What Do Court-Ordered Internet Bans Really Mean?

tcd004 writes "Chris Lamprecht, a.k.a. Minor Threat, was the first person to be banned from the internet back in 1995. Since then, the practice has gained popularity worldwide. In the last year, courts in Australia, Britain, Canada, and the United States have all banned people from the Internet. A British court recently banned a convicted pedophile specifically from entering chatrooms for 10 years. But how effective are the bans? Minor Threat contends that the rules governing his internet ban use were toothless. How much harder is it to keep people off the internet in an age when everything--from parking meters to refrigerators--comes with an IP address." (Note: the Globe and Mail story requires registration.)

Comments

Same as always

[koreaman]

Before computers, there were difficulties getting people to respect parole and probation.

With computers, there are difficulties getting people to respect parole and probation.

But we seem to have dealt with the problem so far, so why can't we deal with it nowadays?

Re:Same as always

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude. You missed the point. The original
poster's point was that there are *unintended*
consequences of some creative sentencing,
not that people on probation are sometimes
not following the rules.

For example, a guy gets a 10 year ban from
using chat. Sounds fine, since he used chat
to exploit some kids. But in ten years,
what if essential government services have
a mandatory chat-enabled feature? Right now,
my ISP has a chat program that I must use
before I can escalate problems with my
connection. What if chat is replaced with
another IRC/IM/-like service that nobody
can imagine, and this guy starts using it
LEGALLY (well, without violating probation
rules, that is) to seduce children?

The point of the original poster was that
technology changes *in unpredictable ways*,
and this is having consequences for probation
rules and short-sighted judges who can't
(like the rest of us) predict what will
come next.

Re:hard to verify

[Chess_the_cat]

It's not meant to be practical. It's put in place so that if you're caught again doing something illegal on the Internet they can nail you on breaking the ban and give you a heavier sentence.

Job Requirements

[Detritus]

At many jobs, a networked PC is standard office equipment and is needed for corporate email, time cards, etc. Would a court tell a convicted forger that he was prohibited from using pen and paper?

This would be difficult

[durtbag]

I cannot imagine a punishment like that. I mean how many people needto use the WWW/Internet for school and work? Would they force you to resign from your job and/or change your major because you can no longer use the internet? This isn't like drunk drivers being banned from drinking. Alcohol isn't *cough* necesarry *cough* for most jobs.

Re:This would be difficult

[beerits]

This isn't like drunk drivers being banned from drinking.

No it isn't. It is more like banning drunk drivers from driving.

Slippery slope?

[Cervantes]

Does anyone else worry that such bans will become more commonplace on non-technically oriented crimes?

I mean, I recall (possibly incorrectly) that the journalist who was just given house arrest for not revealing his sources is banned from the net.

How long before smoking pot bans you from the net? Or protesting? ;-)

With the Internet as the primary communications method for the world (or at least the backbone for the various protocols), how long before repressive governments use this to suppress those who's opinions they don't like?

Would it be so clear-cut if you, convicted of a non-technical crime, were banned from sending snail-mail or using the telephone for a year?

Re:Edmonton man jailed for luring teen on-line (te

[theboyhope]

a 13-year-old girl who was obviously sucked in by the Internet

chat rooms are "extremely dangerous"

Now, this is a sad story, and I can only hope that this guy has a *really* bad time in prison, but how has the idea that the internet is an evil entity with malevolent intent managed to flourish? Chat rooms are as dangerous as warm fluffy socks. If he chatted her up in the local park no-one would have suggested the park was to blame. I'm off to register theinternetisnotababysitter.com

Only means something to the tech-ignorant

[Saeger]

Trying to legally ban someone from using a device connected to the internet is just as futile as trying to ban him from using the phone network, or a vocal network, but that won't stop judges from trying anyway.

The only way to effectively ban someone from something as ubiquitous as the internet would be to either put him in a (faraday) prison, or track him every second of the day with police state measures.

