Webcam spying case: Authorities charge Indian American with hate crime

[caption id=“attachment_1809” align=“alignright” width=“300” caption=“Getty Images”]  [/caption] Dharun Ravi has been charged with a hate crime. The 19-year-old former freshman from Rutgers University in New Jersey was indicted on 15 counts in the suicide of his roommate, 18-year-old Tyler Clementi in September, 2010. Ravi and his friend and fellow-student Molly Wei had allegedly secretly taped Clementi having a sexual encounter with another man. And then they streamed the webcam footage on the Internet. Clementi jumped off the George Washington bridge and sparked a national conversation about gay bullying. By charging Ravi with a hate crime, the authorities made it clear they were not going  after Ravi just for invasion of privacy. Hate crime implies bigotry and hatred and could lead to 5 to 10 years in prison. The prosecutor didn’t elaborate on why he pressed for a hate crime though he said the cascade of events started the day Ravi learned the name of his roommate. As the case unfolds, it will be clearer what role Clementi’s sexual orientation played in the terrible tragedy. But this is not Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming, pistol-whipped and left to die, tied to a fence like a scarecrow by men he met at a bar. That was 1998. This is 2011. Tyler Clementi was out to Ravi. He requested permission to use the room to entertain his date. He complained on a forum that his roommate was tweeting about him and had turned the webcam on. He called his roommate “obnoxious”. He sounded annoyed, not suicidal, paranoid about finding all the webcams. The case raises as many disturbing questions about the double-edged role of technology as it does about bigotry. This is sexuality turned into public sport thanks to technology.  When Ravi found out Clementi was gay, he tweeted about that. A few years ago, a 17-year-old in India videotaped his female classmate performing oral sex on him on his cell phone and it became a viral sensation. The young woman had to leave the country. Did he intend to hound her out of the country? Probably not. Just as Ravi and Wei probably never intended for Tyler Clementi to jump off a bridge. If he wanted to harass and bully Clementi, Ravi could have done it any time, in person, in private. Perhaps the case will reveal that he did do that as well. But that terrible night last September, he and Wei were not even trying to out him. They just wanted the world to see him online with his pants down. They wanted to tweet about it. They wanted to make his private encounter a “free show” for the world to see. And they did it without his consent and streamed it out to the whole world. Ahead of trying to webstream the sexual encounter Ravi wrote on Twitter:  “Anyone with iChat, I dare you to video chat me between the hours of 9:30 and 12. Yes it’s happening again.” It sounds like truth or dare in the online world where privacy has become just a Facebook option. Chillingly, Tyler Clementi left behind his last message as an update on his Facebook page. “Jumping off the gw bridge, sorry.”