- Annoying someone via the Internet is now a federal crime.
-
- It's no joke. Last Thursday, President Bush signed into
law a prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying
e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity.
-
- In other words, it's OK to flame someone on a mailing
list or in a blog as long as you do it under your real name. Thank Congress
for small favors, I guess.
-
- This ridiculous prohibition, which would likely imperil
much of Usenet, is buried in the so-called Violence Against Women and Department
of Justice Reauthorization Act. Criminal penalties include stiff fines
and two years in prison.
-
- "The use of the word 'annoy' is particularly problematic,"
says Marv Johnson, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties
Union. "What's annoying to one person may not be annoying to someone
else."
- It's illegal to annoy
-
- A new federal law states that when you annoy someone
on the Internet, you must disclose your identity. Here's the relevant language.
-
- "Whoever...utilizes any device or software that
can be used to originate telecommunications or other types of communications
that are transmitted, in whole or in part, by the Internet... without disclosing
his identity and with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass any person...who
receives the communications...shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned
not more than two years, or both."
-
- Buried deep in the new law is Sec. 113, an innocuously
titled bit called "Preventing Cyberstalking." It rewrites existing
telephone harassment law to prohibit anyone from using the Internet "without
disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy."
-
- To grease the rails for this idea, Sen. Arlen Specter,
a Pennsylvania Republican, and the section's other sponsors slipped it
into an unrelated, must-pass bill to fund the Department of Justice. The
plan: to make it politically infeasible for politicians to oppose the measure.
-
- The tactic worked. The bill cleared the House of Representatives
by voice vote, and the Senate unanimously approved it Dec. 16.
-
- There's an interesting side note. An earlier version
that the House approved in September had radically different wording. It
was reasonable by comparison, and criminalized only using an "interactive
computer service" to cause someone "substantial emotional harm."
-
- That kind of prohibition might make sense. But why should
merely annoying someone be illegal?
-
- There are perfectly legitimate reasons to set up a Web
site or write something incendiary without telling everyone exactly who
you are.
- A law meant to annoy?
- FAQ: The new 'annoy' law explained
- A practical guide to the new federal law that aims to
outlaw certain types of annoying Web sites and e-mail.
-
- Think about it: A woman fired by a manager who demanded
sexual favors wants to blog about it without divulging her full name. An
aspiring pundit hopes to set up the next Suck.com. A frustrated citizen
wants to send e-mail describing corruption in local government without
worrying about reprisals.
-
- In each of those three cases, someone's probably going
to be annoyed. That's enough to make the action a crime. (The Justice Department
won't file charges in every case, of course, but trusting prosecutorial
discretion is hardly reassuring.)
-
- Clinton Fein, a San Francisco resident who runs the Annoy.com
site, says a feature permitting visitors to send obnoxious and profane
postcards through e-mail could be imperiled.
-
- "Who decides what's annoying? That's the ultimate
question," Fein said. He added: "If you send an annoying message
via the United States Post Office, do you have to reveal your identity?"
-
- Fein once sued to overturn part of the Communications
Decency Act that outlawed transmitting indecent material "with intent
to annoy." But the courts ruled the law applied only to obscene material,
so Annoy.com didn't have to worry.
-
- "I'm certainly not going to close the site down,"
Fein said on Friday. "I would fight it on First Amendment grounds."
-
- He's right. Our esteemed politicians can't seem to grasp
this simple point, but the First Amendment protects our right to write
something that annoys someone else.
-
- It even shields our right to do it anonymously. U.S.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas defended this principle magnificently
in a 1995 case involving an Ohio woman who was punished for distributing
anonymous political pamphlets.
-
- If President Bush truly believed in the principle of
limited government (it is in his official bio), he'd realize that the law
he signed cannot be squared with the Constitution he swore to uphold.
-
- And then he'd repeat what President Clinton did a decade
ago when he felt compelled to sign a massive telecommunications law. Clinton
realized that the section of the law punishing abortion-related material
on the Internet was unconstitutional, and he directed the Justice Department
not to enforce it.
-
- Bush has the chance to show his respect for what he calls
Americans' personal freedoms. Now we'll see if the president rises to the
occasion.
-
- Biography
- Declan McCullagh is CNET News.com's Washington, D.C.,
correspondent. He chronicles the busy intersection between technology and
politics. Before that, he worked for several years as Washington bureau
chief for Wired News. He has also worked as a reporter for The Netly News,
Time magazine and HotWired.
-
- http://news.com.com/Create+an+e-annoyance%2C+
go+to+jail/2010-1028_3-6022491.html
|