Texas Teen Arrested Under New Online Harassment Law 494
SpaceGhost sends in a story from San Antonio, TX: "Police have arrested a 16-year-old girl on charges of harassment under a new Texas law that took effect September 1, 2009. H.B. 2003 says a person commits a third degree felony if the person posts one or more messages on a social networking site with the intent to harm, defraud, intimidate or threaten another person. Police say the harassment went on for a few months and involved a dispute over a boy. ... Some people expect legal challenges to the constitutionality of the new Internet law.' The law is evidently a response to the Lori Drew case.
SHITCOCK! (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a big difference between saying "This person, IMHO, is an asshole" and "I'm gonna punch your face until you bleed from the asshole" (just an example, I have never ever said such horrendous things. I'm appalled that you would take me for that kind of person you fucking piece of shit! I'LL KILL YOU!)
But seriously, I tell my kid and other kids in my family - don't say anything you wouldn't say in person. And if you threaten someone in person, well that's assault.
People need to learn that being a SHITCOCK Internet Fuckwad is unacceptable. People also need to grow thicker skin, but when it truly hurts someone it's time to stop.
Re:SHITCOCK! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Hard cases... (Score:3, Interesting)
And the necessary corrolary: Easy cases also make bad law.
"Easy" cases make bad law because they allow for bad decisions - "the law says one thing, but Mr. Greasy-Haired Used Car Salesman is so obviously running a dishonest business..."
"Hard" cases make bad law because they get decided on a very narrow point of law and set of facts, but then a thousand greasy shysters (er... "lawyers") cite them as precedent for cases that have almost no similarity at all.
In fact, the current way our system is cooked up, the overall conclusion to make is probably that adherence to precedent in general makes for shitty law.
Good Idea (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:About time (Score:4, Interesting)
More than that, can you show that this particular instance should be a felony?
Details of the incident weren't made available, but police say the harassment went on for a few months and involved a dispute over a boy.
That seems pretty vague to me. Should we throw every middle school student into the hoosegow? Typically, middle school is 3 years of constant harassment, and it definitely involves boys.
I'd bet money that this particular instance is a non-issue. The parents of the "victim" probably knew the sheriff.
Maybe this is as it should be (Score:3, Interesting)
<i>It seems the goal of the new law was to discourage using the name or persona of another person to create a Web page.</i>
If she really did this, she should be punished. Now, there's a good point that a felony charge may be too strict and existing laws about libel and false light should cover it (though there could be loopholes that keep it from doing so), but the general idea that we shouldn't tolerate this behavior is pretty sensible. Contrary to popular belief, trolling isn't actually good, and the fact that you can get away with it doesn't mean you should get away with it. Harassment is wrong, and I have no problem with the law punishing it.
(And for the Slashdotter who said "she wouldn't be charged with a felony if this was done in person", exactly how do you put up a web page under someone else's name in person?)
LOL (Score:2, Interesting)
third degree felony if the person posts one or more messages on a social networking site with the intent to harm, defraud, intimidate or threaten another person
LOL, by that standard, the entire fucking state of Texas should be arrested for the shit I see them say every day about the President. Don't mess with Texas!*
*And by "mess" we mean to consider a democratically and validly elected official office legitimate, and especially if you know, he ain't your kind of bigot.
Caption is misleading... (Score:1, Interesting)
The caption here is somewhat deceptive. I believe that the law that's being referenced is as follows:
Sec. 33.07. ONLINE HARASSMENT. (a) A person commits an offense if the person uses the name or persona of another person to create a web page on or to post one or more messages on a commercial social networking site:
(1) without obtaining the other person's consent; and
(2) with the intent to harass, embarrass, intimidate, or threaten any person.
If that's the case it's really the misappropriation of identity that's the problem. Without that element there's no way this survives constitutional challenge (can't turn protected speech to a felony just because it's published). To be honest I'm so fed up with all forms of identity theft I have no sympathy for offenders.
Let's have some fun with the law! (Score:3, Interesting)
/. should try to get a volunteer prosecuted for violating a Term of Service in a hilarious manner. Try to get some free legal counsel for both sides from civil liberties group or from a law firm looking for publicity and then run the sham law suit as far as possible in the court system.
I think it's critical to set precedent by addressing the issue directly rather than via an emotionally confused case. By the same token, I think it would be fun to run a few sham software licence related law suits through the courts. Come on! It'll be fun!
Re:Your Honor! (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure it is. That way, if it can't be resolved through the means you suggested, it goes to court. Not everything goes to court, sometimes people talk to each and resolve their differences. But, when you can't, you let the court decide. But, you have to give the courts some teeth.
These are the same kinds of laws that give people recourse for harassment and stalking. Something that the courts could nothing about until just recently. At least, in the USA.
Re:SHITCOCK! (Score:3, Interesting)
Agreed, actual threats of physical violence SHOULD be unlawful,,, but if you are threatening to kill someone, it doesn't really matter whether or not you are doing it online, does it? Making a law that ONLY applies to online behavior is assinine -- could she have printed the same statements out on paper and gotten away with it? Why is publishing them online any different?
That's my big problem with these laws.
We already have harassment/stalking/whatever laws on the books. If I punch you in the face, it's assault. It doesn't matter if I do it at school, or at the local GameStop, or at a grocery store. We don't need special laws for each building in the nation - we just say "this is assault."
Likewise, if I track your every movement for a week, snap pictures of you, film video of you, peek in your windows - it's stalking. Doesn't much matter if I'm doing it with a 35mm or a digital camera. Doesn't much matter if you're living in a trailer park or a fancy apartment. It's stalking.
If I won't leave you alone, call you constantly, send you annoying letters, leave notes on your car - it's harassment. Doesn't much matter if I type those notes on a typewriter, or if they're handwritten, or if I use recycle paper. Doesn't matter if I'm calling you from my cell phone or a pay phone. It's still harassment.
If I print lies about you in the local paper or run some ads or put up some signs it is libel. Again, it doesn't much matter if the sign is an 8.5x11 piece of paper I printed, or some nice cardboard thing the local printshop put together. It doesn't much matter if it's a free local paper, or a widely circulated periodical. It's still libel.
Why do we need special laws for the Internet? If I call you using Skype or some sort of VOIP is it no longer harassment? Does it magically become some other kind of criminal mischief because my voice is being transmitted over the Internet?
If I post lies about you on a message board is it no longer libel? Does the act of encoding those characters and transmitting them over a wire somehow change the nature of the offense? Are those no longer, technically, printed lies?
Why do we need special laws for forums and social networking sites? Why can't our existing laws be applied?
socialnetdef (Score:5, Interesting)
So what is the legal definition of a social networking site anyway. Is Slashdot a SNS?
Harmful? Are they kidding??? (Score:3, Interesting)
Will this law ever make it past the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals?
It looks really overbroad. I can say something with the intent to harm you that is totally legal and absolutely protected by the First Amendment. I can say harmful things with the intent to harm your business interests (by advancing mine at your expense); I can say harmful things with the intent to harm your political interest (to get your sorry ass out of office); and I can say harmful things with the intent to harm your religious interest (because your religious influence is heretical).
It also appears (from the lame summary and article) that truth is no defense. So, that if I harm you with the truth--I can go to prison.
And that's only some ideas from the point of view of the POSTER.
The social networking sites themselves are getting screwed over, here. What is the COMPELLING governmental reason for jacking up the criminal speech regulation on social networking sites and not on blogs and newspapers????? There is no compelling reason for such a limitation on free speech and my bet is that some lawyers are going to have an easy, fun, and lucrative time taking this law DOWNTOWN.
Anyway, thanks very much to the Texas legislature for providing another money-stream to the lawyers. They'll be the only ones having fun with this dog of a law!
Vigorous enforcement doesn't imply harsh penalty (Score:3, Interesting)
Having been a victim of such harassment in the past myself I agree wholeheartedly [should be felony] I reported it to the police however they fairly resoundingly didn't appear to give a toss.
Do you believe this girl deserves a minimum stint of 2 years in jail with a maximum of 10 plus a fine up to $10,000?
It might be possible for the police force to actively and vigorously enforce a particular law and still have punishments that are reasonable taking the nature and consequences of the actual crime (or misdemeanor, or miscellaneous bad deed) into consideration.
Hypothetically, at least ;-)
Would that perhaps be a good thing?
(I think) I believe people should be protected from harassment if it really damages them. It should be enforced, but the punishment should fit the crime.
It's maybe somewhat analogous to stupid enforcement of child porn laws. Anything without mutual informed consent is bad; whatever people do in their own homes that stays there and doesn't harm anyone is not something I should have any say about, and I defer having an opinion about the remaining 0.1% of the cases. That would be a decent set of principles to enforce. But punishing two mid-teen adolescents for having sex with each other (with mutual consent) and taking pictures of it (with consent) is just stupid.
Protect people, enforce good rules, but don't banish people from society just because they call others a poopface.
Restraining orders, house arrest, surveillance... they might be a good start?
Re:Your Honor! (Score:3, Interesting)
Respect can be given to a weaker person who, knowing they were weaker, went up against you for the principle. The ninny who goes and calls their dad to smack you down just proves that their dad is bigger than you and will never get any respect. Calling law enforcement is the same, its not about who is right and wrong but if you can carry your head high amongst your peers. It doesn't have to be about violence in the playground either, you can get your teams together and play baseball if you like but at the end of it you can respect each other no matter who wins.
It is the path of least resistence (Score:1, Interesting)
As a nation ages, there is a steady increase in the degree to which the behavior of the civilians is regulated and enforced.
This isn't due to some conspiracy or power-play on the part of judges or government. This is just a consequence of how our lawmaking system operates. Wherever society feels any pain, the push is to pass more laws to ease that pain.
Plenty of the laws are absurd. Like this one. They seek to regulate things that are logically and intuitively beyond the jurisdiction of the nation's laws. But there is a large enough segment of the population that wants the laws passed, and they push them through, and the rest of us then have to live with them.
The voice of sanity invariably finds itself fighting a perpetual uphill battle. Getting laws removed is much harder than getting them passed...as the presence of "protective" laws tends to make the common man feel safer (even if the laws actually, in effect, make the common man more vulnerable to unjust legal persecution).
Unfortunately, I don't have a good solution to this problem.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Your Honor! (Score:4, Interesting)
Depends on whether you were the stronger or the weaker of the disputing parties, I suspect...
Actually, I disagree. I realize in this oh-so-civilized and politically-correct world I'm a bit of a neanderthal, but as the weaker one in may confrontations growing up, there was a certain finality and satisfaction in just facing your tormentor or opponent and having it out. Many times I was left with the split lip or black eye, but was able to walk away knowing that I'd at least defended my honor. As stupid as it sounds, things were never left to fester long enough to get to Columbine-proportions let alone anything that would be considered a severe beating.
I didn't fight often, but that was because I learned very quickly that my actions had consequences. I learned that it can sometimes hurt as much to punch someone as to get punched. I also learned that to avoid a physical confrontation, I needed to work on my diplomacy and many times my over-all prick-titude.
Kids these days barely get the chance to use harsh-language against each other before an adult steps in. They see people on TV and in the movies getting in horrific fights that would quickly render a real person unconscious or dead, getting right back up again, ready for more. They've never experienced the fear and pain of defeat, let alone the fear and pain of victory. Without an early outlet for small disagreements some people bottle it up until they explode. Often, they just commit suicide, but sometimes they take the small hurts way too far, grab a gun and kill someone. We can sit on the outside, wring our hands and say "Why would someone kill someone else over a little thing like that?" Well, it's not a little thing when you spend your whole life feeling powerless.
When I was a kid you'd never hear about someone shooting up their school. Why? For one thing, half the pickup trucks in the high school parking lot had a rifle in the back window. The kids actually hunted with them and had first-hand knowledge of the damage they did to flesh and what death and blood smells like. They'd never reach for a gun in a fight. They'd lose hand-to-hand first. Second, there was a spot, right off school grounds, that was the de facto fighting spot. You knew, when you were called out where to be and at what time.
If you chose not to show up, you lost and were dishonored. If you showed up, defeated your opponent, and then proceeded to beat him while he was down, you were considered a loser, which was a bigger dishonor that not showing up. If you lost, at least it was over and you were respected for standing up for yourself. The strange part about that was, after the first time a big bully beat a smaller kid there, it rarely happened again. The big bully didn't get near the accolades they'd envisioned after beating up on a weaker kid in full public view of their classmates. In fact, it was usually the weaker kid who came out better in the eyes of their peers. Of course, if you didn't show up you weren't lauded for your passivity, you were scorned for not being willing to stand up for yourself. No one had any respect for someone who wouldn't stand up for themselves (or their girlfriends more often than not).
I love when I hear naive people say "violence doesn't solve anything". Bullshit. Violence almost always solves the problem, one way or the other. It just may not be the best way to solve the problem. But when you've never known real violence, never dealt real violence, it all sort of becomes unreal. When you grow up your whole life being told that pacifism is so noble and everything can be resolved with talking and reason you lose touch with the grim, gritty reality that comes with getting that bloody nose. So when you find yourself in a situation when the other party won't just accept your reason and when you can't find any adults/officials to come to your rescue and make the other party see reason, your sense of frustration grows to the point where the violence you've never experienced takes on a seductive kind of
Re:Approached from the wrong angle (Score:3, Interesting)
That would require emotional stamina from the kids, involved parenting from the parents, toleration of lawsuit-generating situations by school officials... yeah right. I'm all for beating this particular drum until the cows come home, but I'm also not particularly confident that anything will actually happen.
Re:Your Honor! (Score:4, Interesting)
You read that article and think "Name calling? The police state is violating that persons Freedom of Speech, thats a problem". I read that, see that its from Somerset, Tx, and I think "thats probably gang related or some cracked out trailer trash and they threatened to rape and kill that girl. Thats a problem".
In both cases, none of us knows the specifics of the case, and are both talking out our asses. And even RTFA, given the PD cheifs in the San Antonio areas notoriety for spewing lines of BS, we won't in the immediate future.
Re:Your Honor! (Score:4, Interesting)
So take away that immunity. If you insult and mouth off to someone, they can slap you, as hard as they want, as many times as they want, and it's legal. People would think twice before opening their mouth and letting loose with a stream of vitriol and verbal abuse if there was the possibility of an immediate response.
It's behaviorism at its simplest. It's how the entire natural world works. Every social animal tests their boundaries, and if they go too far, they get bit. That's how boundaries get set. Our laws have created a consequence-free outlet for verbal abuse that is generating some truly out-of-control people.
Re:Your Honor! (Score:5, Interesting)
An entire generation or more has been raised to believe in its own innate and unearned importance...
That is quite a sweeping generalization. I am not sure which generation you are referring to, but if it is my own (I am 23) I would be inclined to disagree with you via a caveat. I will agree that, in general, there are quite a few folks who fit the description that you just posted. Nonetheless, I would caveat that there are some of us, in every generation (not just my own) that know without a doubt that we do not have unlimited entitlement and rights. There are even some of us that know that the Law is not an institution to be used for the abuse of personal gain. In fact, some of us, in every generation, outright abhor the strange exponential increase in the complexity of the Law in general.
So, in principle, I agree that there are quite a few folk out there that think the way you mentioned, using the term, 'an entire generation' really does disrespect those of us that try to remain rational, calm, pragmatic, and realistic. Please, don't lump entire groups of people together as if we are all just walking stereotypes to be typified into a particular Aristotelian category. There are always shades of gray.
Re:Your Honor! (Score:5, Interesting)
The existence of people like that endangers the whole system whereby respect and status are established by means of violence. Consider: an alpha male in the schoolyard has established his position against all rivals by means of fights. He now becomes aware of a subculture that does not respect him for this - they may fear him, but they don't admire him. These people are called 'nerds' and they admire and respect intellectual accomplishment. Or a large collection of Warhammer 40K figures. Either way, they neither admire nor respect the willingness or ability to engage in physical fights. Indeed, they openly disdain it.
This completely undermines his position! This alpha male demands the respect due to him for being so masculine and violent! And so he expresses himself in the only way he knows how: he beats up nerds until he has established to the satisfaction of his peers that he will not tolerate disrespect from inferiors of zero status, from people who have no interest in violence at all.
Looking back on it from a distance of fifteen years or so it's a fascinating sociological study. Thank fuck I'm no longer living in it.
Re:Your Honor! (Score:1, Interesting)
That said, there is a simple solution. I call it growing a backbone! Tried, tested and true.
Step 1, Grow a backbone.
Step 2, Walk up to Bully and look them square in the eye.
Step 3, Break Bully's freaking nose!
Step 4, Profit.
You left out a few steps:
Step 5, As you're walking away, hear a bullet whistle past your ear.
Step 6, Break into a trot while suddenly realizing that the Bully is a sociopath who's willing to escalate things as far as necessary in order to win, including killing you, your family, and anyone you're close to.
Step 7, After the second bullet misses you by a whisker, also realize that many Bullies have a hell of a lot less to lose than you do; a lot more experience with fighting dirty; and no scruples about using any possible tactic, fair or foul, to win.
Step 8, In the course of these revelations, find yourself questioning the wisdom of assuming that people will always back down when confronted with a show of force.
Step 9, Turn around and attempt to plug the Bully with the weapon of your choice, knowing that either you're about to die (if the Bully shoots you first) or spend the next couple years of your life dealing with the legal, psychological, and financial aftermath of having killed someone: something that will bother you since -- unlike many Bullies -- you have a conscience, inconveniently enough.