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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.
...does that mean when you get a -1 Flamebait on slashdot, the authorities are dispatched?
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
President Bush sucks
-Sue Me.
My co-worker Steve is a real jerk.
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.
to tell the submitter what an ass he is.
I'm gonna call the cops next time some night elf hunter kills my helpless warlock from shadowmeld :P
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
the HOME of flamers and trolls. ;-)
Soon the forums will be empty as we are all carted off to jail for smart ass comments given with the "intent to annoy".
We seldom regret saying too little but often regret saying too much.
"Intent to annoy"? Every sibling, spouse and co-worker in America could be charged under this clause!
My wife LIVES to annoy me! It is one of her main goals in life. I'm fairly certain each of my kids also has a primary purpose to annoy one or more of their siblings, their mother, all their teachers and many of the other kids at school. Frequently phones are involved.
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I find this new policy annoying.
should come with a badge now.
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
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.
The law doesn't spell out everything. It's up to judges and juries to decide what qualifies as harrassment. Would they decide repeated 3AM calls is harrassment? Probably. Would they decide somebody calling you a jerk is harrassment? Probably not. But it's something that has to be decided on a case-by-case basis, not something that can be spelled out explicitly by law ahead of time.
I don't need federal protection from that Night Elf who keeps /chickening my Orc.
No, but if you were a small-time blogger just scraping by on ad revenue, you might need protection from people making your comment system utterly useless with continued abuse. If Slashdot didn't have full-time staff to program things like the moderation system, the comments would be useless. And believe me, people aren't coming to Slashdot for the crappy game reviews, years-old news and dupes.
I ave fellt personally harrased and annoyed by many statements made by politicians. Can I press charges? How can this new law not apply to any form of speech?
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
The intent of the medium should be considered in these kind of laws.
Blogs are public with an implicit invitation ( unless comments are shut off ) by the owner to contact the owner to share your views.
That is not the same with a phone.
Laws like this will, in the long run, make the freedom of speech stronger, not weaker.
The first time this is challenged in court it will be struck down, thus setting another precedent for online freedom of speech.
I'm not concerned with this particular bill as I am with one of the tactics that was used.
Namely, I'm talking about the embedding of other mostly unrelated things into a bill. It's especially bad, since with a bill such as this one, the existance of the DoJ relies on this bill getting passed to get its funding. Because of this, members of congress feeled pressed that the bill must be passed (as was noted in the first sentence of jamie's summary).
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.
This law is just part of a continuing effort to erode and limit the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. Continuing attacks on fundamental rights in the United States will continue as long as fear replaces philosophy as the primary tool used to win elections and retain/attain power in elections. It is imperative for citizens of democracies to fight laws which restrict rights -- even if that means protecting the rights of those they find offensive. The test of any action should be whether that action restricts of limits the freedome of others. If it does, then the act is bad., If it does not, then it should be tolerated even if it is ugly and indecent.
If software can't do something useful in 10 minutes, it won't
You're getting quite a few false positives in both columns by not putting things in quotes. Try this version.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I wonder how this plays out in the context of l'affaire Seigenthaler?
"Brian Chase, a 38 year old operations manager at Rush Delivery in Nashville, admitted he had placed the allegations there to play a joke on a colleague..." I suppose Chase's intent was to tweak his (unnamed) colleague, not to annoy Seigenthaler...
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
^------- by Anonymous Coward, Ha!
Does this mean that we, in the rest of the world, can lay into you guys in the US and there's nothing you can do about it (anonymously)?
I will taunt you a second time!!!
Ha! Your country is really small and you all smell of pooh!
...is paved with Congressional legislation. Who are they kidding? Just how enforceable is this going to be? Are the federal courts (which are already overburdened with real criminal cases) now to be swamped with case of "he called me a fsck-head on Slashdot?" The intent is good, allowing people to avoid harrassment but the execution is lousy. I can't see this standing up to the inevitable challenge by the ACLU in front of the Supreme Court.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
When you troll on Slashdot, you troll with Osama!