Re:Only means something to the tech-ignorant

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Are you arguing against the idea of convict-specific punishment, or against the idea of criminal deterrence? If you're against convict-specific punishment, as it appears you are from your post, then I suppose you also oppose such things as house arrests, prison sentences, and parole. Each of those bans convicts from doing things most normal people are allowed.

I oppose convict specific bans that extend past the end of the prison sentence. Banning an ex-con from a common, otherwise legal activity is overly harsh and usually difficult to enforce. An internet ban is materially different from banning a convicted swindler from handling large amounts of money, as the internet ban restricts a large number of activities not related to the crime. To take an extreme example, I believe mitnick's ban could be interpreted as restricting him from using an ATM or a cellphone. How'd you like to live life in the USA with that sort of restriction?

Re:Only means something to the tech-ignorant

[konekoniku]

I understand your stance, but to be fair, these bans don't extend past the end of the sentence - they are part of the sentence itself, and thus part of its duration. you interpret it otherwise, you'd have to oppose the idea of parole on those same grounds, which i don't think is your purpose. similarly, saying internet bans restrict a large number of activities not related to the crime isn't a strong argument either, because the entire concept of prison sentences restrict people from an enormous number of activities not related to their crimes. if you're in prison for assault, you can't go shopping at wal-mart, for example. yet this is exactly the purpose of such restrictions - they are intended to punish people to deter other crimes (whether their own or, through example, the crimes of others').

Perhaps lazy judiciaries and prosecutors?

[Shadowlore]

Essentially, I see such "punishments" as a result of laziness on the part of the sentencing entity. The judges are failing to apply reasonable standards and realize that online behaviour is fundamentally not different from offline behaviour.

If a person is convicted of pedophile behaviour with a child he/she met in the shopping mall, do they the judges ban them from shopping malls? If they met them at a McDonalds, do they get banned from fast food restaraunts? Not that I am aware of.

If someone "knocks over" a convenience store or a bank, do they get banned from entering convenience stores or banks? Again, not that I know of. With possibly one or two rare exceptions I don't know of any offline crime where the convicted is banned from all locations similar to the crime scene.

So why do we suddenly think that banning pedophiles and crackers from the Internet, or phones, or other communicative technology is useful or effective? In my opinion the idea that the Internet is somehow different and that you can be banned from using it by committing a crime on it (or using it to get information to commit a crime) is dangerous to freedom of speech and information. Indeed, may even serve to perpetuate crime.

In today's society it is becoming more and more commonplace to carry out one's business, education, and entertainment online. From online banking and bill pay to online shopping, getting one's degree or a job. Even the local job service and unemployment offices are online.

As the value of the Internet in our daily lives increases such a sentence -if enforcable and enforced- is a damming one in that it begins to perpetuate a class of have-nots with regard to such cost savings and opportunities. Increasingly with government going online the government itself would then be creating a class of citizen that is effectively banned from many government services.

Ultimately it will be impossible to monitor one's access to the Internet, chatrooms, etc. w/o constant supervision. This will naturally lead to a lack of respect for such actions/penalties causing a further drop in respect for law in general. As this increases additional crimes will be committed. Not unlike when as a child if you got "sentenced" to being house restriction but mom and dad were not around to enforce it you began to realize it was toothless and didn't care about it.

Only by treating "cracking" the same as we would such an act in the offline world (breaking and entering, theft, fraud, etc.) can we expect our laws and punishments to be anything near rational and respectable. Banning pedophiles from the place they met their victims doesn't change the pedophile's behaviour.

Just like (IMO) it is wrong to be able to patent something you can do online that you can't get a patent for doing in a "brick and mortar" store, it is wrong to view crime online as different than crime offline. Theft is theft, fraud is fraud, and pedophilia is pedophilia. The Internet doesn't change that.

Re:Perhaps lazy judiciaries and prosecutors?

