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WA Law: 5 Years in Prison for Gambling Online
tpoker writes "Online gambling has been an ongoing legal issue for the federal government, but Washington State has recently decided to take matters into their own hands. The Seattle PI reports, 'Beginning next month [June 7th], Washington residents who play poker or make other types of wagers on the Internet will be committing a Class C felony, equivalent under the law to possessing child pornography, threatening the governor or torturing an animal. Although the head of the state Gambling Commission says it is unlikely that individual online gamblers will be targeted for arrest, the new law carries stiff penalties: as much as five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.'"
Wow, you can kill someone and get less prison time... Look at the guy in the northeast who set off fireworks in doors and led to 100 people dying and he only got 4 years!
Good game, government.
The Morality Police will keep you safe, Citizen.
These self-righteous asshole politicians should be ground up and formed into dildo-sized pieces then inserted into the ass of every voter who put them in power.
Trolling is a art,
When will people learn that you can't legislate away social problems?
Pardon me, but what the hell is the point of this law if "it is unlikely that individual online gamblers will be targeted for arrest"? Selective enforcement... for the win!
Most of the gambling houses are offshore, and the state doesn't get its cut.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
So much more liberal and right-thinking than those evil Islamic theocracies of the Middle East.
Keep on shining the torch of liberty into the darkest corners of the earth, now, won't you?
possessing child pornography, threatening the governor or torturing an animal
I'm pretty sure one of those is legal. I just can't remember which.
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
Amazing how the government can find the time and manpower to enforce crap laws like this when tax revenues are on the line.
God bless the good ol' land of the free. This is getting way past rediculous. It seems almost that soon murdering all witnesses that saw you commit some petty crime, like gambliing, will net you less jail time than getting busted for the small thing. I mean, 5 years for sitting at a computer and clicking a mouse. Sadly, it isn't sounding so unusual, but damn, that seems VERY fucking cruel.
"To lead the people, you must walk behind them"
Does that mean you can't buy & sell stocks online?
Although the head of the state Gambling Commission says it is unlikely that individual online gamblers will be targeted for arrest, the new law carries stiff penalties: as much as five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
:P
There should be a law that you can't put a law on the books with no intention of enforcing it. The law has enough baggage from previous years when politicians would grandstand for the "hang 'em high" crowd. I suggest hanging high anyone who puts a useless law on the book.
Most likely the Indian casinos are behind it. Just up the Interstate 5 corridor, from the Oregon border to Seattle, it seems like there must be a friggin casino every 20 miles or so.
Look it, the only reason that the gov't HATES online gambling is because it doesn't get paid tribute.
The gov't hates when industries that rake in cash don't pay special tribute by donating, ect. Look at how google is now throwing out cash to avoid investigations and avoid the trouble MS had in the 90's.
Pay tribute to the masters and you can do what you want.
plus the state has a monopoly on gambling (state lotteries), they don't want that threatened. so lets throw harmless people in jail for a non-violent, victimless crime. Yes, america "home of the free" what a load of crap
It dates back to around the 1930's (I think) when organized crime was rampant thanks to things like prohibition. The feds tried to crack down on illegal betting way back then by passing laws that made it illegal to place any sort of wager by phone. Betting parlors, bookies, etc. relied heavily on people placing bets via the phone. (For it to be a federal offense the call actually had to cross state lines.) Needless to say, those laws still remain on the books some 75 years later, and they're now applied to internet wagering as well...
Mandatory sunset date of one year. Not just this stupid law but also laws that your congress-vermin pass. One year, it's re-evaluated and then passed again or thrown away.
I'm actually surprised that Washington of all places was the first to pass this bill. I suspect it might be a "since we can't get a piece of that pie into our tax coffers, we're going to shut it down" type of situation.
Place your bets...
http://www.walottery.com/
KFG
Washington is a politically diverse state. Once you get outside of the major population centers, it gets rural and Red pretty quickly, like in Oregon. This is why the races there tend to be so close.
