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Florida Judge Upholds Conviction By Defining "Email" To Include IMs
Simmons was also convicted under a different law against luring a minor via the Internet, and there seems little doubt that he violated that law. But the harmful to minors law is separate; it prohibits "transmission" of data that is "harmful to minors", and includes the clause: "(b) 'Transmit' means to send to a specific individual known by the defendant to be a minor via electronic mail."
I think that how one reacts to this decision is basically a litmus test for how much one cares about the rule of law. The state legislature obviously would have included instant messages in the statute if they'd thought about it at the time, especially if they thought that someone would later try to use that as a loophole to escape conviction. And if Simmons had gotten off, the legislature almost certainly would have amended the law to include instant messages. But it's hard to argue with the fact that the law as written was limited to e-mail, and did not cover the instant messages that Simmons sent.
Justice Peggy Quince, writing unanimously for the Supreme Court, acknowledged this objection but answered it by arguing, "To the extent that the term 'electronic mail' is not sufficiently defined by the statute, we interpret it as including both email and instant message communications sent to a specific individual." But what was her basis for saying that "electronic mail" was not sufficiently defined in the first place? She also wrote in a footnote on page 11, "We agree with the First District's interpretation of 'electronic mail' as including both email and electronic mail sent by instant messaging." The phrase "electronic mail sent by instant messaging" sounds like something Ted Stevens would say.
But Justice Quince won't be subject to the same ridicule as Ted Stevens, and she knows it. It's not as if many people will come forward to criticize the court's decision, only to be attacked with cries of "Either you're with us, or you're with the terrori -- I mean, the child molesters!" However, she could have taken a stand in favor of the rule of law, by saying that Simmons clearly didn't violate the law against transmitting harmful to minors material by e-mail, and if the legislature wants the law to cover IMs, they have to go back and change it. (It's not as if he'd walk away with a clean record, since he'd still have a conviction for luring a minor for sex.) It is discouraging that neither the District Court nor any of the judges on the Florida Supreme Court chose to take that stand.
Ironically, this court decision may partly help the ACLU and other groups when they challenge other state laws that prohibit the communication of certain types of material "by e-mail" -- they could argue that the definition of "e-mail" is unconstitutionally vague. If the judge peers down at them and says "What the hell are you talking about? Everybody knows what e-mail is", the ACLU can argue, "Not necessarily. The Florida Supreme Court thinks that it includes instant messages. And, Your Honor, since judges are the wisest beings in the universe, if even they can't figure it out, what chance do the rest of us have?"
Since judges can decide that 'e-mail' is vague enough to consider any and all forms of electronic message transmission covered by that term, somehow laws that specify 'e-mail' are somehow delegitimized?
I think you've painted yourself into a corner with that argument.
On a serious note, what is the difference? In essence aren't you still transmitting words for communication across the Internet?
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
You won't hear social conservatives crying "activist judges!" about this one.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Often in the court system, these legal loopholes (be they ill-defined laws or what have you) allow criminals to go free. The judge took common sense and applied it, something judges are allowed to do, as lawyers try to circumvent the law by defeating it with specifics. Kudos to intelligent decision-making, and it's time to rewrite the law from "e-mail" to "electronic correspondence".
This only goes to show how stupid an futile it is to create special laws for the Internet. Solicitation of minors, or any other communication, is just that, no matter what medium is used to convey it.
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
Additionally, the court ruling states:
Here's the link to the Florida Legal Code.
The fact of the matter is that the actual section of the law that he was being prosecuted under relates to the Internet in general. It could have been a series of windows messenger popup alerts and it still would have gone through under this statute because even that could technically count as an "online service."
I seriously doubt that the conviction would have been over-turned if the judge had defined email in a more limited fashion.
The judge probably did the right thing. The man was still attempting to socillicit from an underage girl over the internet, who cares excatly which communications protocol was used?
I do. If you take the time to look up the millions of obscure laws written half in Latin, the least you should be able to expect is that the law be enforced as written. This guy was already guilty of violating a different law and their was no reason why another "on the internet" law should have been applied.