[bobscealy]

If a person is convicted of pedophile behaviour with a child he/she met in the shopping mall, do they the judges ban them from shopping malls? If they met them at a McDonalds, do they get banned from fast food restaraunts? Not that I am aware of.

A court is able to ban people from certain places, using the pedophile example the courts might order that the person not go within x metres of a school for example (in Australia at least, I imagine the same applies elsewhere).

I agree with your point that with the migration of many services to the internet that, over time, banning one from the internet becomes a more and more severe sentence to impose, and presumably that would be taken into account when imposing the sentence, in much the same way that if someone is convicted of drunk driving a court may take into account wether they require a drivers license for work, and perhaps give community service or fines instead of suspension of thier license.

On the subject of a sentence being "toothless", I don't think many people would disagree that this kind of sentence is hard to enforce, but some of the power of this kind of technique is the punishment you will receive if you are caught breaking the ban - using the parent/child example it is a lot like when a punishment came with a warning that if you were caught again, you would feel the full weight of thier authority :)

You're Screwed Anyway

[BuenasOlas]

If you are on parole/probation you are screwed anyhow. Good luck getting a job at that internet company after checking the box that says "Have you ever been convicted of a felony", even if you aren't restricted from using the internet. Most companies now even ask if you have been convicted of a misdemeanor(do not check this box if it was posession of Marijuana). If you get rolled in this country you are royally screwed for a while. So get a good lawyer, and pay him a lot of money to get your record expunged.

Re:You're Screwed Anyway

[merdark]

I don't even consider speeding a crime. Dangerous driving is what I consider a crime. You can be dangerous going slow, or dangerous going too fast. But speeding in of itself is not nessesarily dangerous.

The majority of speed limits are set low only so police can collect money and harass people daily. After all, harrassing folks is what many cops get off on.

Re:You're Screwed Anyway

[sapped]

How deranged must a person be if he thinks speed limits are set mainly to allow cops to harrass him?

The kind of person that realises that limiting people to 55mph on a freeway (go NY!) is obviously ridiculous to anybody with a brain. There is no sane reason that you could up with to justify that speed limit.

Isn't restricting free speech unconstitutional?

[koko775]

Not sure if others have addressed this, but wouldn't prohibiting internet use be restricting what has become an entirely new medium for free speech? Is it legal to prohibit someone from the internet? Constitutional?

Re:I'm not really sure...

[BelugaParty]

I agree. Banning someone from the internet, or computers in general, is akin to banning someone from using the electrical grid.

How about

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Ban criminal from using the Internet
2. Make no serious effort to enforce this ban
3. Wait for criminal to commit another crime
4. In gathering evidence determine criminal was engaged in the use of the Internet in violation of the ruling of the courts.
5. Throw on extra charges that are easy to prove and thus gain a position of power in plea agreements or sentencing.
6. Go about throwing other criminals into prison.

Re:Internet Ban

[dark_requiem]

You are operating under the assumption of guilty until proven innocent. Mitnick stole source code, which I most certainly do not condone, but he by no means attempted to commit acts of terrorism, death, or destruction, nor did he provide any probable cause to suspect him of such intentions. This is the entire basis of (pre-neo-con) American law. Law enforcement must always take a back seat to innate rights, or freedom loses, not criminals. When law enforcement supersedes innate rights, you have, by definition, a police state. If you don't believe me, take a look at what the Shrub is doing as president.

Re:Tantamount

[NekoIncardine]

Niiiiiiice. I suspect that such bans from "the Internet" will begin to be tested soon enough, until the judges decide that it's easier to simply stick to assigning jail time. Bans from "Chat Rooms", however, as a far more definable offense, can stand effectively and may become an important tool in pedophile removal.

No different from other court orders

[EmbeddedJanitor]

There's nothing magic because the internet is involved.

Court orders that ban people from driving very seldom actually stop people from driving.

Court orders that ban people from going near someone they were harrassing/assualting/stalking seldom work.

