You've all heard about it by now.  An 18-year-old Rutgers freshman jumped off the George Washington Bridge yesterday.  A gifted violinist, loved by his friends and family, decided it was better to take his own life than live with the humiliation of having a video of his gay sexual encounter - in his own dorm room - plastered all over the Internet.  And to have another encounter broadcast live.

His dorm roommate hid cameras all over their rooms, secretly.  His dorm roommate went to a female friend's dorm room, activated the cameras, and recorded and broadcast what the cameras showed.  His dorm roommate boasted of what he had done on a social network.

And isn't it fun?  Isn't it fun to decide that privacy is something your dorm roommate doesn't deserve?  Isn't is fun to dare people to come, come see your roommate have sex with another dude, live?  All good clean fun, isn't it?  It's just a joke, right?  No harm, no foul, right?  Right?

Wrong.  Wrong because someone else's privacy isn't yours to take away at your whim.  Wrong because it's not a joke, it's not good clean fun; it's death, and indescribable sorrow for the survivors.  Wrong because a life full of promise has ended because of you.

Yes, you.  Nobody else can be blamed.  You set up the cameras.  You didn't tell your roommate they were there.  You broadcast the camera feed on the Internet.  You bragged about it.  You took the "credit", if one can even call it that.

And what kind of punishment even comes close to being appropriate?  This isn't murder, technically.  You didn't plan on having your roommate kill himself -- at least, society would like to think so; but maybe, just maybe, you did.

And now he's dead.  Because of you and your accomplice.

God help me, I would like nothing better than to have you and your female accomplice tossed off the George Washington Bridge.  To feel the rush of air as you fall hundreds of feet toward the Hudson River.  To know the feelings of panic and helplessness and hopelessness your victim felt.  To feel the hard, hard water destroying your body, ending your life, taking away all the promise that was within you.

But it won't bring back the man you both killed.

I remember Matthew Shepard's parents in court, saying they didn't want their son's killers put to death.  They wanted them to live and to be reminded every single day of the person whose life they took.

And so should both of you.

It should be made that both of your social networks are demolished.  That when you log on and try to tweet or use Facebook or Myspace or any of the others, all you see is the face of the man you forced to kill himself.  His face, smiling, looking out at you.

And when you both go to jail as you both so richly deserve, I'd like you to know on the most primal levels just what it feels like when you have no privacy.  At all.  From anyone.  At any time.  Ever.