There are two Washingtons. To the west of the Cascades, there is s fair percentage of liberal thought. To the East of the Cascades, it's pretty much a Dependent Territory of Idaho.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
The state profits on gambling from horse racing and the state lottery. The Indian casino lobby is huge. Since the online guys don't kick back to the state, and since the Indians have deeper pockets, guess who gets the shaft? Nothing to do with the churches this time.
This is sweet. We definitely need to fill our prisons with more people that shouldn't be there.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
Jack Abramoff's main gig (as far as we know so far) was lobbying for "antigambling" laws to stop new casinos from competing with his casino clients. Also under the guise of "protecting gamblers from themselves", even enlisting the most popular Christian political organizers.
Sounds like "antigambling legislation" is a bigger rigged game, a nest for money launderers, mobsters, bribers and bribees. We should protect our legislatures from themselves by keeping them out of the business. They're welcome to stay in the business of busting money launderers, mobsters, bribers/bribees and extortionists, and rehab for compulsive gamblers - but I doubt they'll be as interested in that losing game.
--
make install -not war
Thats the funny thing ... the law contains exceptions to allow a) the state to sell lottery tickets online and b) wagering on horse races.
Washington is run by Democrats, top to bottom. They passed this bill. Just wanted to point that out in case anybody thinks one party has a greater affinity for freedom than the other.
In Washington State, Indian reservations are building more and bigger casinos. Online gambling is considered a threat. They have successfully lobbied for this law. That's all there is to it.
This is pretty crazy. Washington has tons of casinos nearly everywhere (except Seattle, and the city limits of some other suburbs). That said it seems like they're trying to crack down on the competition. You can go to your local tribal or nontribal casino and blow your money, but don't you *dare* do it online.
This is reminicient of the smoking ban just last year. I don't gamble or smoke, but I do believe in personal freedoms. Sadly, this place is slowly turning into a nanny state as the years go by.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060531/ap_on_re_us/se x_offenders_death
Darn election years.
I'm a little torn on this issue. On the one hand, I would like to believe adults can make their own decisions and should be allowed to gamble their money away if they wish. On the other hand, I can understand why gambling is illegal in some places because people are simply too stupid or weak willed to recognize and kick a gambling addiction. This seems just as true for online gambling, and if anything I think the anonymity it affords makes it more insipid than "old fashioned" gambling. Part of me wants to say "too bad" for the saps out there, but I can't help but think that you're exposing these (admittedly weak) people to a dangerous environment for the petty enjoyment of others. Gambling is a lot of fun for most people, but it can devastate the lives of a few. I'm not sure I agree with the black and white decision that the former justifies the latter, although most of the posts so far appear to do so.
Funny how Magic the Gathering Online, run by a Washington state company, now falls under this gambling bullshit. You can buy tickets to participate in matches, and the winners of matches can be awarded prizes -- therefore it's gambling in the eyes of the law.
Congratulations on supporting local businesses, Gregoire! Oh wait you're in the pocket of the tribal casinos... I forgot.
I've lived in both western and eastern Washington. My assertion is that when they were splitting up the territories, they did it in the wrong direction; Washington should be a long narrow state like California, entirely west of the Cascades, and Oregon should be a bigger yet less-populous state east of the Cascades. Then each state would probably have a much easier time governing itself. But alas.
Comment of the year
"Either that or it's a persuasive tribal lobbyist."
F actBook2004.pdf page 75. My thanks to "Dan" of the 2+2 Forums for finding the contributor information.
Bingo!