Re:No different from other court orders

[Darkman, Walkin Dude]

Its not a question of whether or not they will attempt to break court orders - the court orders are there in the first place to stop them from doing something they like / need / want to do. The court knows this and assumes this.

The real issue here is accountability. Someone banned from driving stands a fighting chance of running into a police presence on the road sometime. The victims of stalkers with a court barring order only need to complain to the authorities again, and the penalties are inflicted. Sort of a self correcting problem.

But internet bans are almost entirely toothless, unless you want to patrol public libraries and internet cafes, and monitor the criminal's purchases to ensure that he or she did not slip in a laptop with that 42 inch television, among many other routes an individual can take to get online.

I mean, how many fine articles and comments on slashdot itself provide details instructions for evading censorship and maintaining anonymity on the web?

Internet bans can therefore be seen as being largely unenforceable without a serious allocation of manpower, which is arguably not worth the effort, in the light of other more easily pursued and still serious crimes. And any part of the law which is unenforceable can only weaken the whole body of the law. End result? Like so much with technology and the law, the problem isn't the law or technology, its how they address the problem. In this case, not at all.

Re:No different from other court orders

[ColdGrits]

"Avoiding the internet is going to mean never using a bank, never paying for anything with any means besides cash, never using a store"

Utter nonsense.

No matter how pervasive the internet becomes, walking into a store, picking up an item, walking to the paydesk and paying for the item will not involve the customer using the internet.

Sure, the back-end may be entirly network based, but the CUSTOMER is not using that backend.

Oh, and if your shop does have all its backend processing handled via the internet, then I'd think twice about shopping there! Security, anyone?

Re:No different from other court orders

[pla]

No matter how pervasive the internet becomes, walking into a store, picking up an item, walking to the paydesk and paying for the item will not involve the customer using the internet.

You make the assumption that physical stores themselves won't go the way of the dodo.

Now, I don't think that will happen "within a few years", but it seems like a very real trend. Perhaps within a few decades, the only brick-and-mortar stores around will have hideous prices and only exist to cater to wealthy retro-luddites.

Using myself as an example, 10 years ago, I did all my holiday shopping by hitting the malls two days before christmas. This year, I have already finished my shopping, and never even left the house to do it (well, not entirely true - I had to follow up on one order from work, but that still didn't involve going to a physical retail location).

I really think that, once more people realize that they literally can buy anything they wany over the internet, the traditional idea of a store will become a quaint throwback to an older time.


More relevantly, though...

I think the GP didn't so much mean to argue what I describe above, but rather, the problem of how to avoid the internet, which you touch on...

Sure, the back-end may be entirly network based, but the CUSTOMER is not using that backend.

How long do we have before the majority of phone calls travel over some portion of the internet? And when talking about signals running over fiber between two locations, where do you draw the line between "phone" and "internet"? At L1, often L2 (and with VoiP, even L3), they look identical.

When you drive through an intersections... Does the light/camera/sensor/whatever report home via the internet? Does it make a difference if it uses a private TCP/IP network? And does either of those count as "using" the "internet" involved?

Even something as simple as watching TV... If you use a TiVo, does that count as using the internet? How about (assuming it legally survives in some form) sharing recorded programs between friends? How about Video on Demand? Does it count as "internet" if you watch it on a computer, but "not internet" if you watch it on a TV via a standalone set-top box, even if the content comes from the same place and over the same wires via the same protocols?

The line has already grown fuzzy, and will only continue to blur. You can't really argue otherwise without deliberately playing dumb. The word "ubiquitous" applies very literally here. Short of going into the woods and totally disconnecting from society, people simply will not have the ability to avoid using the internet. A court may as well order someone not to use oxygen.

idiocy

[poptones]

How the fuck does banning a pedophile from the internet protect children? Can he molest a child through the screen? Can a chat room allow him access to a child's naughty bits?