The difference is between living in a state where people are ruled by laws and living in one where people arbitrarily enforce their beliefs upon you. Just because you agree with the beliefs in this case does not make it any less wrong. Two wrongs don't make a right, and that is exactly what is being done here.
Here's the definition in 668.602:
IANAL, but it seems pretty obvious that this should cover instant messages as well as e-mail as it does not refer to any of the RFCs for e-mail (2821, 2822, etc).
The rest of the law can be seen at http://election.dos.state.fl.us/laws/04laws/ch_200 4-233.pdf.
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I'm curious as to how this works. Based on the article, it seems as though he is being charged based solely on what occurred between him and the sheriff pretending to be a little girl.
I'm sorry, but does nobody else find something wrong with this? I'm not saying that this guy didn't necessarily deserve it, but how can it possibly make sense for him to be charged for sending images of himself to a 'fictitious' person (i.e. the sheriff pretending to be a little girl). In other words, if the sheriff hadn't lied about his identity, there wouldn't have been a crime here, even if the man had done the same thing?
I'm all for stopping/getting help for people like that, but how on Earth is the above a crime?
Hmmm... interesting politically moral question.
Do we do what's right with regards to justice?
Or do we do what's right with regards to (legal) policy?
I would side with the judge and say this law should include IM's and any electronic communication, VoIP, blogs (MySpace), etc. However, this does leave open the attack for a different case, where it's not as obvious or the crime is not as heinous, to be exploited in the same regards... think RIAA.
I think this is a situation where one has to weight the seriousness of the crime against the importance of the law.
This makes me think of the case in Wisconsin where 2 guys saw a picture in the newspaper of a 21 year old girl who recently died in an accident. They thought she looked pretty so they went and bought some condoms and dug up her grave. They where caught at the cemetery, before anything could come about, but since there were no laws on the book, they couldn't stick any charges to these guys.
This is a situation, again, where the law should be capable of proper punishment of these people and not just some petty crime because 'there was nothing on the books specifically'. In a perfect world, we would all agree and we wouldn't need written laws because we could just file things case by case, but that's just not realistic.
Cheers,
Fozzy
"The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth." ~1984 George Orwell
The prime example I usually bring up is the interstate commerce clause. Congress used it to justify writing laws to promote civil rights, beyond the powers granted to them by the Constitution (specifically, the 10th amendment in the Bill of Rights). I'm a big fan of the motivation, but I've always questioned the means...
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Legally, yes- which is how it should be.
I work in a lawyer's office, and I was dealing with a case almost exactly like this one. The court (thankfully) ruled that if the framers had intended for the law to cover the specific issue we were dealing with, they should have written it that way. As it is, the law is clear in its written meaning- and therefore any loopholes have to be fixed legislatively.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
Laws are intended to be as literal as possible in most cases. Sure, there's some leeway in things to allow for things that aren't quite right but still obviously intended in the original. The example of gravedigging perverts isn't such a hideous failing of law, the whole point of the US legal system is to allow freedom unless it's something deemed important enough to dictate laws.
I think this is a case where technology moved too fast for the law to keep absolute specifics in place, but it's not a big deal. Is an IM really *so* different from an e-mail message? Besides the speed of communication and responses they are by definition almost identical. So what if they use different network protocols? That's like saying someone's complaint is invalid because they use an IMAP mail client and the law only mentions POP3.
The problem with this is that tech changes waaaay too quickly to try and be specific in every law.
I see very little need for tech specific laws. The laws are supposed to be arbitrating conflicting rights. In principal, adding technology to the equation does little or nothing.
I mean, you're the same guy who, in 5 years will be saying, "Hey the law only covers IM, Email, Blog posts and VOIP...It doesn't say anything about holo-chat rooms!"
We already have a law that says it's illegal to solicit a minor for sexual acts. Why do we need one to add another penalty if it is done on e-mail, IM phone, messages on rocks, or mental telepathy?
Forcing the law down to a super nit-picky technical medium is ripe for setting up a huge number of bad precidents.
Agreed, which is why laws should be about actions, not the means by which those actions are completed. I victim is just as dead whether they're killed with a rock, a firearm, or a disintegrator ray. That is why the law should ban murder not killings with rocks or firearms or disintegrator rays.
