Annoying someone via the Internet is now a federal crime.
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."
thats another one of those laws like , a guy cant walk around barechest in public. It doesnt mean you;ll get busted on it for walking around barechest, it means if they want to bust you for some reason - they can fall back on one of their cache of bullshit laws for busting people they want to bust.
its a fascist way of compiling laws. sarcasm. must be great to be american. end sarcasm.
basically with the law you mention, any kind of activist they want to bust they can and will easily construe his activities as being an annoyance, and bust him. or her. but most likely him.
****** america.
Sounds like the net is on it's way to ending it's free phase faster than we thought.
I for one would like to see how they would enforce this type of thing, especially when they're up to their elbows already with spammers, phishers and whatnot.
insanity , you obviously missed the point of my post.
the law is not there to put an end to trolls , and annoying kids. the law is there so they can bust people that they already want to bust. such as activists , whos activity can be construed as an annoyance.
also, heres a little homework kids. via the powers of your favourite search engine , go and find out who's in possession of the 13 'super computers' that the whole internet functions on/through.
scarier still is that they were supposed to share responsibility but went back on the arrangement and just said NO. WE;RE KEEPING THESE.
Nothing the government does anymore surprises me.
Doesn't matter who the president is, what party he represents... the whole of America seems doomed to turn into a totalitarian country, I think.
Special interest groups (and many others) are complaining all of our freedoms away.
And I must agree with Marv Johnson: it's nearly impossible to define a concrete legal explanation of "annoy" that everybody can & will agree with.
And there will be so many fine-line debates about whether something is considered an annoyance or constructive criticism or simple opinion.
hahame, you left out the source link that will add more to the story...
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-6024695.html Lol, im just if 10,000 americans annoyed someone and said a fake name, they wouldn be caught, and if they were nothing would be done, very petit crime
Over the years I have been flamed, berated, and down right insulted, but I always took them for what they were....text on a page.
I feel no need for the Government to step in and "protect" me, not when I have control over the Delete button.
"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names (or in this case words) will never hurt me"
Don't get too worked up. It's basically an extension of the telephone stalking laws. Although the wording (anoy) is vague, most of us trolls don't have to worry too much, unless you start stalking people.
you're all wrong. its just another convenient law which exists purely to bust people that they want to bust, namely activists.
Does anyone know how to find a copy of the order that was signed?
| wolfhnd wrote: |
| Does anyone know how to find a copy of the order that was signed? |
Try google.i thank website is a space which we can expless what we like
I think that the punishment should fit the crime, and the annoyance that a spam email causes is not worth sending someone to jail!!!
Talk about wasting money creating legislation to make the world a little better for the rich and much worse for the poor....
| Code: |
I think that the punishment should fit the crime, and the annoyance that a spam email causes is not worth sending someone to jail!!!
Talk about wasting money creating legislation to make the world a little better for the rich and much worse for the poor.... |
Agreed. 
| bewald wrote: |
I think that the punishment should fit the crime, and the annoyance that a spam email causes is not worth sending someone to jail!!!
Talk about wasting money creating legislation to make the world a little better for the rich and much worse for the poor.... |
They're not talking about spam. They're talking about stalking.
There's a HUGE difference. For example, a guy I know was trolling an H2 board a while back, (very successfully, I might add), and one of the mods release his IP address (He wasn't using a proxy I guess, or perhaps traced him back thru his email addy), to the rest of the forum. Several folks from the H2 forum took a road trip to Az in search of the troll to crack his skull because they were all butt-hurt about getting trolled.
That's stalking.jail time? that is stupid to me..... but so is harrasing people I dont see how that is a fitting punishment I think a lilttle fine would do..
You know what's funny about the 'net? It's international. Nice for goverments to place in laws but it doesn't work out.
In example last year my country introduced a law which allowed someone to sue another person if he/she would flame him/her. So let's say you would call me a fking ****** on a forum I could sue you.
Now the problem is, this only applies if the server is located in my country and if I'm a legal resident of this country.
The second applies, but as for the first? That hardly ever happens, especially not the servers I am on. Now there still is a third problem, the other person. If he/she lives in another country then I could sue the person, but the other country would have to deliver the person to my country before he or she could be prosecuted.
As you could imagine... that will just about never happen.
The same will be for this law, nice to be there, but the chance of it actually applying will be minimal. For something like the USA the chance will be somewhat bigger since it hosts a lot of servers, but now let's say the server of the blog you're on is located in the UK and you would then call someone a fking ****** under the name suck my d*** there isn't much to be done against it.
@S3nd K3ys, you cannot get a persons location out of his/her IP. Country/region is a possiblity, although even that doesn't have to apply, in example my ip switches from sweden, swiss, uk, netherlands and germany from time to time. I live in only 1 of those countries and log in on only 1 of these countries. Now an entire forum could go through all those forums, but they won't find me like that.
Even if you find a specific region it is just the question whether the person truly lives there or not. ISP's in general tend not to give you ip's which are being traced to local regions due to privacy issues, in example my closest IP which I get out of the range still is like 150km away from me.
So if some punks from a forum would try to come to me in real life there would still be a 150km radius left.
The only people which have a connection between your address and your ip is your ISP, they will not give it away, in certain countries not even to the cops unless it goes through court or even better, in some countries not at all and activity on the net is still anonymous and has no laws applying to it.
So to come short to the story of the guy's skull being bashed, as mythbusters would say "Totally busted", and so is every other myth about people being raped/killed/harrassed and such in real life due to internet activity unless the person was moronic enough to link himself to his own address and then go about doing crap like that.
(Hint: Google is an easy way to trace people if you know how to search for it)
Most likely, if something is true of the story which you said, that's how it happened, but not through the IP.
But well yeh, the US goverment currently cant even do something about warez servers being hosted in foreign countries, do they seriously think that on this they can do any better? 
Other countries have tried it as well already and were dull enough to waste time on coming up with it, they should learn from eachother. You cannot apply any law on the net untill the entire world would work united on it.
The only thing in which the majority of the world has an agreement on is the spread of virusses, trojans, etc. Still there are countries where spreading virusses aint illegal, so if you would live in one of those you can do so freely, enjoy and sit back and relax without having broken any local law. The internet is just another thing that has gotten to big for anyone to handle, they cant stop what is happening on the internet but to try and make people think they are controlling it, they make these stupid rules which are 100% certain to not work and no one will care about them so really, there is not point to even bother.
| hahame wrote: |
| Last Thursday, President Bush signed into law |
That's never good...the more they try to place restrictions on internet usage, the more backlash they will get. You don't need an army to do damage on the internet, there are many ways that people could retaliate and cause trouble for any force trying to impose such laws.
Personally i think dubya signed it cuz he's ticked off Osama keeps sending him bestiallity porn through his msn 
Seriously though, its seems like another case of taxpayer money hard at work with no real value in return, except for some lame bragging rights that Dubya did his part to make the net a safer place for the children of america, even though the truth is that nothing changed whatsoever. Brings to mind all the hype over spam legislation a few years ago, and the laws that were created to prevent that... a lot of good they did wouldn't you say? How in the world could/would they enforce such a law? The law passed by Bush would only apply to US citizens, and there are alot more countries than that using the Internet. How would they enforce those others countries to abide by our law(s)?? Seems impossible to me.
Politics.....ya gotta love it 
