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State Lawmaker Wants To Ban Anonymous Posting Online
bfwebster writes "According to a local news article from last week, Kentucky state lawmaker Tim Couch wants to ban anonymous posting on the internet in order to 'cut down on online bullying', which he says has been 'a particular problem in eastern Kentucky.' His bill would require posters to register with their real names and e-mail addresses under threat of fines. Looks like another battle in the right for anonymous free speech."
hope in hell of being enforced, or are at the very least enforceable.
=======
Science -- Sealed, Delivered.
We should ban stupid politicians. Unfortunately, how do you ban ignorance?
If you're getting bullied online by anonymous people and taking it seriously, then your parents messed up big time somewhere along the way. I grew up with the internet, and was constantly harassed by anonymous idiots. I just knew better than to take them seriously, since they are SOME IDIOT ON THE INTERNET!!!!!1!!1!!!!lim(x->0)[sin(x)/x]. I'm getting really sick and tired of parents trying to use the legal system to protect their kids. The idea is that the legal system protects kids from things they don't understand. I'm pretty sure that the average child understands that some anonymous person on the internet cannot harm them and that they are probably just some other stupid kid. I wish parents would start actually raising their kids. My parents did a great job, and it was their first time.
Just figure out who I am so you can find me.
And if you think any country's laws - including the USA's - can regulate the world-wide Internet, you're dreaming. All this law would accomplish is to cause the creation of anonymous blogging centers in countries with stricter privacy laws.
And by the way, hasn't the Supreme Court already said that you have a right to be anonymous online?
The only people who would benefit from this are the individuals, corporations, and politicians seeking to quash dissent by outing, and then suing, those who post unflattering comments, no matter how truthful. And those aren't the people I want to be helping out.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Bills like this don't get anywhere in America. Unless he can come up with some religious reason to deny anonymous postings, there won't be any support from his constituency. You start messing with the first or second amendment in Kentucky and it's going to be an uphill battle.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Ooh, flamebait, fun! It's Monday after the clock change, so I'll entertain myself while my brain awakes.
:-P
First of all, you spelled "know" incorrectly.
Secondly, where did anyone mention religion? I must've missed that.
Thirdly, do you have to use profanity? I mean I just sent Rep. ClueStick an email on his form, and was perfectly polite in telling him where to stick his bill
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
I'm pretty sure the result would really just be to drive a lot of web hosts out of Kentucky.
(IANAL)
We need to ban anonymous posting to the internet because bullies who post anonymously are hard to track down.
So we'll make them register their names and email addresses with the state.
But they can get literally thousands of email address, for free, from services that aren't subject to our state's (or even country's) laws, and there is no mechanism even possible to police what email address or name they actually use, so they can continue to post anonymously.
And even though we can't track down anonymouse cyber bullies now, we'll be able to later, when they're not using the name or email address they registered with the state.
In addition to having no effect whatsoever, we will give them a legal defense of "Well, that's not my name or email adress! I registered those with the state, just like the law requires, so how could it be me?"
This doesn't even look like an attempt to "do something." In fact, it looks more like an attempt to protect bullies than punish them.
A law that isn't enforceable is totally pointless. If it is a legit, enforceable law, then you can debate if it is a good one or not, but an unenforceable law is just the height of stupidity and a waste of time. I mean we could pass a law saying the sun needs to be cooler, but there is fuck all we can do to make that happen, so it would be a waste of time.
I'm not saying I agree with laws that are restricting speech, but at least if it was a law that was enforceable then there could be a point to it. You could debate if it was a good idea or not, if the tradeoff was worth it. Here, it is just a fucking waste of time since regardless of any merits, it just won't work.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't SCOTUS already rule that anonymous speech is protected? Ah yes, here we go: http://www.eff.org/issues/anonymity. Yet another law just waiting to be struck down, and it took five seconds on Google to demonstrate why.
Ah, so SCOTUS decisions are written in stone, are they? If that were true, we would still be counting African-Americans as 3/5 of a person. Courts change, attitudes change, decisions that seemed immutable get overturned or reversed or gutted. Don't think it can't happen. If a liberal or centrist justice dies, and Bush gets one more appointment, we may have a Court that will one day declare the Constitution itself "unconstitutional..."
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
You forgot the "Think of the Children" crowd. Making anonymous postings illegal will make it "easier" to catch the predators after your children!
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
That'll be amusing when he tries to get this passed. I'd love to see this bill get laughed at when he is informed that it has virtually no enforceable methods and that international users will just see this as another ignorant "Stupid American" method of trying to control what it cannot.
Oh, before anyone mods me as flamebait (which the zealots love to do) I'm a patriotic American and in case you haven't heard about something called The Monroe Doctrine...
The question is not whether or not the law is enforceable.
The question is whether this bill will help Rep. Couch get reelected in his little corner of Kentucky come November.
(I'd bet $0.11 it does).
2008 is an election year. Expect to see a lot more of this sort of thing, coming soon to a legislature near you.
>Why the hell doesn't someone sue one of these idiots for breach of trust?
Because they face re-election every few years. If they are supported by their constituents,
they return to office. If lawmakers were subject to legal threats every time they proposed
something, there would be so much abuse that would make today's level of corruption look like
child's play.
Consider that a state assemblyman represents a rather limited group of constituents, and is
a pretty small voice in a pretty big crowd. He is small potatoes even by Kentucky standards,
representing a county of about 25,000 population, under 30 percent of them high schoolgraduates,
where the average income is $16,000 and the average home value under $10,000.
Think about these numbers, and then ask yourself how much influence you think Rep. Tim Couch has,
and how likely it is for this bill to get past committee.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
The answer is because they have immunity. I think the GP assumed that you knew this, since virtually all public officials have personal immunity from civil suits when acting in the performance of their duties in the U.S., outside of some fairly narrowly-defined exceptions. He was more getting into the issue of why public officials have immunity -- it's because the solution to a misbehaving politician isn't supposed to be a lawsuit, it's voting them out the next time they're up for reelection.
Since lawsuits could be used by a powerful minority to effectively hamstring the government, producing potentially very undemocratic outcomes, there's always been a strong tendency towards limiting their use (the other big example would be the blanket prohibition on suing the government itself, except where the government itself allows it, via sovereign immunity).
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Exactly, that's what started this whole discussion. Until there is some way to enforce some type of fiscal responsibility on the government. Government officials need to account for these grandiose schemes they have - we have to stop letting them just print/borrow money.
If you were to add up all the taxes, fees, cost of compliance with tax laws and cost of real inflation, and spell it out for people, then you'd see that rioting in the streets you mention.
If you could make people understand, but I don't think you ever will. I would LOVE to see a president get into office that consolidated all of the tax code into something like a flat sales tax. We have allowed lawmakers to hide tax by scattering it around and making employers and merchants pay it. Most people have no idea how much they pay, and figure if their boss pays their unemployment and social security for them it doesn't actually come out of their wages.
Of course, everyone feels so powerless to stop it... not sure what anyone can do, but watch the meltdown.
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Here's his official web feedback form. Note that while it requires you to provide your name and address, nothing validates that those are actually your real name and address. You might want to point that out to the representative.