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Go To Jail For Visiting a Web Site? Top Law Prof Talks Up the Idea (slate.com)
David Rothman writes: Eric Posner, the fourth most-cited law professor in the U.S., says the government may need to jail you if you even visit an ISIS site after enough warnings. He says, "Never before in our history have enemies outside the United States been able to propagate genuinely dangerous ideas on American territory in such an effective way—and by this I mean ideas that lead directly to terrorist attacks that kill people. The novelty of this threat calls for new thinking about limits on freedom of speech.
The law would provide graduated penalties. After the first violation, a person would receive a warning letter from the government; subsequent violations would result in fines or prison sentences. The idea would be to get out the word that looking at ISIS-related websites, like looking at websites that display child pornography, is strictly forbidden" There would be exemptions for Washington-blessed journalists and others. Whew! Alas, this man isn't Donald Trump — he is a widely respected University of Chicago faculty member writing in Slate.
The law would provide graduated penalties. After the first violation, a person would receive a warning letter from the government; subsequent violations would result in fines or prison sentences. The idea would be to get out the word that looking at ISIS-related websites, like looking at websites that display child pornography, is strictly forbidden" There would be exemptions for Washington-blessed journalists and others. Whew! Alas, this man isn't Donald Trump — he is a widely respected University of Chicago faculty member writing in Slate.
Maybe he'll realize why it's a horrendously idiotic idea. Probably not though, people who envision draconian laws always do it believing that they'll never become a victim of their own fuckery.
USA how deep will you sink? Please stop.
I can see this being taken advantage of to quell free speech. For example, visiting a Tea Party or Libertarian website could land you in jail someday. Who gets to decide what is dangerous?
Also, wouldn't blocking certain websites be more effective? If they were using a foreign VPN, the US government wouldn't necessarily know anyway.
I can imagine this getting abused rather quickly, like someone important getting tricked into clicking a link.
""Never before in our history have enemies outside the United States been able to propagate genuinely dangerous ideas on American territory in such an effective way"
I first thought he was talking about the idea that people might go to jail for merely visiting webpages.
State is more than capable of effective propaganda (or counter-propaganda). If ISIS is such existential threat, then correct approach to defeat their speech is more speech. For a fraction of what it costs to bomb them US Gov't can create top-notch documentaries and satire to effectively neutralize the threat.
Those willing to give up their freedoms... and all that.
Eric Posner suggest we jail people we find engaging in objectionable ideas. I find Eric Posner's ideas highly objectionable, therefore following his suggested approach we should throw him, and anyone visiting Slate, into jail and throw away the keys.
He could equally be talking about radio transmission, the ability to print and distribute pamphlets, or satellite TV broadcast.
I always find it a bit disturbing when legal theorists talk about ways to work around the constitution, seeing it as an impediment rather than a set of ideals. Amend it, by all means. If you genuinely think that freedom of speech is an outdated concept it would be hypocritical of me not to support your right to say so.
I'm pretty sure that the United States founders would agree that "genuinely dangerous ideas" (let's remember that not so long ago, things like homosexuality, transgenderism, interracial marriage would have all been on that list - hell my parents were married in 1955 and his parents didn't go to the wedding because my mom was LUTHERAN) should very much BE discussed in the marketplace of ideas. The only way stupid ideas die is when they're revealed to be stupid.
Of course, part and parcel of their worldview was that if you were deemed enough of a threat to society, they just killed you and didn't wring their hands over the injustice of it either.
-Styopa
What's scary about this is that he has even written books on Constitutional law but proposes ideas such as this. I guess it is pretty telling though that according to his Wikipedia page he is a big proponent of the NSA and its pervasive collecting of US citizen's data. I'm assuming his books on constitutional law just skip over the 1st and 4th Amendments.
I also wonder what effect this would have on scholars and researchers. Had ISIL been around in it's current form 4-5 years ago I would have most likely written my Master's thesis on them and possibly might have attempted to access some of their propaganda sites for research. Besides, wouldn't criminalizing this information just make it seem that much more powerful and also make it harder to refute? People will seek it out just to see what is so bad about it.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Anti-abortionist and ultra conservative right wing christian websites are going to fall under this umbrella too right, after the recent domestic terrorist shooting, right?
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
I also love how this is treated as a new problem ("A new quality of terrorism", as an European politician put it a short while ago), as if there never was an Unabomber, an IRA, a RAF, an ETA or a "top terrorist" Carlos The Jackal. And the fact that a mass shooting totally changes everything because it was political, in contrast to the several hundred other shootings that weren't ;-)
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
"After the first violation, a person would receive a warning letter from the government;"
Wow! How would the government know my address? I'm sitting in a Starbucks with free WIFI and obviously an active VPN.
I guess he has more knowledge about the law than of that series of tubes, like all those morons with the 'great ideas'.
Something has going seriously wrong when a well respected professor of law begins saying that there are dangerous ideas, and that ideas can be the direct cause of terrorism.
Huh?
There are dangerous ideas.
Ideas are precisely the cause of terrorism.
Conversely his idea (having thought police) is also deeply dangerous.
Finally your idea of pretending something you don't like doesn't exist is also dangerous, because if can lead to quite amazing blindness.
That's the thing though, just because ideas are dangerous, doesn't mean they should be illegal.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
...means the terrorists win. Again. We should never consider giving power to bat-shit crazy fundamentalist types (of every stripe) by suggesting that their doctrine is "dangerous". What we should be doing is something like the equivalent of a giant marquee with flashing neon arrows, announcing "Look at this bat-shit crazy ranting". Ideas deserve the light of day. Bad ideas deserve derision in that light.