I wondered, "Who sponsored this and who contributed to the sponsor's election?" The sponsor was Senator Margarita Prentice (D) 11th District, and here are some of her financial supporters -
WA INDIAN GAMING ASSN OLYMPIA WA
NISQUALLY INDIAN TRIBE OLYMPIA WA
MUCKLESHOOT INDIAN TRIBE AUBURN WA
CHIPS CASINO LLC BREMERTON WA
CONF TRIBES OF COLVILLE RESERVATION NESPELEM WA
GOLDIE'S SHORELINE CASINO SHORELINE WA
This is from http://www.pdc.wa.gov/datarequests/factbooks/pdf/
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
Animal torture is legal as long as you're a large industrial meat processing plant. They only go after individuals, especially if the animal is cute.
We have quite a few Indian casinos, and playing poker is legal in general. The online joints are probably taking revenues away from the state, so I'm not terribly surprised.
Besides, with unregulated online casinos running in another country, why on earth would anyone A) implement a casino without the ability to skim (Which could be completely invisible to anyone without some serious probabilities analysis tools and a lot of time to sit playtesting) or B) want to play said unregulated online casino?
You can choose to smoke cigarettes around a newborn baby, even blowing smoke in its face, and it's completely legal, but to gamble your own money should be a crime? Because they can tax the cigarettes, but it's difficult to enforce taxes on online winnings. Without that tax money, how are they supposed to vote themselves more payraises? There is no logical reason for this. If you think about it, most laws are in place for no reason other than as reasons to fine us or tax us to death.
The original purpose of laws at all was to impose a minimal number of laws to ensure the safety of lives and property of citizens. How does it ensure the safety of my life or property if I cross a suburban street anywhere other than a street corner if no cars are coming? I learned to look both ways. It's still a crime a cop could fine me for.
What politician does it hurt if two guys want to go consensually behind closed and do whatever the hell they want to do with each other? Who does it hurt if I want to give a guy a blow job, or he wants to go down on me? Hell, we're adults, and yet these are still crimes in some states. Must we get permits?
See why I like a lot (but not all) of the ideas behind anarchy? Get the government the hell out of our lives.
It's a girl!
Wait a minute. There are reasons other than religion why certain types of gambling are wrong and should be restricted. State lotteries are a good example because they take advantage of the poor, desparate and ill-informed. The odds of winning a typical state lottery are thirteen million to one. For the multi-state lotteries, it's in the 145 million to one. While I am sure there are some people who play on a whim, there are a lot more who succumb to emotional reasoning or gambling addition to play when the practical reality is they will never win. Practically any other way they spend their money would be more useful.
As far as online poker, your average person might stand a better chance than with the lottery but not much. With the use of poker bots, the odds for Joe Smith are greatly dimished unless he knows how to utilize poker bots himself or he's sharp enough a card player to recognize when he's facing bots and get out of the game accordingly.
Then again, I've never done it anywhere that didn't meet fire code.
I even have ignited dozens of model rocket engines indoors (safely secured) and detonated thermite. I'd say there is a basic expectation of fire-safety with regards to buildings. If there was a lazy/corrupt/incompetent fire inspector that is where the blame lies.
People are going to smoke, light candles, use toasters, and have accidents in the kitchen. You can't always blame the person that finds the problem.
Man, you really need that seminar!
You can day-trade yourself into the poorhouse on Schwab, but online poker is a felony? WTF?!?!
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
Five bucks says they'll never catch me.
Pity that Governor Chris Gregoire is a Democrat. Otherwise you all could blame it on Bush/Rove/Cheaney.
IMHO, the purpose of the criminal justice system is not to punish. Let that sink in. I don't want to punish criminals. It's stupid. It's vindictive. It's emotional and it isn't constructive.
What SHOULD be the purpose of the justice system? One thing, and one thing only:
To separate dangerous individuals from society, and keep them separated.
Note, by "dangerous" I mean physicly harmful only. I don't mean, "they don't live like we think they should". I don't mean "they stole a lot of money". Yes. That's right. Thieves don't belong in jail unless they hurt people physicly. If the crime is monetary, there is an excellent argument for RESTITUTION in the form of fines and wage garnishment. There is no good argument for SEPARATION unless the guy waved a gun in somebody's face to get the money.
