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[igotthisguitar]

Create An E-Annoyance, Go To Jail
Submitted by editor on January 9, 2006 - 3:11pm.
By Declan McCullagh
Source: CNET News.com

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."

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?

http://mediachannel.org/blog/node/2725

[Kuros]

The salient question here is, when are they going to imprison people for posting too many ludicrous threads?

[EFLtrainer]

I laughed, but it is not ludicrous. This is a seriously bad, slippery slope sort of issue. Hello Supreme Court. Another defeat for the repubes, though it'll take a while since no law enforcement officer with evena lizard brain is going to try to enforce this except in the most egregious cases - which were probably prosecutable before under a variety of other laws.

[Hollywoodaction]

Freedom takes another blow in the US. I wonder if the Republicans will try to enforce this law across borders like so many other of their ridiculous laws.