From news.com:
[DISCLAIMER: Your friendly barrister has not had the time to review the content of this article for, you know, legal crap.]
"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."
Now anyone could find out my "real name" in about 30 seconds here, but doesn't the First Amendment guarantee us the right to annoy???
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10 comments:
I'll want a front row seat for the first court case where the merits of what "annoying" means are debated.
Unenforceable.
Certainly agreed--in theory. That is 7th-grade civics stuff, but tellme---how confident do you feel, Schmidlap, that a bench populated with Bushite Stepford judges will respect even the most fundamental of civil liberties?
True enough.
Maybe the bigger problem is that it's all meaningless. When the government can arrest me, deny me habeas, render me to Uzbekistan, and boil me to death, why should they (or I) worry about meeting the burden of defining "annoying" speech?
Deck chairs on the Titanic, and all that.
The government can also stop you on the street without probable cause, inspect your waist for seatbelts and breath for beer, compel you to provide evidence against yourself for the latter, line you up like sheep at airports and courthouses and warrantlessly search you and your belongings, demand that hundreds of thousands of retail outlets track you and your OTC drug purchases ... all prior to and/or independent of any Bush administration incursions on the Bill of Rights.
snfff, snfff ... I smell hypocrisy.
If you can't tell the difference between a breathalyzer and being boiled to death, I can't help you.
I'm confused - how is regulating the proper use of a deadly weapon (your ton+ car, flying along at up to 70 mph, legally) the same as regulating whether or not I annoy you with what I say?
how is regulating the proper use of a deadly weapon (your ton+ car, flying along at up to 70 mph, legally) the same as regulating whether or not I annoy you with what I say?
It's not the same; it's similar.
It's similar along the axis of "government regulation".
If you accept that the government has the
a] authority, and
2] the duty
to "regulate" for our betterment ['betterment' being mutably defined], then when the government defines a 'betterment', they have the authority and duty to regulate it.
Two airplanes at 30K' on the same vector ... big, bad corporations which use misleading showboating to sell their products ... salving peoples' hurt feelings ... what's the practical difference?
Americans have been demanding the government save them from all manner of evil for so long that "evil" has expanded to encompass "naughty" and now "rude". It's habit, for both Americans and our government.
If we don't want the government to save us from rude, then we really shouldn't be asking it to save us from naughty.
There is a large difference between the government regulating things that can kill and the government regulating speech, which, while it can cause any number of emotions, cannot kill. That's not a matter of degrees, it's a fundamental difference.
There is a large difference between the government regulating things that can kill and the government regulating speech
While I would personally agree with you, I cannot allow the flagranat denial of reality to exist in my vicinity without at least a passing reference to its existence -- agreeable or otherwise to your or my personal philosophies.
There is a whole area of tort law devoted to the "civil rights" of assuaging hurt feelings. Loosely, the concept is known as "fighting words" or "hostile environment".
If you insult me to the point I lash out in petulant rage, I could -- and people have -- rationalized their actions, in court, and to sympathetic juries -- as being driven to do so because the words were just so outrageous.
If you "marginalize", "trivialize" or "objectify" ...say, ... a woman in your office by saying something along the lines of "this job turns me on", then it can be, has been, and is now, being argued as a violation of civil rights by hurt feelings. There's a Navy Lt somewhere in MD who's being court martialed because a woman overheard him say "getting on this boat turns me on" or words very similar.
Personally, I'm with you; sticks and stones and all that. I'm darned good and creative with words and can fight back no problem.
But the reality is: this nation has a legal landscape that has defined "rude" to be regulable -- regulatable? This is just one more means of doing what's already been done.
If we don't want the government "protecting" us like this, then we shouldn't be asking them to protect us like this.
If we don't want the government "protecting" us like this, then we shouldn't be asking them to protect us like this.
I am not. Many people can't handle what freedom of speech really means. That people have gotten juries to say that there's some right to not being offended is one of the sadder commentaries on our country.
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