I may not *like* the Enron criminals, but wouldn't mind living next door to them. These guys are not going to stick a gun in my face and BLOW MY HEAD OFF. They are (probably) not going to rape my children.
Get it, government idiots?
Some guy who plays online poker and smokes weed on the weekends does not belong in jail. If you want to tax the weed and the poker, fine but I am SICK AND TIRED of my government setting child rapists and armed thugs free so they can put functional members of society behind bars because of their particular notions regarding crime and punishment. Frankly, that kid of life sounds like enough punishment.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
All that's needed to circumvent the law is for me to have a machine with SSH login in another state (or country). I then can do
putty -D 8080 -ssh hostname.com
And set my browser to proxy requests through SOCKS proxy. No one ever will know what sites I'm contacting. Granted, most poker players are incapable of launching a free tool from the command line and obtaining a free shell account, but the smart ones will still play wherever the heck they want.
Your comments about bots are quite misinformed. I have played hundreds of thousands of hands online in the past few years (multitabling shorthanded games you can easily get 500+ hands/hr) and made more per hour than I do at my job. I have friends who make a living playing fulltime online. For a good player, there is plenty of money to be made. Bots are a complete non-issue (except insofar as fear of bots scares off potential fish). The best bots today cannot beat anything above the micro-limit games. If you think it is possible to buy a program that you can just start running and beat the games, you are very mistaken. If that were possible, everyone would be doing it (and there would be no more games).
There are frameworks available to play online, but they only handle the clicking of buttons and avoiding detection from the site and so forth. They do not include any useful AI. You need to write your own code for actually making tatctical decisions.
Collusion (from humans, not bots) is a bigger concern and you do need to look out for that. But the sites generally do a fairly good job of detecting it since unlike a casino, they can analyze every hand you've ever played including the cards you fold and look for suspicious patterns (e.g., you always sit at the same table as Player X and when he has a good hand, you raise even though you have nothing).
I'd rather be lucky than good.
There should be a law that you can't put a law on the books with no intention of enforcing it.
You forget, in our state, if someone commits a felony that there's a financial penalty tagged to it, you can turn them in for a bounty (usually 10 percent of the fine, sometimes higher).
Which means $1000 to rat out the guy downstairs in your dorm who's underage and gambling online and bragging about the fancy car he got from gambling.
I think there will be lots of takers for that one.
Maybe they'll do a new TV series "Gates: Bounty Hunter" which has scenes like this:
Gates: Hmm, I see Muffy's got a new Cadillac DeSalle parked in front of the Sorority.
Sidekick Allen: Didn't she turn you down for the Spring Fling, Bill?
Gates: Yup, and she's going down for online gambling - I can use that $1000 reward for turning her in to buy another double core processor for my Opteron! Quick, to the Internet Sniffer, Paul!
music crescendo - And So Another Day In The Life of Bill Gates, Internet Gambling Bounty Hunter, and Another Villian Will Be Brought To Justice! - music diminishes
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
That guy should do exactly zero time in jail.
You got some average guy. This guys lights of indoor pyro as part of a music act.
A foam mat catches on fire, people can't leave because the building is not up to code.
That person will ahve to live with that forever. He is NOT a danger to society.
There is no reason to put him in jail cost the taxpayers 100s of thousands of dollars, and put a hardship on his family, which will probably end up cost taz payers even more money.
If this guy was an arsonist, then yeah, lock him up. He is just a guy, doing a task in a club that the fire martial should have closed.
Seems like a tradgic accident, and the need for a scapegoat to me.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
There are a lot of good comments here explaining why this is simply a waste of time for the U.S. government. But representatives are not going to read any of these and be influenced to vote against the internet gambling prohibition act. Please write you opinions to your congressmen. You can find you congressman at this site by entering your zip code. As a poker player I strongly urge you to spend a few moments to contact your representative and tell him to stop wasting his time and tax payers dollars on silly legislation. The bill currently in congress is "H.R. 4777, the Internet Gambling Prohibition Act". Please reference it if you decide to contact your congressman.
