A friend sent me this item in the news this morning, which is appropriate given the recent discussions of using noms de plume on the internet. Under a new law signed by the President last week, sending any email or posting any messages that are "annoying" to others without revealing your identity is a crime.
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."
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.
Here is the actual language of the relevant section:
"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."
Having the word "annoy" in there makes this legislation dangerously broad and subject to enormous abuse. I've had lots of people leave me anonymous comments that annoyed me; that doesn't mean they should go to prison. Let's hope this is overturned by the court, and soon.
- Log in to post comments
Back in the 70s I read a lot of books by Ron Goulart, which were that era's version of pulp science fiction. Lightweight and he churned them out 2 or so a year. They were, however, very satirical of modern society -- most of the satire coming out through extreme exaggeration.
I recall one society with a law: The Annoying Persons Act, which allowed the incarceration of someone if two people signed affidavits that he was annoying.
Now this. Truth is stranger than fiction.
I believe that "abuse," "threaten" and "harass" have legal definitions -- does "annoy?"
*sigh*
Hey, I'm in the clear. I never, ever intend to annoy.
You jerk.
Umm... UH-OH!
Seriously, how can this law even be enforced? I can not fathom the bureaucracy required to actually handle the complaints. A more likely outcome will be the silencing of various forms of dissent and unpopular messages. When were the Republicans for small, unintrusive government again?
1) props to my ACLU
2) anonymity does breed bad behavior. That's why I favor a registration system at Panda's Thumb. You shouldn't have to use your name, you might have a politically sensitive job, but just having to get an account would stop a lot of nonsense.
There are so many minefields in the paragraph you quoted. It has long been my understanding that many public statements are protected free speech, including those that are satirical or parodic insults of public personas. It was also my understanding from my days in law enforcement that threats of legal action are protected speech, even when uttered directly to private party, say via a phone call and such. Now the way this is worded, a statement on MSNBC that takes to task a certain Senator's idiotic pronouncements could be considered in violation of this law since a portion of MSNBC is streamed online. This would also be true for most of what now appears on TV and in other broadcast media. SNL and MADtv could be considered in violation of this, as well as, statements by Robertson and Limbaugh.
Is this really the big deal it's being made out to be? This passage is a minor amendment to the Communications Act of 1934, passed during the Roosevelt administration. All it does is add "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" to the provisions that have existed since then. The use of "annoy" is not new, nor has it ever been interpreted in the manner that is being suggested here.
No offence - and certainly no intention to annoy :-) - but you are sounding a bit Chicken Littleish here. What am I missing? What prosecutions under this Act has ever threatened civil liberties in the 70+ years since it was enacted? How does updating it (rater belatedly, I might add) to account for this thing we call the internet change that?
I have recieved a fair amount of e-mail from people who probably send it to me to annoy me and some of them do so anonomously. I occasionaly comment anon - though usualy I don't, and sometimes I imagine my comments annoy those they are intended for. I would hate for someone to try to prosecute me because I happen to do so anonomously on occasion. Especialy as I post anon when I do out of respect for those who might be mildly effected by my not doing so - not because I am afraid of people knowing who I am. Likewise I would hate to stop recieving e-mail from some of the idiots that send it as I find it rather de-stressing to read it sometimes.
It strikes me that this legislation is somewhat silly. Anonymity over the Internet is a myth. Virtually every communication over the Internet includes a trace-back to the IP address that originally sent it, and it would be a simple matter to get the (physical) address of the computer from which the communication was sent. If a proxy (intermediary) was used, it may be a bit more complicated, but not by much.
To put it simply, this is nothing more than "window dressing."
This is an update of a law about anonymous harassing phone calls. The problem is that a phone call is a private, point-to-point communication, while the new language includes posting to the Internet which is a public communication.
Raj, if it were so easy to trace Internet communications, the violators of CAN-SPAM, the launchers of denial of service attacks, and the people launching viruses and worms would be caught more frequently. Not only are there lots and lots of compromised machines available to use as proxies, they don't do any logging of where they are connected from. It's also possible to use chains of proxies.
There is genuine anonymity on the Internet--onion routing, proxy chaining, mixmaster anonymous encrypted mail relaying, mail-to-Usenet gateways, anonymizing web proxies, etc.
Jim Lippard at January 10, 2006 09:02 AM
Consider this. To the extent that a perpetrator can remain anonymous over the Internet, how can he or she be prosecuted?
Raj: That's surely not an argument in defense of this statute, which would seem to now clearly include the annoying-email-to-politicians services of Clinton Fein's annoy.com (cf. ApolloMedia v. Reno, which addressed the similar wording of the Communications Decency Act, where the courts avoided the issue by deciding that "annoy" only was a violation in conjunction with obscene but not indecent speech).
Those who are truly anonymous (including those who are doing so by violating other laws, using compromised systems to hide themselves) would be safe from prosecution, while those who post to Usenet under pseudonyms from their ISP would not be. That's a consequence of any law--the skilled violator is less likely to be prosecuted--but one that should be irrelevant to the appropriateness or quality of the statute.
I think the statute is less objectionable applied to point-to-point communications (like email--but don't harassment/"cyberstalking" statutes already cover this?) than it is to one-to-many communications (web sites, Usenet).