Families of military dead fight for digital memories

Stationed in a remote corner of Iraq, Marine Corps reservist Karl Linn's only means of communicating with the outside world was through a computer. Several times a week, the 20-year-old combat engineer would log on and send a batch of e-mail and update a Web site with pictures of his adventures.

For his parents in Midlothian, Va., the electronic updates were so precious that when he was killed last week in an ambush, one of the first things they did was to contact the company that hosted their son's account. They wanted to know how to access the data and preserve it.

But who owns the material is a source of intense debate.

Linn's father, Richard, said he believes the information belongs to his son's estate, just like his old high-school papers, his sweaters and his soccer ball, and should be transferred to the next of kin. The e-mail and Web hosting company, Mailbank.com, said that while it empathizes with the family's situation, its first priority is to protect the privacy of its customers. It refuses to divulge any information about the accounts.

As computers continue to permeate our lives, what happens to digital bits of information when their owners die has become one of the vexing questions of the Internet age. Much of that data is stored in accounts on remote servers and has no physical manifestation that can be neatly transferred. There are no clear laws of inheritance, meaning Internet providers must often decide for themselves what is right.

Many Internet firms have found themselves facing criticism no matter what they do. If they decline to release the information, they are labeled villains by people supporting the families. If they give it up, they are chastised for violating their own privacy statements.

Complicating such disputes is the nature of e-mail, which many consider to be more personal and informal than regular letters; some even use it to correspond anonymously, to hide aspects of their lives they may not want revealed to others.

Many of the larger e-mail and Web site providers, such as America Online, MSN Hotmail, Google's Gmail and EarthLink, allow for the transfer of accounts upon death with proper documentation, but plenty of others do not. Yahoo!, for instance, in the past few weeks has found itself under fire for refusing to let a Michigan father, John Ellsworth, whose son died in Iraq in November, to access his son's e-mail.

"Messages confidential"

Mary Osako, a spokeswoman for Yahoo! in Sunnyvale, Calif., which manages about 40 million accounts, said, "Our hearts go out to the Ellsworths and any family that suffers from a tremendous loss such as this." But, she added, "The commitment we've made to every person who signs up for a Yahoo! Mail account is to treat their e-mail as a private communication and to treat the content of their messages as confidential."

E-mail accounts can hold an array of personal material, from banking and e-commerce records to notes passed among friends and family, providing a unique window into someone's life.

For some family members of military officers killed in Iraq, retrieving these digital relics has become an important part of mourning their loved ones.

Take Karl Linn's Web page. Mostly, he used the page to post pictures. One showed the view down the Euphrates River from 10 stories up on the Haditha Dam where his unit was stationed. Another showed him sitting in a Humvee with full battle gear as he prepared to go on patrol.

"Personal effects"

Richard Linn, 51, who is in software sales, said his son told him he had been working on another Web site at the time of his death, and Richard Linn hopes some of the information is still in the account. He believes his son may have stored sketches of designs and inventions related to small arms and robotics.

"I think computer accounts are part of personal effects and I have power of attorney. It wasn't like he didn't trust me to take care of his affairs, and I know what I should or shouldn't be reading," Richard Linn said.

The family of Army Spc. Michael J. Smith had no more luck getting access to his Web page.

The singer from Media, Pa., who dropped out of high school to join a local heavy-metal band, had been recording his thoughts in a blog for three years when he arrived in Iraq last fall with the 2nd Infantry Division. He died Jan. 11 when his vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, and his father has a pending request to get access to the public and private portions of his son's online journal on LiveJournal.com, where the 24-year-old infantryman wrote poetry about his experiences in Iraq, his love of music and life in general.

When news of his death spread through the blogging community, more than 700 people posted messages thanking Smith, who went by the online alias "wolfmoon98," for sharing his insights and for his service to the country.

Marine Lance Cpl. Karl Linn died Jan. 26.

Smith's father, James H. Smith, 63, who works for an electronics retailer, hasn't read the blog. He said it would be too painful now, but he's hoping to take possession of the postings for later.

"Maybe not right away, but someday I'd like a chance to read what he had to say," he said.

LiveJournal community-site supervisor Jesse Proulx said that the company's policy is "to never transfer an account between individuals, regardless of the situation," but that it does offer families of deceased customers other options. The next of kin could request that the account be deleted or preserved to serve as a memorial where people can post their condolences and tributes.

"It's the most ideal solution for all involved — our liability, the user's privacy and the next of kin's wishes," Proulx said.

Meanwhile, the family of Marine Lance Cpl. Justin M. Ellsworth, 20, who died Nov. 13 in Fallujah, Iraq, is continuing to fight Yahoo! over its refusal to give it access to the Mount Pleasant, Mich., man's account. His father said he promised his son he'd make a scrapbook of e-mail sent to him for future generations, a scrapbook that would be incomplete without all the e-mail that Yahoo! is holding.

The family hired a lawyer, who is talking to Yahoo! about possible alternatives, but time is running out. Yahoo! deactivates accounts after 120 days if they haven't been used. If the issue isn't resolved by mid-March, the e-mail could disappear forever.

Washington Post staff researchers Julie Tate and Richard S. Drezen contributed to this report.