Yes I do. If it is is unethical to knowingly solicit a minor, then it is unethical to do so via any medium and there is no reason for mediums to be specified in law. The only reason these unnecessary laws are passed is to garner votes from morons. "Look how tough governor Smith is on cyber-criminals. Now they are convicted of two crimes for each act and serve twice the sentence instead of one." It is idiotic and needs to stop.
In particular, is there some reason to think that the *legal* definition of "electronic mail" perfectly coincides with the common usage of "email"? I would not assume so. The fact that SMS and IM are not called "email" is simply a marketing decision. Let's say google optimized gmail so that one gmail user sending an email to another gmail user never uses SMTP. Is it still email? I would say, "sure." If the law made reference to SMTP, POP, etc, then there would clearly be a distinction... and it would have been silly to write the law that way.
You compose an email message and send it to your email server. The email server then figures out which server it needs to be delivered to based on the recipient. ...
;-)
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From this, I'd conclude that you understand little of email in general, and completely misunderstand SMTP.
The RFCs that define SMTP don't talk about email servers. The primary intended implementation would attempt first to make a direct TCP link to the recipient machine, and if successful, the message would go directly from source to destination machine with no intermediate "server" machines.
The primary reason that email servers exist is that Microsoft's DOS systems at first couldn't do direct TCP connections to each other, because they couldn't run a background task to listen on an IP port. Or even if they could, the machines usually had only a modem internet connection, so most of they time they weren't connected to the internet at all, and attempting to connect to them would fail. So the server approach was added to SMTP to accommodate machines with such intermittent network connections.
Even now that many home users have always-on internet connections, there are still many who don't, so the server system is kept alive. And ISPs do like it, because storing all messages on their server lets them do commercially-useful things like scanning the messages for keywords, for use in targeted advertising campaigns. (And it also means that they can comply with government access requirements if necessary.)
But the idea that email always works by bouncing messages off servers is flat wrong. I routinely run a number of email agents (some of which I wrote myself as tools to diagnose network problems) that deliver email by connecting directly to the machine in the address, and hunt around for servers if that fails. If I were to send you a message from the machines that I work on most, you'd see only one "Received:" line in the headers, indicating that it reached you in one hop with no intermediate servers involved. Unless you're on a Microsoft system, of course, in which case you're still probably not running an SMTP listener, so my machines can't connect to your port 25. (People knowledgable in SMTP will now explain why you still might see only one "Received:" line.
I'd go into more detail, but I can hear the readers falling asleep already
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Email goes to your inbox -- you don't have to read it right away, or even be logged in.
And if a chat program had a feature that people could send you messages without you being logged in, then I would say that did, in fact, count as an email program.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The general debate here is whether the Judge crossed a line or not. What worries me more is that police entrapment is becoming common place and accepted. An agent of the sheriff's department, went online to look for someone that would agree to have sex with a minor. The goal was to create a situation that lead to a crime. As I understand it, that is entrapment, and is illegal.
I don't know the name of the movie, but there was a trailer that was running for a while, where an adult was at a club, and two hot twins offer sex to the adult. The adult asks "You two are 18, right?" and the response was "Well, together we are 34!". While this was obviously intended to be humor, it presents a reasonable hypothetical situation.
Interpretation has always been, and will always be, a power of the court system. If the law were black and white, there would be no need for trials or courts. You're auctioning off your flexibility here, for good and for bad.
What annoys me about this whole discussion the most, though, is how Slashdotters complain that legislators and lawyers don't understand technology, but when they do the right thing, they get blasted for it. "Electronic mail" probably should have been "electronic messaging" but that's really neither here nor there. These people recognized that the intent of the law was to protect people from electronic solicitation, and they applied it. You can't wait for the wording of the law to catch up with you--court decisions are what push the laws to change. There's no automatic review of most laws, so if you want them fixed, you have to take it to the courts or to the appropriate legislative body.
Slashdotters want the law to change to reflect a better stance on technology, but when someone takes the steps to make that happen, they're derided. Maybe instead of childish anarchism, everyone should go back and take a basic government course.