Check out ioquake3.org for a great, free, First-Person Shooter engine!
I'd like to see the first attempted prosecution under this new law.
>ALLIANCE SUCK
>HORDE SUCK
>ALLIANCE SUCK
>HORDE SUCK
>I'm calling the cops!
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
Laws like this will, in the long run, make the freedom of speech stronger, not weaker.
However they will do nothing for the kamikazee use of the comma!
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
A real solution to those a**es who corpse camp you in WOW!!!
Thank you Bush, now I won't have to worry about my realm server being full any longer!
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).
I'm not wrong. You haven't thought about it hard enough.
The terrorists is using the Internets!
And I almost forgot: What about the Children!!?!?!
"It's a wonderful idea. But it doesn't work." -- Tad Danielewski
I don't need federal protection from that Night Elf who keeps /chickening my Orc.
Reroll on a PvP server plzkthxbai.
It should be a crime to prosecute someone unconstitutionally.
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.
Linux - because it doesn't leave that Steve Ballmer aftertaste.
Is this an article or an opinion piece (ie. Slashdot via FoxNews)?
Yes. It's by Declan McCullagh. Declan is an advocacy journalist. A traditional journalist would have been less likely to know about annoy.com and Thomas's concurrence in McIntyre v Ohio Elections Commission.
Declan runs the politech list, and writes for Cnet.
If I recall correctly, he was a student government leader at Carnegie-Mellon when a free-speech controvery happened there, and parlayed that into a job with Time magazine.
Slashdot readers may remember his interview with FEC commissioner Brad Smith, which set off a firestorm of bloggers versus the FEC.
He's also a photojournalist, visit his web page for photos of geeks.
His coverage suggests that Spectre, and the congress, have once again violated their oaths of office. That annoys me.
At majors.blogspot.com I have links to the 4 major cases that uphold the right to be anonymous and annoying. I litigate in this area, but not very effectively. I'd be willing to work with people who want to challenge this statute. - arbitrary aardvark.
Line. Item. Veto.
This is easy to take care of.
Anytime someone posts something bad about you, immediately call the police with full intent to press charges. After we waste enough of the government's time, it will either do the smart thing and revise the law, or the stupid thing and make it a felony.
Now personally I don't like it when people talk shit about me on my own blog, but I have the tools to remove their remarks thanks to the blog site. I surely don't need a law to protect me. The only way I could see it being useful is if some corporation decided they didn't like me and would engage in a smear campaign against my name on the websites I frequent. Then I would leverage this law (or libel..).
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
But just because some local yokel slides in a dumb amendment does not mean we should all jump off a cliff. Yes, we all know how great big business is. Tried calling Microsoft, Dell or T-Mobile support lately with even a simple question? I called the IRS a few days ago with a very complex and detailed question. I got a very detailed and thoughtful response within 24 hours that would have taken weeks from a tax attorney and cost me thousands. If US business could provide the level of service of the IRS our economy would rock. Every time I move it is the businesses that can't seem to get even a change of address right, but I've never had even the local utility district get it wrong. Sure, the current republican clowns in DC are control freaks, sack them and get back to a team that want to provide good services.
It should also be noted that every single one of his articles takes pot shots at repubs and especially the Bush admin, whether they are warranted or not. This one was no exception. The law is portrayed as being pushed through the congress by those tricky freedom hating republicans, even though it was approved unanimously.
As a regular reader of his it gets rather annoying and distracting and it diminishes the effectiveness of the arguments he tries to make.
Why do individual governments think they can regulate the internet in this manner? When you make spamming illegal in the US the spammers just move to Belize or China. Want to post a flame, just log into a remote server in another country and do it from there.
What a waste of time creating an illusion of a solution in this manner. The only people these laws would stop are those who are too clueless to circumvent them.
If we are going to try to regulate the net the only practical way would to use international treaties. Of course there will always be non-treaty countries where the rules would not apply.
