of ‘identity theft’.

Then we’ll collate a chronological list – sort of a ‘wiki’ with a précis (summary of incident) and links to the clarification made by the affected parties. After which, we’ll ask the good offices of a blogger to permanently host the page. A blog carrying a Malaysian directory, e.g. Sopo Sentral would be the best choice to do this.

 

National Disservice to the Young

Death of a loved one is obviously a heart-wrenching experience for family members, particularly the parents concerned. It is especially traumatic when the circumstance surrounding the death is perceived to be still unclear, if not suspect.

 

Thus, the recent death of National Service (NS) trainee Too Hui Min, 18, from the Geo Kosmo Camp in Kuala Kubu Baru predictably has not only caused anguish and pain to the parents, but also further alarmed concerned parents and other Malaysians regarding the safety of the remaining and future NS trainees.

 

Deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak argued that there were merely 11 deaths (in the training camps) so far out of a total of 339,186 trainees since the start of the NS programme in 2004 in his attempt to provide justification for the continuation or perpetuation of the NS programme. Such a response, given the parents’ grief, genuine anxiety of other parents and the questionable security procedure of the NS training camps, is callous and insensitive.

 

Besides, the deaths of these young people cannot simply be reduced to mere digits. We are taking about human lives here.

 

It is understandable that consequently there had been calls from the general public for the government to halt the NS programme, or at the very least, to suspend the programme for a thorough and critical review. To be sure, it is in the national interest that concerned citizens had urged the government to put a stop to this NS programme so as to prevent further deaths and also unnecessary wastage to a national programme that had consumed so far some RM2.37bil of the taxpayers’ money. Apart from these unfortunate deaths, certain objectives of the NS programme, such as the aim to promote good ethnic relations among the young, had been questioned because it was felt that these objectives had not been, or may not be, achieved satisfactorily during the short spell of stay in the training camps.

 

As if adding salt in a wound, even the Parliament’s Deputy Speaker reportedly did not even see it fit or urgent enough to allow for an engaging debate on the death of Too Hui Min. In this regard, one is made to wonder what does it really take to make this issue look ‘sufficiently urgent’ for the firm consideration of the Deputy Speaker? Fifty more deaths? 100?

 

Or does ‘urgency’ merit attention of the Parliament only after it is considered as such by BN politicians?