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

Is this law really needed?

[dada21]

Actually, I think the entire law against crank calling is pretty worthless now, anyway.

We have Caller ID -- we can refuse to answer the phone. If crank calls were a major concern, you'd see market solutions to the problem. Companies would come up with "quiet time" phone features that would prevent any ring after a certain hour unless you coded it with numbers that were acceptable.

As you can see with this law, and thousands of other bad laws, you enter into a slippery slope of stupidity.

The Department of Justice is completely out of control -- nearly 99% of the Department is unconstitutional and unnecessary at the federal level. In this end, this is an abridgement on the freedom of speech. Every time government wants to penalize "edgy" speech, they are just finding another way to control normal speech.

I think we know who the real cranks are in this case -- read the entire law/budget, you'll find more bad things than usual. In fact, I can't see anything in the budget that seems worthwhile anymore.

Re:Is this law really needed?

[Evil Adrian]

Caller ID is not free, it is an optional pay service on most carriers, and not everyone has it, so not everyone can just sit there and screen the calls.

That aside, if someone doesn't answer the call (because they know who is calling via Caller ID), what is to stop that person from calling 300 times consecutively in an attempt to annoy/harass them?

I guess you could block the caller... but that too incurs a fee.

"As you can see with this law, and thousands of other bad laws, you enter into a slippery slope of stupidity."

I don't think it's out of line for the government to outlaw harassment. You could certainly argue that this law in particular perhaps goes too far, but you're almost saying it's OK to harass people, until some company invents technology that you can purchase to stop harassment. That is just plain silly.

Re:Is this law really needed?

[RexRhino]

What you are saying is true, but only to a certain extent.

Yes, at the present state of time, we probably still need a small state to protect us from certain groups who would step in and take power in the absence of the government. But that is a huge jump to saying that we need the monster government that we have today.

First of all, you are assuming that the government protects us from, lets say, a corporation. It is clear right now that corporations use law suits, government legistlation, intellectual property laws, all as tools for control and intimidation. It is not that the government protects us from corporations, but more like our government is being used as an enforcer for corporations.

Intimidation of minorities was/is largely carried out by the government (Jim Crow laws then, drug and gun laws now that almost exclusivly target minorities now) Ask a black man living in inner city Detroit if he is more scared of the KKK, or of the police! At least half a million black men are imprisioned right now for victimless crimes... When you consider that there is only 10-15 million black men in the United States, I would say that the U.S. government is several orders of magnitude more dangerous to minorities that the KKK.

In most places, the government acts WITH organized crime... for example, in many places you can't get a building permit unless you pay off the local goodguy, who then pays off the local politician to let you build. Or we have drug laws that do more to raise the price of illegal drugs and make them highly profitable than they do to stop illegal drugs (the DEA is the OPEC of drug smuggling!!! And I won't even go into the CIA drug operations).

And, I am of course talking about the United States. The Soviet Union and Stalin's purges, Mao and his "Cultural Revolution" and "Great Leap Forward", Pol Pot in Cambodia, Nicolia Chochecau in Romaina, I could go on and on about governments with far greater domestic power than the United States and the attrocities they commited. The United States is generally a more pleasent place to live because the lack of total government control. (But even without a totalitarian government, we have the U.S. government's participation in the genocide of native Americans, or massive bombing of civilians in WWII and Vietnam, and other attrocities that have nothing to do with fighting big corporations or the mafia).

Yes, you are correct, an immediate jump to anarchy is probably not a good thing right now... we probably need the government to protect us from warlords, aggressive foriegn governments, powerful economic interests, etc. But you are not defending that, you are defending a government that regularly invades peoples homes on the slightest of pretext, spies on its own citizens, takes 80% of their income in taxes and hidden fees, and now can arbitrarily throw people in jail for being "annoying". We are so far away from the concept of liberal democracy that maybe having a few more mafia people might be an acceptable price to pay for a little bit more freedom.

you might not need it, but they do

[aeoo]

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.

Yes, you're right. What sane person would need such a law?

But on the other hand, I can see how politicians and people in power might need such a law. It would make it illegal to criticize them anonymously.

The point is obvious

[Deep Fried Geekboy]

The point of all this bullshit is simply to create a web of laws which can be used to ensnare anybody.

The next time some wingnut retard says 'so long as you've done nothing wrong, you've nothing to fear', point this out (and tell them how annoying they are).

Blogging and e-mail way different

[Cyphertube]

This law sweeps across with a broad stroke and that's bad legislation.

One problem is a matter of 'annoying' people. What is annoying varies from person to person.

On the one hand, this means that spammers face yet another law against them. So, spamming while in the U.S. is a really bad idea. I'm sorry, if your name is really Ivan Charles Wiener, then, ok, I guess you can continue to send me erectile dysfunction ads as I.C. Wiener. But Heywood Jablowmie had better look out!

My question then is a matter of whether or not posting anonymously on a blog is a problem. If you allow real anonymity and you aren't prepared to handle the system, well, you're a fool. But most blogging software takes care of that. And if you force people to register, problem solved.

The big problem is that 'recipient of communication' is undefined. So, if I have a blog, and I allow people to post anonymously and they don't annoy me, is it a problem if some politician visits my blog and sees that? The original author is anonymous. Granted, as the owner and effective publisher who is not anonymous, well, I would argue that it's now my problem, and too bad, and so on. But sites, like Slashdot, that allow anonymous and disavow ownership of any kind of the post, well, that could be a big problem, as then Slashdot is not committing a crime directly, but can be considered an accessory.

Hopefully, this thing will be given a reasonable smackdown, but I doubt it.

Re:First Anonymous Post

[gfxguy]

And yet here we are, posting here and in all those articles MarkusQ referenced... free speech is alive and well, believe it or not, and people bitching about it not being free while they freely post their rants here are too oblivious to see the irony.

There is more to this than you think

[surfingmarmot]

Most of you are looking at this from an individual perspective and you are grossly mistaken. How foolish you all are to think this law is to protect you! You the people! Hah! This administration doesn't do things for the people, they do them for big businesses with lots of funding to contribute to campaigns and with lobbyists who have big entertainment budgets. In other words corporations who are tired of trying to use ineffective civil law suits to stifle free speech about them. So this law is _not_ to give you power--it is to give corporations the power to criminalize product and corporate criticism on the internet. After all, civil suits are so darned expensive, but if a corporation can send a few people to jail, then that will have an immediate and severe chillng effect and squelch bad product reviews and negative comments about customer service and corporations. Don't believe me? Wait an see.