Beyond Insult and Injury

There was a grotesque story about the nasty side of digital culture in today's Los Angeles Times, which also involves state rhetoric and archival processes, so it seems worth mentioning here. "Dead Teen's Photos Sent to Family" describes how grieving relatives received electronic copies of digital photos of their daughter's decapitated body shortly after she died in a car crash in a flurry of e-mails from malevolent strangers. Apparently the original source of the photos is actually the California Highway Patrol, although it is not clear how the images were released so that they now have proliferated on ghoulish, sadistic, and pornographic websites, from which particularly cruel users sent them back to the family. According to an article in The Orange County Register, the family of Nikki Catsouris is now attempting to purge the images from the Internet using the popular service Reputation Defender, which specializes in scrubbing out traces of youthful indiscretions on social networking sites. The family is also suing the CHP and is being represented by Bremer Whyte Brown & O'Meara, which has reproduced some of the print news coverage on their website.