What about messages of protest? The power to annoy is one of the foundations of activism. What does this say for free speech and civil liberties? Would such a law stick? I doubt it anyway.
This is a classic tactic, called "attaching a rider". It's also the legal equivalent of asking, "have you stopped beating your wife?"
John Kerry's famous "I voted for it before I voted against it" referred to something like this. What he meant was, "I voted for the weapons acquisition bill, but when it brought up again with a whole bunch of stupid riders attached to it I voted against it." Either way, it meant that his enemies could hit him for voting for it, or for voting against it, or for being flip-floppy. How's that for win-win-win?
He sure didn't help by compounding the insult by injuring himself with a silly phrasing, but it's a sign that politicians have very little faith in their constituents by being unwilling to put out the longer and more complicated version. And, given how effectively Kerry's statement was used against him, their lack of faith seems to be entirely justified.
Personally, I favor a parliamentary procedure called "splitting the motion", where a member can move to consider part of a bill separately from the rest. That way when a bill like this comes up a member can say, "I think we should consider the 'jail you for flaming' part of the budget bill separately from the actual frickin' budget," and let that part stand on its own if the motion passes.
But it would be impossible to convince Congress to change its rules to allow that, because the all-or-nothing nature of a bill is what lets people say, "I'll vote for your self-serving amendment if you'll vote for mine." All of those deals would fall apart of those two Congressmen couldn't force the rest of Congress to go along with them once they got a sufficiently large coalition to pass the amendment.
So basically, get used to it. Not a bill goes by without scores of these riders. Sometimes they're useful, like when John McCain threatened to attach a "no torture" rider to every bill until it passed. It's just the way Congress works, and enjoy your tour of the sausage factory.
I have to wonder if this law can be used (or is intended to be used) as part of a SLAPP strategy, also known as "strategic lawsuit against public participation." If a blogger posts a comment that's uncomplimentary about a company — and therefore annoying — then that unflattering remark now becomes a criminal matter. By stripping away anomynity, the law will definitely chill whistleblowing, compaints, and other comments that aggressive companies attempt to supress.
Strikes me as moderately stupid. I mean, threats and all, sure. Harassment, ok, I guess. Though I believe there are already recourses for these problems (I could be mistaken).
But "intent to annoy"? Isn't that what the Internet is? A giant, collective, intent-to-annoy?
(Moreover, isn't that why there are things like selective blocking/allowing for IMs, for blogs, for e-mail?)
This won't affect me, however! When I call someone a jerk, it's never with the intent to annoy.
It's with the intent to inform!
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.
The fact that some people in some cases are able to express their views does not mean that "free speech is alive and well." The point of free speech is that everybody can do it, without recrimination.
-- MarkusQ
Maybe you could actually address the real point of this post?
He said:
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.
You said:
Fine. I'll pay $6 for a caller ID box and $24 a year for piece of mind. You want to pay for bureaucracy and red tape and non-effective unconstitutional legislation? You should pay your share of what you use, I'd like to bow out of it.
What does your response have to do with his comment? He is saying that your philosophy, as you phrased it, implies that you don't believe we should be protected from harassment unless there is a non-governmental way of doing it. You are not addressing his point that it is "just plain silly" to argue that the only allowed way to protect from harassment is through the market.
Now, it so happens that I agree with you that the DoJ has gone way beyond what the constitution allows, and that too many powers have bubbled up to the federal level. I even agree with you that the market is likely a better solution to harassing phone calls than legislation, although I think it is worth debating.
I do not agree that "the market" is the way to solve every problem, or even the problem of harassment in general.
where at least I know I'm free.
We are not at war.
Good catch. I keep forgetting that. I guess that's a good demonstration of how "the Big Lie" works; they keep repeating it and after awhile you start going along with it even though you know it's false.
--MarkusQ
I really have to go ahead an rant on that point. I fail to see that EVER being the case. Over the last decade or so I have watched everything get privatised/deregulated in Australia.
