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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.)
Not sure how well it works for others, but I'm banned from the internet....
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?
Le français vous intéresse?
Better not let em near touch tone phones either, just in case they want to launch a Nuclear strike! ...
Easy just use the Internet2.
With voice over IP becoming more common place with carriers like Vonage, etc., phone calls are starting to travel over the internet. Does an internet ban mean they are banned from all things internet? If it does, some people may screwed 5 or 10 years down the road when it comes to even using a telephone, as they too will use the internet.
It shouldn't be there either, because it opens the door to pure arbitrariness.
The term "internet" is a damn broad statement in and of itself. I think that has a lot to do with just exactly where to draw a line as to what's considered using the internet or not. Touchtone telephones for example. A grey area.
I'd say that the aforementioned pedophile's example was quite a bit different. He has a rule like "no chat rooms for 10 years." I'd say a chat room is fairly easy to define, and a much clearer cut case.
Also, the "toothless" threat of this is just like the "toothless" threat that is given to people on parole or probation for drug offenses. You can't be around anyone who is using drugs as part of the deal. Can they really enforce that too effectively? Its supposed to be a point. Something you're supposed to regulate yourself on, because, on the off chance they do find out, you're in a whole world of trouble.
Login: CowboyNeal
Password: CowboyNeal
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
If you're banned by the court to normally legal X activity, and you are caught doing X activity, then you can be fined and/or sent to jail.
I think if someone is banned from the Internet for hacking they should be forced to use AOL, dial-up, version 1.5.
Minor Threat along with Mucho Maas authored ToneLoc, a great war dialer. Hours upon hours I sat, watched, and listened while it scanned. Great Stuff..
time is a perception of a being's consciousness
time is your 6th sense, the wierd ones are 7+
A ban from the internet for me would be tantamount to a death sentence.
Thinkin' Lincoln - a web comic of presidential proportions
The term "internet" is a damn broad statement in and of itself. I think that has a lot to do with just exactly where to draw a line as to what's considered using the internet or not
that's exactly the question- what is using the internet, and, how reasonable is such a punishment as internet usage becomes even more common than it is now?
10, or even 5 years ago, you could get by without an email address... you could have a normal family life, and an almost normal job, and never think about email... but now? how about 5 or 10 years down the road? not being allowed an email address would be like prohibiting someone from talking, or from using the postal system.
a generalized internet ban would essentially mean somebody couldn't work, or, employers would have to put up unreasonable work-arounds, like a special extra employee to handle all the email for the ban-ee... it would be rediculous
as other posters have mentioned, this will soon mean the ban would extend to most telephone use as well...
so, hopefully, some court somewhere, like the british court that restricted the ban to chat rooms, will realize that they have to tailor bans to specific needs
however, i think idea of these kinds of bans in general are a little dodgy anyway- take mitnik's ban, he had to put up with that after serving a prison term... well, come on here, if you've served your time you've served your time, and normal probation should follow... we don't tell jewelry thieves that they must serve their entire probation without entering jewelry stores, and imagine the uproar if a bank robber was told he had to serve his probation without entering a bank!
that said, in the case of the pedephile, that seems pretty reasonable to me- if the popularity of bans continues, hopefully, they'll be restricted to recreational activities, such as chat rooms, but not prohibit uses that are necessary for one's livelyhood... but, this is the court system we're talking about, so i'm not keeping my fingers crossed
I would think that the point of something like this is to make sentencing easier if a person is caught for the same crime. Maybe there will be a point where they think the person has commited another crime and I'll the evidence that they have is the web activity. That would be enough to bring him in for questioning. And if they did convict him for this new crime, the penelty would be that much more severe if they could also pin breaking the Internet ban on him. I doubt that they expect to actually enforce the ban.
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
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.
itadakimasu
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?
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
1) Have every website to require registration.
2) Give the websites a list of the people who have been banned.
3) If a banned person signs up for a website, shoot them!
I'll be solving world hunger next week.
I am NOT a man!
I am a free number!
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
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.
Power to the Peaceful
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.
On the one hand, people are quite often prohibited from normally-legal activity (such as leaving the state) during a probation or parole period. However, it would seem to me that, with the Internet taking over more and more everyday functions (VoIP, the wide use of email, IM, and videoconferencing in business, Web-based applications coming into wider use by corporations, in some companies, including the one I work for, you have to log into an online server just to punch in), this could effectively amount to a prohibition from holding any but the most menial jobs during your probation/parole period. I think that, looked at that way, that would certainly seem to be cruel, excessive punishment.