I got $50 that says no individual person will do any time for this in the next 5 ... oh wait.
What are the odds? If, say, I were a gambling man...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
This one falls into two categories with one go...:
I'm not sure how they do it, since it's on gross receipts. Maybe it's the total difference of incoming money and outgoing money from a given individual casino concerning gambling. The B&O tax is a fixed rate, more or less. It tends to be either 1.5% or 1.6% of the gross receipts for gambling if you look at http://dor.wa.gov./
This law doesn't bother me. Gambling via the Internet seems like a bad idea. You cannot check for someone's age, and plus there's no way to deal with people who have gambling problems.
However, what does bother me about the law is the punishment. One, at most it should be a gross misdemeanor, not a felony. Two, they should go after any business which doesn't hold a disclaimer saying Washingtonians cannot gamble via their site. A fine equal to 110% of the winnings or amount gambled, whichever is greater, for the individual Washingtonian who gambled.
How many have heard that Washington state is considering raising the gambling age from 18 to 21?
I hope you didn't post that from Washington.
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
Are they charging people who use progressive.com and geico.com now, too? What is insurance but a form of wager?
With gambling, you are spending some money in exchange for the chance of a good return. Your odds are improved if you are skilled or have someone on the inside.
With the stock market, you are investing some money in exchange for the chance of a good return. Your odd are improved if you are skilled or have insider information.
With insurance, you are spending money in exchange for the possibility of a return. Your odds are improved if you know what you are doing (maintaining the correct coverage for your risk) or know something on the inside (i.e. that you plan to kill the person you just took out a policy on, or that they have a secret terminal illness!).
Terry Pratchett's first Discworld book - The Colour of Magic - has a good and humorous explanation of insurance in terms of gambling.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
You also need an untraceable method of funding your account and withdrawing your winnings.
How about the goddamned state-sponsored lotteries? There isn't even any strategy, just toss your money away!
He is just a guy, doing a task in a club that the fire martial should have closed.
I think the goal is that future pyrotechnicians won't just start lighting off fireworks and saying, "eh, it's someone else's job to worry about fire safety, not mine". Hopefully the first question out of the pyro's mouth to the club owner will be, "is this place up to code, cause my ass isn't spending 4 years in the state pen if it isn't?"
The data presented here: http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-157.html
Shows that prison populations, murder rates, organized crime, etc... all went UP during prohibition and went down after it ended....
from that source:
"The most telling sign of the relationship between serious crime and Prohibition was the dramatic reversal in the rates for robbery, burglary, murder, and assault when Prohibition was repealed in 1933. That dramatic reversal has Marxist and business-cycle crime theorists puzzled to this day. For example, sociologist John Pandiani noted that "a major wave of crime appears to have begun as early as the mid 1920s [and] increased continually until 1933 . . . when it mysteriously reversed itself."[50] Theodore Ferdinand also found a "mysterious" decline that began in 1933 and lasted throughout the 1930s.[51] How could they miss the significance of the fact that the crime rate dropped in 1933?"
Travelling forward in time at a rate of 1 second per second.
I don't even gamble but this stupid law makes me sad to be a resident of Washington State. Sometimes the greed in our State government knows no bounds. They weasel their way into raising our tab fees after we voted them down and they screw us on our road bills where they say roads will be paved with high grade concrete only to be stripped and replaced with asphault, guaranteeing more idiots working the roads and less efficiency in our state funds going to improve more infrastructures. Vote Libertarian and force these pukes to follow through and put the money where they proclaim it will be put and no more.
Let the idiots who become addicted to gambling shrivel up in their own miseries for being weak. Re-privatized our Liquor stores that presently force everyone to drive to the reservations for reasonable prices. Good for the reservations and their exemptions but come on! Stop screwing your residents. Fix out power grids with a joint private venture so we are less susceptible to power outages and real jobs are created instead of the various strip mall retail service ilk.Doing it in a crowded building is still incredibly wreckless, and IF someone where to be killed, you SHOULD be held accountable.