The bank got sold... bank fees went up. (the latest is a 50 cent fee for using internet banking)
The gas company got sold... the price of gas doubled.
The Airline got sold, prices went up AND the Australians were fired because jobs went overseas.
The milk companies got deregulated.... the price of milk quadripled.
Do none of you remember what Enron did to California? "If we trade electricity it will be cheaper for everyone" What a load of shit.
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything" -- Josef Stalin
For every -1 Flamebait that appears on Slashdot we should all file a federal lawsuit that must be investigated and tried. Sometimes you just have to prove that something is too stupid to be in the rule book. We'll see how long the justice system can withsatnd a very stupid law that can be invoked by the average citizen. Any takers on a template complaint form to save lawyer fees? :D
And just for clarification, I'm all for protection agains harrassment, but a law against making an anonymous message that annoys someone is ridiculous.
From TFA:
Please note that,once again, it was a conservative justice who championed freedom of speech. A true conservative is a friend of liberty; please don't oppose a supreme court nomination just because you disagree with the nominee on a single issue--on which he may have expressed an opinion decades ago. Once you're in the Supreme Court, you're untouchable and beholden to no one--and more often than not, that has brought out the best in the Justices, and they have grown to fill the office.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
Currently the internet is not trusted. I don't really know who you are and you don't know who I am and we can pester each other without really being able to do anything about it.
Total open internet doesn't work. That is clear from slashdot alone else why would we have moderation and bans? If you ever run a website you will quickly learn that you will need to secure your site from many attacks.
There is something about being anonymous that can bring out the worst in people and with the internet it doesn't matter how small a group it is, they still number in the millions because of the global reach. Or put another way I don't need to worry about some kid from Japan gatecrashing my Dutch LUG. That same kid however can easily try attacking the website and I can't grab him by the throath and show what happens to little punks.
So lets move to a totally un-anonymous internet where who you are is known. Post a troll on slashdot and be assured someone from your hometown will come by and teach you a lesson.
Nice idea no? No. Because for all the trolls and flamers and idiots and time wasters there are also those people who contribute stuff they can get in trouble for but we would really like to know. Oh they ain't many, every slashdot story has trolls versus only a handfull that have inside information BUT some people find that the trolls are worth it.
And yet should that mean anyone can do anything they want and not have to fear being punished for it? Saying that people should be able to harras, threathen or even annoy while hiding behind anonymity is al very good until you are at the receiving end.
I happen to know one of the people who claims to be one of the gnaa members. Yes he is as sad in real live as well but that is not the real funny thing. He sometimes gets "attacked" himself and then bitterly complains about how people are costing him bandwidth from a DOS (yeah a DOS not even a DDOS). A lot of people are for freedom but only if it is them being free, the moment someone else uses freedom against them it is time to get the law involved.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
This says you are free to speak. Strictly speaking it does not say you do not have to face consequences of what you say. (Shouting fire in a crowded theather example) It certainly does not say you have the right do speak anonymous. The amendment was clearly not written by lawyers. Not good ones anyway.
Of course it also was written a long time ago when if you wanted to say something you had to either own a press or stand up in front of your audience. The tech to speak from another continent without ever having to show yourselve was unheard perhaps even undreamed of.
This law has a lot of nasty possibilities but as someone who has had to clean to many websites after a visit by a person with the intent to annoy I am torn in two. The majority of me knows this is going to lead to trouble and the other part of me has a list of IP's in his firewall that he would loved to have traced by the feds and their users put in a wooden chair with leather straps and a link to another kind of net.
Should at least make for some intresting bash.org posts when someone convinces an annoying kid they are about to be arrested for talking in caps.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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.