The arguments that "they can bust the hacker if he's caught again" seem somewhat specious to me. They can already bust him for committing the same crime again, and they can already punish a second offense more harshly than a first. They don't need some "violation of an internet ban" to do either.
In balance, while I can understand the reasoning behind this line of thought, I don't think it's an acceptable punishment. I can see why it might've been thought so in 1995, but this is not 1995 and it no longer is.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
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?
Chat rooms are dangerous in the sence that you cant see if someone is a *dirty old man* ( tm ) , if he tried chatting some 13 yr old girl up in a park, there is a fair chance that she could have seen that he wasnt the 14 yr old boy from down the road that he was pretending to be ..
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.
So, once I'm banned from the internet, presumably I can't conduct any of my antiquated-but-still-effective social engineering password 'recovery' methods either?
Or write sql-injection instructions longhand using my daffy-duck pencil to be carried out on the internet by others?
Or read paper hard-copy versions of web pages?
I can still use SMS though, right?
Back in '94, a federal judge in Seattle banned me and my codefendant for a period of three years from using a modem or "network device".
Strange how I was allowed to work at a media company there, that contained the word "Networks" in it, without hassle.
Of course all good things must come to an end, and the Feds raided my office and had me fired the next day.
What irritates me is the irrational fear that keeping a "bad person" off the information highway is going to rehabilitate him. After all the net is a mixture of both public and private services, and tightly integrated into the common everyday activities that normal people use.
I suppose the Judge felt he was revoking my "privilege" to use the Net, but it was more of a first amendment ban if anything.
The question becomes, should people be qualified and licensed to use the Internet, since judges feel that it an earned privilege, not a God-given right?
The idea as written will remain insane to you until its your child being molested.
If you think the idea is insane, remember we're talking about a pedophile. Wander over to NANAE sometime, and check out the posts with suggestions for dealing with spammers, an obviously lesser crime than child molestation. In particular the thinly veiled threat to firebomb the same NOC that houses my servers. There were some spammers leasing rack space in the NOC, not connected in any way to myself, and the problems had been dealth with by the hosting provider.
Come on now, think about it. I didnt mean a "knee knocking" jolt, just a tingle. But there are other variations that could be done such as sending a signal to the police, similar to the tracking ankle bracelets worn now by some home confined felons.
Maybe I'll look into patents, you never know.
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
This would have been more appropriately asked to lawyers, not a bunch of IANAL's. :)
But, from the experience I have (a few law classes, and plenty of time on both sides with lawyers), a ban such as this, while to encourage the person not to do something, is more inclined to give a harsher penalty if they should do it again.
For example, if you get a DUI, you'll very likely lose your license. You may also be prohibited from drinking. It varies by the state and circumstances. Now say you go to a bar and drink. You probably won't get caught. But if you go to a bar and are involved in a bar fight, now you'll be dragged off for VOP. Judges don't generally like it when you do something directly against what they just told you, and will probably drop you in the nearest jail for the full term of your probation, or longer, depending on his mood.
I've heard judges let things go lightly, because they know it was a subtle offense. Like, the VoIP, and IP enabled appliances that I see referenced in the comments. If you were chatting up underaged girls and the judge said to stay off the Internet, but then you were caught talking to your mom on a Vonage phone, he'd probably let it go. But if you were on a PC in a Internet Cafe, trolling for underage girls, sure as hell you'd be spending time in jail.
Consider the incident with Richard Ricci in the Elizabeth Smart case (kidnapping in Utah). Ricci was told by the judge not to drink. They raided his house because they suspected he might be involved (and then it was later proven he wasn't), but arrested him for drinking a beer. If he didn't have the beer, they would have needed real evidence to arrest him. Since he had violated that prior ruling, he was screwed, even though that's the only thing he had done wrong. If they hadn't suspected him of kidnapping and murder, they would have probably let him go with a warning.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
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.
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."
The ban is intentionally toothless. The ban is a threshold, that if violated, can be used against the individual at some future point in time. So if a banned individual chooses to violate the ban, they must be certain that they can hide that violation from the authorities, or they must be willing to accept the risk of greater punishment in the future. It's a low cost control tactic, which actually is quite effective considering it costs nothing (next to nothing) to enforce.
And I'm even a slashdot user, since just about the time my ban ended ;)
-chris[In America...] While in custody you have the right to humane treatment, the right to remain silent and the right to contact a lawyer, a family member, or the like for help. But that is pretty much the limit.
That's bizzare. Here in Britain we have not historically had any constitutionally guaranteed rights, however a prisoner on remand retains all their rights other than those necessarily removed from them by the fact of their incarceration or specifically removed by legislation. I would have assumed that in the Land of the Free protections of the innocent would be even greater...
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.