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It's no joke. Last Thursday, President Bush signed into law a prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity.
In other words, it's OK to flame someone on a mailing list or in a blog as long as you do it under your real name. Thank Congress for small favors, I guess.
This ridiculous prohibition, which would likely imperil much of Usenet, is buried in the so-called Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act. Criminal penalties include stiff fines and two years in prison.
"The use of the word 'annoy' is particularly problematic," says Marv Johnson, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. "What's annoying to one person may not be annoying to someone else."
It's illegal to annoy
A new federal law states that when you annoy someone on the Internet, you must disclose your identity. Here's the relevant language.
"Whoever...utilizes any device or software that can be used to originate telecommunications or other types of communications that are transmitted, in whole or in part, by the Internet... without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass any person...who receives the communications...shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than two years, or both."
Buried deep in the new law is Sec. 113, an innocuously titled bit called "Preventing Cyberstalking." It rewrites existing telephone harassment law to prohibit anyone from using the Internet "without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy."
To grease the rails for this idea, Sen. Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, and the section's other sponsors slipped it into an unrelated, must-pass bill to fund the Department of Justice. The plan: to make it politically infeasible for politicians to oppose the measure.
The tactic worked. The bill cleared the House of Representatives by voice vote, and the Senate unanimously approved it Dec. 16.
There's an interesting side note. An earlier version that the House approved in September had radically different wording. It was reasonable by comparison, and criminalized only using an "interactive computer service" to cause someone "substantial emotional harm."
That kind of prohibition might make sense. But why should merely annoying someone be illegal?
There are perfectly legitimate reasons to set up a Web site or write something incendiary without telling everyone exactly who you are.
FAQ: The new 'annoy' law explained
Think about it: A woman fired by a manager who demanded sexual favors wants to blog about it without divulging her full name. An aspiring pundit hopes to set up the next Suck.com. A frustrated citizen wants to send e-mail describing corruption in local government without worrying about reprisals.
In each of those three cases, someone's probably going to be annoyed. That's enough to make the action a crime. (The Justice Department won't file charges in every case, of course, but trusting prosecutorial discretion is hardly reassuring.)
Clinton Fein, a San Francisco resident who runs the Annoy.com site, says a feature permitting visitors to send obnoxious and profane postcards through e-mail could be imperiled.
"Who decides what's annoying? That's the ultimate question," Fein said. He added: "If you send an annoying message via the United States Post Office, do you have to reveal your identity?"
Fein once sued to overturn part of the Communications Decency Act that outlawed transmitting indecent material "with intent to annoy." But the courts ruled the law applied only to obscene material, so Annoy.com didn't have to worry.
"I'm certainly not going to close the site down," Fein said on Friday. "I would fight it on First Amendment grounds."
He's right. Our esteemed politicians can't seem to grasp this simple point, but the First Amendment protects our right to write something that annoys someone else.
It even shields our right to do it anonymously. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas defended this principle magnificently in a 1995 case involving an Ohio woman who was punished for distributing anonymous political pamphlets.
If President Bush truly believed in the principle of limited government (it is in his official bio), he'd realize that the law he signed cannot be squared with the Constitution he swore to uphold.
And then he'd repeat what President Clinton did a decade ago when he felt compelled to sign a massive telecommunications law. Clinton realized that the section of the law punishing abortion-related material on the Internet was unconstitutional, and he directed the Justice Department not to enforce it.
Bush has the chance to show his respect for what he calls Americans' personal freedoms. Now we'll see if the president rises to the occasion.
Biography
Declan McCullagh is CNET News.com's chief political correspondent. He spent more than a decade in Washington, D.C., chronicling the busy intersection between technology and politics. Previously, he was the Washington bureau chief for Wired News, and a reporter for Time.com, Time magazine and HotWired. McCullagh has taught journalism at American University and been an adjunct professor at Case Western University.
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Regards,
Anonymous
Secondly, there are WAY to many people with WAY too much free time on their hands, doing such jerky things as passing assinine legislation like this. (Did I annoy someone by saying that)?.....(TOO BAD)!!
Thirdly, While not everything that is: spoken, printed, typed & posted, or broadcast, may be: polite, politically correct, in good taste, etc;
we are still guaranteed FREEDOM of SPEECH & EXPRESSION, whether such words "annoy" someone or not. There are TOO many OVERLY sensitive people out there, getting all bent out of shape over TOO MANY TRIVIAL things, these days,.....GET A LIFE!!
On top of it all, whether our right to free speech and expression is sanctioned by the U.S. Constitution or NOT,.....speech, thought & expression are inherent HUMAN abilities, and it is only a smug, ARROGANT Government (or a tyrannical one) that would dare believe they could legislate these human processes.
This law is one example of how some lawmakers (and the chief law-signer himself) have their collective heads irreversibly stuck up in a place where the sun never shines and where they love to hear the echo of their own voices.
Lastly,....I must have annoyed SOMEONE, with what I have said, but I don't give a rat's a$$, and I must have violated this new law, because in addition to possibly annoying someone, I am also doing it anonomously!
cat
The article references a good example of this scope of reference when the owner of the site Annoy.com felt his site would be impacted by the Communications Decency Act, but the courts ruled that this only applied to obscene material, not that which he was delivering. Scope of reference from the letter of the law to the spirit of the law established.
Using common sense to interpret slight ambiguities wouldn't leave much for pundits and lawyers to do, though, would it? Makes for a good read though, especially when its never been hipper to be anti-establishment.
BTW, good job on breaking the stroy, Declan.
It could be argued an IP address is an identity.
It could be argued an account name or email address is an "identity".
So the only persons likely to be affected by this law would be the cowards who cyber stalk from behind anonymous remailers. Anonymous remailers remove the identity of the original sender and then retransmit the message to the destination defined by the sender. Therefore the send of the message has no "identity", as the point of origin can't be traced. The remailer administrators themselves don't have any way of knowing where the message came from or any way to trace or block such messages.
If the intent of this law is to make abuse of anonymous remailers illegal, than it's a step in the right direction.
However if the real intent of the law is to insist every person place their name upon every message they send out to the internet, it's clearly a violation of the First Amendment rights for anonymous speech.
People have a right to privacy just as much as they have a right not to be harrassed.
If someone is "annoyed" enough and have legitimate grounds to be annoyed, that person can file a subpoena to the NSP or ISP or email provider.
There are a lot of kooks out on Usenet and on the intenet in general. LE should not be obliged under this law to be annoyed with frivolous complaints by kooks who feel "annoyed" because someone referred to a kook who would file a frivolous complaint like this, as a kook.
Are LE prepared for the flood of complaints about people who may have differing opinions which may be considered "annoying"?
This is a poorly written law.
- This country is becoming more and more like Nazi Germany everyday...
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by GPayne
January 9, 2006 11:29 AM PST
- Sieg Heil Bush.
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