If you remember back to your days in, well, any level of public education in the US short of graduate-school-not-in-history-or-poli-sci, there was a discussion of 'checks and balances'. One of these 'checks and balances' is that the President does not have to sign a bill that he disagrees with. If Bush knew or cared about the amendment, he could veto the bill and make speech explaining to the American people that Congressional politicking is preventing the passage of this important spending bill. Think back to how Clinton handled Gingrich during their budget conflicts - if a wimpy liberal like Clinton could make a congress controlled by the GOP back down, certainly Bush could get a Congress controlled by his own party back in line.
Bush either likes the amendment, doesn't care about it, or doesn't know about it. None of these options means that Bush doesn't get some of the blame if you think the bill "sux".
"Bugger this, I want a better world." - Jenny Sparks
While that does seem to be the standard that constitutional law has evolved to, what troubles me more about the wartime assertion is that this war is so vague and open ended.
If we accept the premise that wartime is different than peacetime and different rules apply, then the first thing I want to know is how do we know when the war is over? We've gone 4 years since 9/11 with no additional attacks on US soil. Is the war over now? Will it be over if we catch bin Laden and Mullah Omar?
In a conventional war against a country or polity of some sort, it is pretty clear when hostilities have ended. A war against individuals in hiding is not nearly so cut and dried.
My biggest issue with the wartime argument is that there is no clear end to this war, so we had better assume that these "wartime powers" are in fact permanent. That thought scares the crap out of me.
Is it just me or does this law not actually apply to the Internet in general?
I mean, read the definitions, and where it says an interactive computer service doesn't count, and then where it says an interactive computer service includes the Internet.
Perhaps this is the legal vehicle to aid in the prosecution of electronic harassment. A growing trend with middle and high school kids is to create blogs/website/emails to harass fellow students.
I have seen some very vicious blog sites devoted to the defamation of a fellow student. Without the legal ammo, law enforcement has their hands tied as to the extent they can investigate and remove the content.
With the web, you can anonymously bully fellow students from the comforts of your own bedroom.
We need to weigh your right to flame someone with the rights of people to be protected from harassment.
What amazes me, more than anything, is that some people seem to feel the need to draw a line between the real world and the Internet. For example, are on-line auctions THAT different from real-life auctions? How about shopping carts?
First of all, everybody in the U.S. does have the right to freedom of speech. If someone's right has been infringed, please take it to the supreme court and I'm sure they'll agree. As I've said, it's usually the people that have cried the most about having their free speech denied that are talking the most about it. Ironic, isn't it?
But why without recrimination? Now you are adding words to right that the constitution guarantees you! You have no right to say anything you want about someone else without consequence? That's why you CAN'T yell "fire" in a crowded movie theater!
Let's take the example of the spoiled movie star or singer, for example; the one who has always been given a soapbox in the form of news programs desperate for viewers. So some guy thinks that because he's famous he can go on one of these shows and spout off whatever he wants. Then when people don't go see his next movie, or buy his next CD, or someone doesn't want to cast him in their next film, he claims his freedom of speech is being infringed! Wrong!
You also don't have the "right" to be heard. If I choose not to listen to you, or give you a forum, I'm not denying your right to speak freely. So again, if you're some movie star that's been making the rounds on talk shows and spouting off about some politician or another, and I don't agree with you, I don't have to have you on my show! Has your freedom of speech been infringed? No!
No one is saying you can't say whatever it is you want to say, I'm just saying that a) I don't have to give you a forum to say it, b) I don't have to listen, and c) there may be consequences.
Good example of someone who knows what free speech is about and stands up for his beliefs: Bono. Good example of when someone doesn't actually understand the concept of freedom of speech and cries because they may have suffered consequences: Dixie Chicks.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
At some point, the decent folk at ColumbiaHouse and similar outfits, annoyed that their no-postage-necessary return envelopes were being used to throw their junk in their faces, took to printing on them in red letters something to the effect "if you try and send us stuff in this envelope anonymously, we're gonna get you".
I can assure you, the best way to get rid of dragons is to have one of your own.
Like any other internet legislation
You mean like any other US legislation.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
The only thing more annoying than a Libertarian is an (un|mis)informed Libertarian