While the rest of us warily ponder the merits of national ID cards in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, two New Hampshire parents continue to fight what they consider to be a far more sinister invasion of privacy.

For less than $200, the couple insists, a deranged young man was able to buy on the Internet all the personal information he needed to stalk and eventually kill their 20-year-old daughter, Amy Boyer.

Tim and Helen Remsburg of Nashua, N.H., have sued Docusearch.com, claiming that the company was negligent when it sold their daughter’s Social Security number and other information to Liam Youens without checking his background. The 21-year-old Youens, who had become obsessed with Boyer, used the information to track his former high school classmate to her workplace in October 1999, where he shot her 11 times before killing himself.

According to a recent Associated Press story about the suit, the Internet information broker claims that nothing it sold to Youens was private information and it has asked a federal judge in New Hampshire to dismiss the case. The company also argues that it can’t be held responsible for Youens’ actions because the stalker could have killed Boyer without its help.

Having spoken with Tim Remsburg two years ago, I was glad to see that he was continuing his exhausting and frustrating campaign to bring some measure of accountability to the Internet. Remsburg, who sells building materials, admitted he was an unlikely crusader, a David pitted against a Goliath of an industry where regulations are few and profits are measured in the billions.

“I understand that people don’t want government in their faces,” he told me at the time, “but these Internet companies have no responsibility whatsoever.”

Remsburg’s voice still was hoarse with grief as he recounted the details of his stepdaughter’s murder the previous fall at the hands of a young man she barely knew. A couple of days before her death, Boyer went on the Web to plan a Colorado ski vacation during college spring break. With her mother beside her, Boyer hunted for bargain airfares and motels.

Meanwhile, the information that might have saved her life was just a click away. Had Boyer simply typed her own name into the search engine, she would have seen a Web site displaying a photo of Youens holding an assault rifle as well as the luridly detailed diary of his attempts to find and kill Boyer.

In explaining how he located Boyer, Youens wrote: “I found an internet site to do that, and to my surprize (sic) everything else under the Sun … It’s accually (sic) obsene (sic) what you can find out about a person on the internet.”

Youens reportedly paid about $50 for Boyer’s Social Security number, and another $100 or so to find the address of her workplace. The Web site, which Youens ghoulishly named for his victim, ran for at least two years. It listed real names, dates and places. It talked openly of weapons and murderous impulses. It even carried high school photos of Boyer as well as Youens’ admission that he “lusted for the death of Amy.”

Yet no one ever reported the gruesome site to the authorities or to Boyer’s parents. The site also went unnoticed by the Internet service provider under whose banner it ran.

“It was all right there under our noses,” Remsburg said. “But I don’t want her death to be in vain. I’m going to make noise. I’m going to make a stink, because I can’t sit back and let Amy’s life go out like a candle.”

Yet it would seem that Remsburg is going to have to make a lot more noise before things improve in cyberspace. More than two years after he began his crusade, no one

has ever been made accountable for allowing Youens to pursue his twisted obsession so easily. The Communications Decency Act states that service providers, such as the one that hosted Youens’ site, cannot be held responsible for the postings of third parties. Although Docusearch.com has voluntarily stopped selling Social Security numbers, Congress failed to pass a bill last year that would have curtailed the lucrative practice among online information-gathering businesses.

“I have absolutely nothing to gain from this,” Remsburg said. “I lost my daughter and I can’t get her back. I’m doing this so that no one else’s kids wind up in the same situation.”