The whole "I've done incredibly wreckless things multiple times and haven't hurt anyone yet" justification is nothing but a cop-out...
Hey, as the owner of a pesticide plant, I've been dumping explosive chemicles into the ocean for YEARS now, and nobody has been killed yet!
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
They should just sell insurance. $1 dollar gets you 10K if you are arrested.
That's not really true, for the market to increase in value on average then more money must be coming in than is going out. A paper profit is no profit at all.
I'm a long time resident of Seattle and very few people in my state understand the influence our Indian Casinos have over politics in this state. They make tons and tons of money and arent afraid to spend it politically to get what they want.
This law is a direct result of that. They dont want the online competition to their casinos.
Just a few months ago they were the main sponsors of an initiative to ban smoking in all bars and restaurants. Surprise surprise... casinos are excluded from the law. So the only place WA residents can smoke are in the indian casinos.
It's really ridiculous. I'm all for gambling, but right now we have a gambling industry that exploiting government purely for its own advantages. Now we cant smoke in bars or gamble online mainly because the Indian Casino owners dont want competition. And the liberal politicians of the state follow along like lemmings.
The gamblers known as businessmen view with austere disapproval the businessmen known as gamblers.
--Ambrose Bierce
rj
One thing I can think of is that in Washington (and other states) they regulate casinos in order to make sure the games are fair.
How can the state make sure the online games are not rigged?
Why is this not a problem that bothers online gamblers? If you gamble online, please reply and tell me how you know the virtual cards or virtual dice or virtual roulette wheel is not rigged. I am curious to know as I don't gamble at all.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
* Counsel the murderers
* Jail the rapists
* Hang bad drivers
OK, you've got my vote. Which district are you running in?
For the record, all day today KIRO was running a piece about how reprobates have been running an open air crack cocaine market across the street from the King County courthouse in Seattle (this state's largest city) for years, and even they (one of the largest radio stations in the state) couldn't get police to respond. Note to furriners: the sale and use of crack cocaine is prohibited in the US.
I am curious about what offended our state representatives more... that their sponsors the tribal casinos weren't getting a cut or that the state wasn't getting a share. They're certainly pleased to pander to habitual gamblers with scratch tickets and lotto in every convenience store, gas station and grocery in the state. They get a cut of every bottle (or glass!) of alcohol. Certainly they make more bucks off of a pack of cigarettes than the farmer who grew the tobacco, or anybody else who touched it before it arrived at the consumer -- tax is > 50Pct.
Certainly it wasn't the cops, who must use care now only to pull over offenders driving later model cars so as to not overburden the Justice Profit Center with an excess of violators who can't pay their fines.
Yes, that's Washington - the state where you're safe from online gaming and you can't buy Sudafed because you might make meth with it, but you can sell meth, crack, heroin and Ecstasy with impunity in the Junior High School because there's no profit in arresting you. Click it or ticket. Fines are double in work zones. Thanx.
It offends me that I live in the state that reelected Baghdad Jim http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/903913/po sts after this piece ran.
It would be more honest to put a menu on the state house: Calendar days: $50K, Minor issues: $500k. Major Issues: $4M. Public/Private partnerships like ballparks or public transit: Profit sharing whatever we can fleece the taxpayer for. No law too unenforceable, no cause to liberal. It's for our children, dammit! Won't anyone think of the children?
Do I sound bitter? Yes. My son really deserves an "Alex recognition day" on the state calendar, but where am I gonna get $50K?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I realise I'm getting a bit pedantic here but that's the definition of manslaughter, not murder. Murder is *by definition* pre-planned.
Also, I would disagree that someone who is unstable enough to kill someone during the course of an argument is not a danger to society. What about the next time someone spills their pint on him?