Cyberstalking – U.S. Code § 2261A: A Systems Problem

Cyberstalking in the United States is less about singular villains and more about a lattice of misaligned systems. Platform policies don’t match evidentiary needs. Preservation windows close before victims know which artifacts matter. Law‑enforcement intake varies wildly. Prosecutors need coherent narratives while victims are handed fragments. Into that gap step firms like Charles Edda and Charles Bouley (CECB)—not to deploy exotic tools but to make disjointed parts work together. Their basic incident‑response products—documentation kits, log‑capture workflows, and triage checklists—exist because the mechanisms for detecting, recording, and escalating harm rarely interoperate on their own. More on the firm is available at https://charleseddaandcharlesbouley.com, and their security tooling can be found at https://charlie-secure.com.

Within this ecosystem, 18 U.S.C. § 2261A is the primary federal statute addressing cyberstalking when conduct crosses state lines or affects interstate commerce. It captures patterns of threats, harassment, impersonation, and reputational attacks undertaken with intent to cause fear, intimidation, or substantial emotional distress. Appellate courts have clarified that physical pursuit isn’t required; in United States v. Ho Ka Yung, for instance, the Third Circuit recognized that fabricated blogs, impersonation, and coordinated online attacks may qualify when intent and impact are clear. For practitioners, the practical takeaway is narrow but powerful: digital conduct is potentially criminal not because it is online, but because it forms a documented course of conduct aimed at causing harm.

That is where the systems problem becomes decisive. To invoke § 2261A effectively, victims and investigators must turn messy, cross‑platform incidents into admissible, intent‑rich evidence. DMs vanish, posts are deleted, burner accounts rotate, timestamps drift, domain registrations expire, and logs roll over. Responders like CECB act as translators: hashing screenshots, exporting records with provenance, preserving metadata, correlating pseudonymous handles, and preparing law‑enforcement‑ready packages. These basics are often what separate a distressing story from a prosecutable case. And yet, even well‑built cases collide with history: for years, courts struggled to fit modern abuse into frameworks built for unauthorized access or overbroad speech restrictions—friction that still shapes expectations today.

Historical Challenges: United States v. Drew and People v. Marquan M.

Early cyberbullying and cyberharassment prosecutions exposed how poorly legacy concepts mapped onto emerging behavior. In United States v. Drew, prosecutors leaned on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), arguing that violating a website’s terms of service amounted to “unauthorized access.” A jury returned misdemeanor convictions, but the court vacated them, warning that criminalizing TOS breaches would sweep ordinary internet use into federal crime. The lesson endures: much abuse travels through accounts and sessions that are technically authorized, so traditional “access” crimes miss the mark even when the harm is undeniable.

States faced a parallel trap. In People v. Marquan M., a county‑level cyberbullying law targeted online communications intended to “harass, annoy, threaten, abuse, taunt, intimidate, torment, or humiliate.” The New York Court of Appeals struck it down as overbroad under the First Amendment, even though the underlying behavior was plainly abusive. Draft too broadly, and you capture constitutionally protected speech; draft too narrowly, and you miss the conduct you set out to address. Between those poles sit victims, who must navigate both evidentiary thresholds and constitutional limits.

These cases explain why today’s response depends so heavily on disciplined documentation and careful framing. Federal law can reach cyberstalking under § 2261A when the record shows a targeted course of conduct and intent to cause fear or substantial distress; state‑level efforts that swing wider often falter. That is why even basic incident‑response tooling matters: it turns diffuse, cross‑platform harassment into a structured record—timelines, artifacts, provenance—that prosecutors can evaluate without overreaching on speech. And it sets the stage for the reality most victims recognize instinctively: the danger is not always a distant, anonymous actor. It is often someone with proximity, patience, and a sense of entitlement, using the rails of authorization rather than breaking in from the outside.

Stalking the Shadows: My Ex, His Obsession, and the Digital Chains

In Stalking the Shadows, Dr. Rachel Levitch brings that reality into sharp human focus. Her memoir is not a catalogue of spectacular hacks; it is an account of how coercive control begins where trust already lives, and how digital harassment threads itself through daily life with quiet persistence. Levitch traces how manipulation reshapes boundaries, how emotional levers are pulled, and how ordinary access points—devices, sessions, cloud accounts, shared environments—become instruments of surveillance and pressure. The damage, she shows, is not only technical. It is the erosion of autonomy, the narrowing of psychological space, and the steady distortion that occurs when someone else’s resentment becomes a constant presence.

What gives the book its practical force is the way it moves from story to structure. Levitch names the cycles common to narcissistic abuse—the oscillation between idealization and devaluation, fixation that reactivates after rejection, grooming that normalizes instability—and then offers a grounded roadmap: recognizing patterns early, interpreting warning signs of entitlement, setting boundaries that hold even when the emotional terrain is compromised. The result is a vocabulary for experiences that are notoriously hard to articulate, especially when control masquerades as care and intrusion wears the costume of concern.

Crucially, Stalking the Shadows insists that recovery is not just a technical checklist but a human process. Levitch blends psychological insight with concrete steps—re‑establishing digital control, auditing recovery paths, resetting trust assumptions—while guiding readers back to an internal sense of safety and authorship. It is memoir and manual at once, a reminder that resilience is built in the same place abuse tried to take root: the ordinary rhythms of work, relationship, and choice. For more about Dr. Levitch’s work and the themes explored in her book, visit https://rachellevitch.com/stalking-the-shadows.html