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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.)
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.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
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?
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
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
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.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
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.
This isn't like drunk drivers being banned from drinking.
No it isn't. It is more like banning drunk drivers from driving.
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.
Engineering is the art of compromise.