Crank Blogging, Like Phone Calling, Now Illegal

On Thursday, President Bush signed into law a must-pass DoJ appropriations bill which contained a little gotcha for the internet. For decades, making anonymous abusive phone calls has been a federal crime, good for up to two years behind bars -- and the term "abusive" has included threats, harassment, and the much weaker "intent to annoy." Now, that telecommunications law has been extended to include the Internet, so when you post an anonymous troll to wind up your least-favorite blogger, you may break the law. This is silly: the law needs to start taking into account the qualitative differences between things like telephones, email inboxes, blogs, and IM accounts. A 3 AM phone call is different from a post to blogger.com calling me a jerk. I don't need federal protection from that Night Elf who keeps /chickening my Orc.

Comments

Re:First Anonymous Post

[MarkusQ]

President Bush sucks

If only it were true. He seems to be able to lie us into a war, shred the constitution, hand out important government jobs like stocking stuffers to incompetent nitwits, give aid and comfort to our enemies in time of war, suppress political descent, and run up enormous debt in our name to enrich his backers, and there doesn't seem to be anything the hand wringing "opposition" party can do to stop him.

If only he sucked , he's be out of there so fast his head would spin.

--MarkusQ

Re:Is this law really needed?

[twiddlingbits]

What a dummy. Did you grow up in the USA and never even learn how your Government works?

There are a LOT of Federal Crimes on the books with which the DOJ is charged with enforcing and prosecuting. Based on what you said the Feds could never have gone after Enron, Worldcomm or others except on SEC crimes like stock fraud. They could have never prosecuted the KKK, they could have never enforced Handgun Registrations, or broken up Chid Porn rings, or intercept drugs from Colombia.The DOJ is the parent organization of the FBI, Civil Rights, BATF,DEA and many others. Take a look at http://wwww.doj.gov./ Therefore your post is 99.75% WRONG QED

I'm surprised you have so much time to post on /. on such topics since you are supposed to be managing a LOT of projects and putting in mega-hours to earn your 60% profit margins in your consulting business.

HA! HA! LIVEJOURNAL IS DOOMED

[i_ate_god]

If you think SLASHDOT is fucked by this law, can you imagine what LiveJournal will have to go through? I'm sorry, but Slashdot comments are just stupid. Anonymous posts, pixels on a screen. LiveJournal is different, everyone knows each other personally. There are faces behind the fonts.

The filthy dramabombs that explode all over that site will now be handled in a court of law. I love it. I can just see a mighty judge, a symbol of american might and power, succumb to dealing with two gothy emo kids who insulted each other on LiveJournal.

Infact, watch a precedent get set thats not in our collective favour, and soon blogging becomes illegal because it helps propogate internet harrasment the way Grokster propogates copyright infringement. Don't say it won't happen. Don't say that the courts aren't that stupid. We all know that the US legal system has done some very, how should we say it, interesting things (before american patriots accuse me of singling out the US, we are talking about the US. Has Canada's legal system done some interesting things? Of course, but this is an american law, not a canadian or european one).

Oh, and heaven forbid that law enforcement officials ever dare look at Fark's or Something Awful's photoshop contests too.