If you want to make sure pedophiles stay away from children you ban them from contact with children, not from contact with an electronic information service. Banning someone from the internet amounts to thought control (which is, in actuality, the goal here - to take them away from others who support the notion maybe pedophilia isn't so abnormal). But this also has the effect of stripping a person of signifiant intellectual capacity. Just think about how much the internet and google combine to allow individuals to amplify their knowledge of a subject - to access tools. Hell, just to navigate in a new city. I know the simple ability to pull up yahoo maps made my move to LA much, much more comfortable. I hate to think how many hours I would have wasted driving around that place, lost as a ghost in a mansion.

Banning someone from the internet is simply the western version of sending them away to the gulag or the russian front; the goal obviously isn't to protect society, but to allow the state to better exact thought control on the "subject."

Re:Specific to anglo-american law system

[nomadic]

It shouldn't be there either, because it opens the door to pure arbitrariness.

If judges don't have the ability to find people in contempt, then court orders become voluntary, which is kind of the opposite of the point.

And contempt charges are especially easy to appeal, and they're routinely overturned.

Re:Internet Ban

[DissidentHere]

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, sorry, my stomach hurts.

You've never been picked up for anything, even for anything as simple as a speeding ticket, have you?

While the law says you are innocent until proven guilty, the reality is, you suffer the consequences until proven innocent.

For example, in my state, if you get a speeding ticket, you are expected to pay the fine unless you show up in court and defend yourself. Therefore, guilty until proven innocent. In my state, if you don't show up for court, and don't pay the fine, they revoke your license and have a warrant out for your arrest. Doesn't sound too innocent to me.

Also, in my state, if you get picked up for DUI (obviously not a good behaviour), you have your license revoked, even if proven innocent (in county court), your license is still revoked. Sounds guilty to me.

If you're innocent until proven guilty, then why isn't bail set immediately, on a schedule so there is no need to spend any time in jail? Why should an innocent person spend any time in jail?

Don't kid yourself, legally, your assumption is correct, but in practice it is very clear that the opposite it true. While the US may be a bit more easy in this respect, at least the UK admits to an adversarial system. The cops, the judge and prosecutor assume you guilty until proven innocent. I'm afraid it might be human nature.

Re:Internet Ban

[jasonditz]

I'm sure I'm not the only person uncomfortable with giving police free reign every time they run into a situation they don't understand.

Re:Internet Ban

[Tim C]

So, are you legally entitled to that one phone call, or are you legally entitled to contact someone (lawyer, friend, family member, etc)? That is, is it an unquestionable violation of your rights if they refuse to allow you to make the call but give you pen and paper to send a letter, or offer to go pick the person up and bring them in to talk face to face, etc? If so, can you point to the statute that makes it such?

Not trying to be an arse, but I would have thought that the point is to allow the prisoner to contact the outside world, *not* to give them a phone call. For instance, what of a mute? Do they have no right to contact, because they can't use a phone?

Re:Internet Ban

[Lost Race]

It doesn't even matter whether he was an American citizen. The rights recognized by the US Constitution are innate human rights; everybody has them.

Not really about technology

[Anonymous Coward]

The restrictions placed on released sex offenders always seriously impede their ability to lead a normal life. Restricting their access to the internet is no worse than the more tangible bans that are commonly doled out in the UK (for instance being banned from playgrounds/schools, buying toys/puppies etc).

I have always been under the impression that the bans were an attempt to thwart temptation. "I'll just look - won't talk to anyone" leads to "Just a little chat" leads to re-offending. In this sense its more akin to AA's insistence on total abstinence since the offender in question is unable to regulate their own behaviour given a sniff of temptation.

Preventive vs Punishment

[Ik3r]

When a court orders something, it will often not take any preventative steps to ensure it's followed. However, it will punish violations severely.

Judges do not like being ignored. So if they feel like a court order is being violated, they have many methods at their disposal to ensure they are not ignored...like prison.

So if I were banned from the Internet, I wouldn't go on the Internet. Unless you want your pissed off ex-girlfriend telling your parole officer about your Internet account.