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Bill Would Declare Your Blog a Weapon
Mike writes "Law prof Eugene Volokh blogs about a US House of Representatives bill proposed by Rep. Linda T. Sanchez and 14 others that could make it a federal felony to use your blog, social media like MySpace and Facebook, or any other Web media 'to cause substantial emotional distress through "severe, repeated, and hostile" speech.' Rep. Sanchez and colleagues want to make it easier to prosecute any objectionable speech through a breathtakingly broad bill that would criminalize a wide range of speech protected by the First Amendment. The bill is called The Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act, and if passed into law (and if it survives constitutional challenge) it looks almost certain to be misused."
What usually happens with these kinds of unconstitutional laws is they are rammed through with the authors knowing full well they won't stand up to a constitutional challenge. Think about certain aspects of the Patriot Act, the laws regarding civil asset forfiture, and the Lautenberg amendment to the Brady Bill (AKA the Domestic Violence Offender Gun Ban where you are denied 2nd amendment rights forever after having a restraining order lodged against you or being merely accused of a crime, even in absence of a conviction thereof).
What happens is the courts pile on the charges so high that defendants are forced to settle for a plea bargain, which is how 95% of all trials are resolved. Thus laws which blatantly violate the constitution are allowed to sit on the books forever with no effective challenge against them, generating eternal revenues for the state and ensuring that a long line of semi-innocents head off to the hotel-with-barred-windows for violating some petty legal technicality. The Branch Davidians were gassed and incinerated alive for nothing more serious than an unpaid tax or unfilled-out form regarding certain firearms laws.
The same nasty precedent set by the previous examples will be precisely how it plays out here. Not only will this law pass but it will be misused and abused left and right, and nobody will cut it off because that would stop the gravy train.
If someone is obviously and intentionally harassing someone else, I have no problem with them having legal recourse.
Oh really? Define "obviously and intentionally harassing" in a legalistic manner that is so clear cut that it cannot be abused, misused, or given an extremely broad interpretation? If I post a scathing blog indicting the Ku Klux Klan and a Klan member finds it harassing, can my blog be shut down? Last year, the Canadian government prosecuted someone for "hate speech" because they were critical of Islam, and some Muslims found it offensive. Do you really want to start down this road?
Folks like you scare me. You think just because *you* can easily define things like "harassment" that everybody else conforms to your definition of the word. You don't think beyond your own idea of the concept, and you're willing to trade First Amendment protections because of it. Frightening. Truly frightening.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky