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Crank Blogging, Like Phone Calling, Now Illegal
Posted by
jamie
on Mon Jan 09, 2006 12:00 PM
from the do-people-get-prosecuted-for-this? dept.
from the do-people-get-prosecuted-for-this? dept.
On Thursday, President Bush signed into law a must-pass
DoJ appropriations bill
which contained a
little gotcha for the internet.
For decades, making anonymous abusive phone calls has been a federal crime, good for up to two years behind bars -- and the term "abusive" has included threats, harassment, and the much weaker "intent to annoy." Now, that telecommunications law has been extended to include the Internet, so when you post an anonymous troll to wind up your least-favorite blogger, you may break the law. This is silly: the law needs to start taking into account the qualitative differences between things like telephones, email inboxes, blogs, and IM accounts. A 3 AM phone call is different from a post to blogger.com calling me a jerk. I don't need federal protection from that Night Elf who keeps /chickening my Orc.
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Crank Blogging, Like Phone Calling, Now Illegal
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So wait... (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://tpno-co.org/)
Re:So wait... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://blog.myspace.com/jonathano)
Re:So wait... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.theroughnecks.net/)
Re:So wait... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:So wait... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://ptth.net/squish/ | Last Journal: Monday October 01, @11:26AM)
Re:So wait... (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Sunday April 16 2006, @10:03PM)
My friend, you don't have to read the warrant; you just need to read Alito's dissent a bit more attentively.
The important line is the last one (emphasis added): Second, even if the warrant did not contain such authorization, a reasonable police officer could certainly have read the warrant as doing so, and therefore the appellants are entitled to qualified immunity.
Now understand that: Alito's saying that it's OK if a cop misreads a warrant and does something it doesn't authorize, the cop can't be sued.
Now let's think about that. If your doctor misreads a drug formulary and gives you Topamax (an epilepsy drug) when he meant to give you Toprol-XL (a drug for heart failure), and as a result you have a heart attack, would you say that you shouldn't be allowed to sue?
Now as to the facts of the case Alito dissented from: the warrant only described, and authorized, the search of one adult male. When the cops went to the man's home to arrest him, that adult male's wife and daughter were with him. Even though the warrant only authorized a search of the man, the cops also strip searched his wife and the ten-year-old daughter.
The warrant names one adult man, and the police "misread" it to include a ten-year-old girl, and they make her take off all her clothes and bend over and be searched by a stranger.
That's a pretty substantial misreading, you'd agree? Well, maybe you wouldn't agree, but consider this: Alito's opinion was a dissent; that means two other judges disagreed with Alito and thought the police went too far.
And one of those other judges was none other than Bush's current head of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff -- no "liberal" he.
So, friend, does my explication help you decide that police strip-searching a ten-year-old girl is wrong?
Re:So wait... (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course nobody wants to see little girls strip-searched. Stop avoiding my point by bringing emotional rhetoric into it.
Alito did not say that any mistakes a cop might make are ok. Let me change the emphasis on the same quote and see if it sounds different:
The suggestion appears that if a reasonable were to think he had permission under the warrant to search the family, then it's appropriate to grant him immunity. Now, I'm no lawyer, but I think that's the same sort of reasonableness standard that's applied elsewhere in the law.
What the text of the warrant specified and why the cops thought they were allowed to search the family is exactly what we should be discussing, but you haven't brought that up because you keep trying to make an emotional appeal that's unrelated.
So if you'd like to discuss whether the cops were reasonable, why they thought they had the right to the search, and whether they did or not, then by all means, let's discuss it. I'm not predisposed toward agreeing with either side until I look at the warrant and the circumstances. But please stop headlining with inflammatory text like "ALITO SUPPORTS UNAUTHORIZED STRIP SEARCHES"
Re:So wait... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.wuug.org/)
You mean a trial to determine that you are actually guilty...
Re:So wait... (Score:4, Funny)
(http://www.badpuns.com/)
No... but you still won't get your $200 for passing Go.
Re:So wait... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:So wait... (Score:5, Funny)
I vote we slashdot the Federal criminal system! (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.wiglefamily.net/)
And just for clarification, I'm all for protection agains harrassment, but a law against making an anonymous message that annoys someone is ridiculous.
Silly American K-niggots!!! (Score:4, Funny)
Does this mean that we, in the rest of the world, can lay into you guys in the US and there's nothing you can do about it (anonymously)?
I will taunt you a second time!!!
Ha! Your country is really small and you all smell of pooh!
Only the anonymous cowards (Score:5, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Friday August 17, @05:34AM)
Currently the internet is not trusted. I don't really know who you are and you don't know who I am and we can pester each other without really being able to do anything about it.
Total open internet doesn't work. That is clear from slashdot alone else why would we have moderation and bans? If you ever run a website you will quickly learn that you will need to secure your site from many attacks.
There is something about being anonymous that can bring out the worst in people and with the internet it doesn't matter how small a group it is, they still number in the millions because of the global reach. Or put another way I don't need to worry about some kid from Japan gatecrashing my Dutch LUG. That same kid however can easily try attacking the website and I can't grab him by the throath and show what happens to little punks.
So lets move to a totally un-anonymous internet where who you are is known. Post a troll on slashdot and be assured someone from your hometown will come by and teach you a lesson.
Nice idea no? No. Because for all the trolls and flamers and idiots and time wasters there are also those people who contribute stuff they can get in trouble for but we would really like to know. Oh they ain't many, every slashdot story has trolls versus only a handfull that have inside information BUT some people find that the trolls are worth it.
And yet should that mean anyone can do anything they want and not have to fear being punished for it? Saying that people should be able to harras, threathen or even annoy while hiding behind anonymity is al very good until you are at the receiving end.
I happen to know one of the people who claims to be one of the gnaa members. Yes he is as sad in real live as well but that is not the real funny thing. He sometimes gets "attacked" himself and then bitterly complains about how people are costing him bandwidth from a DOS (yeah a DOS not even a DDOS). A lot of people are for freedom but only if it is them being free, the moment someone else uses freedom against them it is time to get the law involved.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
This says you are free to speak. Strictly speaking it does not say you do not have to face consequences of what you say. (Shouting fire in a crowded theather example) It certainly does not say you have the right do speak anonymous. The amendment was clearly not written by lawyers. Not good ones anyway.
Of course it also was written a long time ago when if you wanted to say something you had to either own a press or stand up in front of your audience. The tech to speak from another continent without ever having to show yourselve was unheard perhaps even undreamed of.
This law has a lot of nasty possibilities but as someone who has had to clean to many websites after a visit by a person with the intent to annoy I am torn in two. The majority of me knows this is going to lead to trouble and the other part of me has a list of IP's in his firewall that he would loved to have traced by the feds and their users put in a wooden chair with leather straps and a link to another kind of net.
Should at least make for some intresting bash.org posts when someone convinces an annoying kid they are about to be arrested for talking in caps.
Re:Only the anonymous cowards (Score:5, Insightful)
No, Slashdot is not an example why open internet doesn't work. It's the opposite, it's one of many working models which facilitate a community despite and because of the near-to anonymity. Moderation in particular is a great way to deal with a lot of crap that people post when they don't need to fear real world retribution.
...and I'm proud to be an American (Score:5, Funny)
Re:First Anonymous Post (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://free-usa.blogspot.com/)
You miss the point (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Friday January 19 2007, @04:54PM)
And yet here we are, posting here and in all those articles MarkusQ referenced... free speech is alive and well, believe it or not, and people bitching about it not being free while they freely post their rants here are too oblivious to see the irony.
The fact that some people in some cases are able to express their views does not mean that "free speech is alive and well." The point of free speech is that everybody can do it, without recrimination.
-- MarkusQ
We are not at war. (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Friday January 19 2007, @04:54PM)
We are not at war.
Good catch. I keep forgetting that. I guess that's a good demonstration of how "the Big Lie" works; they keep repeating it and after awhile you start going along with it even though you know it's false.
--MarkusQ
Re:First Anonymous Post (Score:4, Insightful)
Well I think we are not at war and I haven't been living in a cave. There is nothing technical about it-we have been fighting terrorists for a long time. We are engaged in multiple conflicts and troops are suffering casualties. Nothing unususal there-it happens regularly.
Frankly the "war on terror" is roughly akin to the "war on drugs" or the "war on x". They all are poorly defined and generally impossible to win. Because they fail to address the underlying problems. Invading a country is easy. Changing a society is hard.
Frankly I am not concerned about Osama. Neither is the US government based on its actions. I am concerned about a government that wants to reduce my rights and priviledges for a false sense of security and so they can be seen as "doing something". Of course, I am more afraid of the clueless people like you who support those measures. That is the real threat.
Remember that terrorism is insignificant when compared to other preventable deaths. More people are killed driving in a month than died in 9/11. But you don't see a "war on road deaths".
Re:First Anonymous Post (Score:5, Informative)
What the heck are you whining about? A republic is often, and definitely in the case of the US, also a representative democracy. The two terms are not mutually exclusive. If you're getting all pissy because you think the use of the word democracy should refer soley to direct democracies and no other forms, that's an issue you need to work through with your therapist.
well let me be the first to say (Score:4, Funny)
Re:well let me be the first to say (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.alexkrupp.com/)
-Steve
Re:well let me be the first to say (Score:4, Funny)
(http://patrickhart.org/)
Is this law really needed? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.unanimocracy.com/about.html | Last Journal: Tuesday April 04 2006, @12:04PM)
We have Caller ID -- we can refuse to answer the phone. If crank calls were a major concern, you'd see market solutions to the problem. Companies would come up with "quiet time" phone features that would prevent any ring after a certain hour unless you coded it with numbers that were acceptable.
As you can see with this law, and thousands of other bad laws, you enter into a slippery slope of stupidity.
The Department of Justice is completely out of control -- nearly 99% of the Department is unconstitutional and unnecessary at the federal level. In this end, this is an abridgement on the freedom of speech. Every time government wants to penalize "edgy" speech, they are just finding another way to control normal speech.
I think we know who the real cranks are in this case -- read the entire law/budget, you'll find more bad things than usual. In fact, I can't see anything in the budget that seems worthwhile anymore.
Re:Is this law really needed? (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.unanimocracy.com/about.html | Last Journal: Tuesday April 04 2006, @12:04PM)
There is no right to protecting your phone line from phone calls -- you don't need to have a phone line. Also, private companies will be cheaper that government. Will you pay a lawyer to sue the crank caller? No? You expect me to pay through my taxes, because you're cheap, lazy and irresponsible?
No need to create anything, that law is already here
Unconstitutionally.
I happen to live in a non-lawyer-happy land (so far), and I am not lawyer-happy myself. It's not about sueing, it's about respect to others, and law is, or should be, about respecting each other.
So you don't respect the free speech that is protected in the Constitution, but you do respect the ability to tax people who don't want to pay for something that doesn't affect them?
I happen to live in a non-lawyer-happy land (so far), and I am not lawyer-happy myself. It's not about sueing, it's about respect to others, and law is, or should be, about respecting each other.
No, you want to control society. There is a big difference -- those who want to voluntarily cooperate (capitalism) and those who want to control (authoritarianism).
Re:Is this law really needed? (Score:4, Insightful)
So you don't respect the free speech that is protected in the Constition, but you do respect the ability to tax people who don't want to pay for something that doesn't affect them?
I don't have to withstand harrassment as part of my respect to free speech. In fact, your right to free speech stops when you start interfering with my rights. You can't yell "Fire!" in a crowded theatre, you can't make remarks to your secretary that qualify as sexual harrassment, and you can't call me to make a prank call. That is not an exhaustive list.
I don't agree with extending this law to the internet, because unlike phone calls, postings are non-invasive. I'll agree that internet postings qualify as righteous free speech because it's not actively interrupting someone. If you call me to make a prank call, even if I do subscribe to your Caller ID "solution," I have to actually go check who is calling me. That's all fine and good at normal hours, but not if you're waking me up at 3am. I don't need to answer the phone before you've harassed me. Sure, I could turn off my phone for the night, but then I'd miss potentially important calls. On top of that, inconvenient times aren't universal. I may work nights, so a 3pm call would bother me. I may be doing something else other than sleeping when you've interrupted me. My phone line isn't public, I'm paying for the damn thing, and you don't get to call whenever you feel like it to annoy me. You call if you have my permission to, implicit or explicit (that's why I'm also in favor of the Do-Not-Call list, if it's unsolicited, they don't have my permission to call).
I see your points about the inneficiency of government, and as much as I want to see less governmental interference, there are some things that ARE a government's job. Protecting my rights is the government's job.
Re:Is this law really needed? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://asdasd/)
That aside, if someone doesn't answer the call (because they know who is calling via Caller ID), what is to stop that person from calling 300 times consecutively in an attempt to annoy/harass them?
I guess you could block the caller... but that too incurs a fee.
"As you can see with this law, and thousands of other bad laws, you enter into a slippery slope of stupidity."
I don't think it's out of line for the government to outlaw harassment. You could certainly argue that this law in particular perhaps goes too far, but you're almost saying it's OK to harass people, until some company invents technology that you can purchase to stop harassment. That is just plain silly.
Re:Is this law really needed? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.unanimocracy.com/about.html | Last Journal: Tuesday April 04 2006, @12:04PM)
Government is not free and in fact costs way more than competitive services.
Government is not optional, so those of us who pick another option still have to pay.
Government doesn't support everyone -- in fact laws are fairer to those who can afford a lawyer.
Not everyone can go and sue someone for harassing them. If someone harasses you a few times from an unknown number, good luck getting the cops to stop them.
You could certainly argue that this law in particular perhaps goes too far, but you're almost saying it's OK to harass people, until some company invents technology that you can purchase to stop harassment. That is just plain silly.
Fine. I'll pay $6 for a caller ID box and $24 a year for piece of mind. You want to pay for bureaucracy and red tape and non-effective unconstitutional legislation? You should pay your share of what you use, I'd like to bow out of it.
Re:Is this law really needed? (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://lawpoop.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Friday May 28 2004, @06:51PM)
Sounds like you've never visisted the third world. When you visit the police station to file a complaint, or get pulled over by a cop, do you expect to pay a bribe? That's standard operating procedure outside of Europe, North America, Austrailia, and Japan, etc.
If you decide to run against an incombant politicain, do you expect to get thrown in jail on trumped up charges? If you do get thrown in jail, do you expect to be regularly beaten by the guards?
Do American political dissidents ever just "dissapear" without a trace, with not a peep from the government, much less an investigation?
"I suppose there might be a few people in government who want to do what's right, but they're far outnumber by the power-grabbers. And, unless we get a lot more "common people" off their butts, the government responds more to the corporate lobbiests than to the common person." Not so. Most people in the government are average Joe and Jane Beaurecrats. They are the lazy Federal employees. But, at least they aren't corrupt.
The power-hungry people are the elected congrespeople, Senators and perhaps the cabinet members. That's 535 congress people + 100 senators, + 1 president + 1 vice-president. Those people are far out-numbered by the bureaucrats.
" Or Khartoum, where people walk the city streets with Hyenas and Baboons on chains for personal protection
"If only hyenas and babboons could protect against Elephants and Donkeys."
You aren't seriously suggesting that Republican and Democratic political operatives are actually killing people on a daily basis, are you?
" When you start reducing legitimate democratic government, you have either corporations exploiting working people like in the US at the turn of the 20th century
"Don't you mean the turn of the 21st century? And the government (both parties) is in their pockets."
As bad as things are now, they were much worse 100 years ago. Before the FDA, you could basically sell poison onthe shelf as an exilir for any ailment. You could have a factory work fall into the meat processing machinery and everybody in Chicago can buy canned human flesh later that week. Mine workers would go into debt living in the Mine companies town, buying their food and renting their housing, and this after working 100 hour weeks with no vacation. Even 12 year old were working in the mines.
So basically, take your head out of your rear-end, get up out of your armchair, read some history, look at other countries in the world. Here in the US, we are living in a paradise.
Re:Is this law really needed? (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.google.com/search?q=gilead+greene)
Re:Is this law really needed? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, at the present state of time, we probably still need a small state to protect us from certain groups who would step in and take power in the absence of the government. But that is a huge jump to saying that we need the monster government that we have today.
First of all, you are assuming that the government protects us from, lets say, a corporation. It is clear right now that corporations use law suits, government legistlation, intellectual property laws, all as tools for control and intimidation. It is not that the government protects us from corporations, but more like our government is being used as an enforcer for corporations.
Intimidation of minorities was/is largely carried out by the government (Jim Crow laws then, drug and gun laws now that almost exclusivly target minorities now) Ask a black man living in inner city Detroit if he is more scared of the KKK, or of the police! At least half a million black men are imprisioned right now for victimless crimes... When you consider that there is only 10-15 million black men in the United States, I would say that the U.S. government is several orders of magnitude more dangerous to minorities that the KKK.
In most places, the government acts WITH organized crime... for example, in many places you can't get a building permit unless you pay off the local goodguy, who then pays off the local politician to let you build. Or we have drug laws that do more to raise the price of illegal drugs and make them highly profitable than they do to stop illegal drugs (the DEA is the OPEC of drug smuggling!!! And I won't even go into the CIA drug operations).
And, I am of course talking about the United States. The Soviet Union and Stalin's purges, Mao and his "Cultural Revolution" and "Great Leap Forward", Pol Pot in Cambodia, Nicolia Chochecau in Romaina, I could go on and on about governments with far greater domestic power than the United States and the attrocities they commited. The United States is generally a more pleasent place to live because the lack of total government control. (But even without a totalitarian government, we have the U.S. government's participation in the genocide of native Americans, or massive bombing of civilians in WWII and Vietnam, and other attrocities that have nothing to do with fighting big corporations or the mafia).
Yes, you are correct, an immediate jump to anarchy is probably not a good thing right now... we probably need the government to protect us from warlords, aggressive foriegn governments, powerful economic interests, etc. But you are not defending that, you are defending a government that regularly invades peoples homes on the slightest of pretext, spies on its own citizens, takes 80% of their income in taxes and hidden fees, and now can arbitrarily throw people in jail for being "annoying". We are so far away from the concept of liberal democracy that maybe having a few more mafia people might be an acceptable price to pay for a little bit more freedom.
Re:Is this law really needed? (Score:4, Insightful)
Let me be the first (Score:3, Funny)
Damn Night Elves (Score:4, Funny)
what will we do here at /. ???? (Score:3, Funny)
(http://demosthenes2010.com/blog | Last Journal: Sunday November 27 2005, @10:17AM)
Soon the forums will be empty as we are all carted off to jail for smart ass comments given with the "intent to annoy".
What? (Score:3, Funny)
(http://www.howtobeinvisible.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday October 04, @07:42AM)
My wife LIVES to annoy me! It is one of her main goals in life. I'm fairly certain each of my kids also has a primary purpose to annoy one or more of their siblings, their mother, all their teachers and many of the other kids at school. Frequently phones are involved.
-Charles
Good thing they used their real names... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:What the hell...? (Score:5, Funny)
However they will do nothing for the kamikazee use of the comma!
Re: article or opinion? (Score:4, Informative)
(http://breakplay.com/)
As a regular reader of his it gets rather annoying and distracting and it diminishes the effectiveness of the arguments he tries to make.
Already taken into account (Score:3, Interesting)
This is silly: the law needs to start taking into account the qualitative differences between things like telephones, email inboxes, blogs, and IM accounts. A 3 AM phone call is different from a post to blogger.com calling me a jerk.
The law doesn't spell out everything. It's up to judges and juries to decide what qualifies as harrassment. Would they decide repeated 3AM calls is harrassment? Probably. Would they decide somebody calling you a jerk is harrassment? Probably not. But it's something that has to be decided on a case-by-case basis, not something that can be spelled out explicitly by law ahead of time.
I don't need federal protection from that Night Elf who keeps /chickening my Orc.
No, but if you were a small-time blogger just scraping by on ad revenue, you might need protection from people making your comment system utterly useless with continued abuse. If Slashdot didn't have full-time staff to program things like the moderation system, the comments would be useless. And believe me, people aren't coming to Slashdot for the crappy game reviews, years-old news and dupes.
does this also include political speeches? (Score:5, Interesting)
intent of the medium (Score:5, Interesting)
Blogs are public with an implicit invitation ( unless comments are shut off ) by the owner to contact the owner to share your views.
That is not the same with a phone.
sneaky sneaky (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Monday November 08 2004, @03:43PM)
Namely, I'm talking about the embedding of other mostly unrelated things into a bill. It's especially bad, since with a bill such as this one, the existance of the DoJ relies on this bill getting passed to get its funding. Because of this, members of congress feeled pressed that the bill must be passed (as was noted in the first sentence of jamie's summary).
you might not need it, but they do (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Friday January 13 2006, @01:30AM)
Yes, you're right. What sane person would need such a law?
But on the other hand, I can see how politicians and people in power might need such a law. It would make it illegal to criticize them anonymously.
. . . and so it goes (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.10-minute-rule.com/)
Wikipedia/Seigenthaler? (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://www.dpbsmith.com/)
"Brian Chase, a 38 year old operations manager at Rush Delivery in Nashville, admitted he had placed the allegations there to play a joke on a colleague..." I suppose Chase's intent was to tweak his (unnamed) colleague, not to annoy Seigenthaler...
The Road to Hell... (Score:5, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Tuesday November 13, @10:52AM)
The posters read like this... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.timedoctor.org/)
The point is obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
The next time some wingnut retard says 'so long as you've done nothing wrong, you've nothing to fear', point this out (and tell them how annoying they are).
This law is necessary (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.garageband.com/artist/kimjustice)
And I almost forgot: What about the Children!!?!?!
The real crime (Score:4, Insightful)
Blogging and e-mail way different (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://cyphertube.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday May 21 2006, @11:10AM)
This law sweeps across with a broad stroke and that's bad legislation.
One problem is a matter of 'annoying' people. What is annoying varies from person to person.
On the one hand, this means that spammers face yet another law against them. So, spamming while in the U.S. is a really bad idea. I'm sorry, if your name is really Ivan Charles Wiener, then, ok, I guess you can continue to send me erectile dysfunction ads as I.C. Wiener. But Heywood Jablowmie had better look out!
My question then is a matter of whether or not posting anonymously on a blog is a problem. If you allow real anonymity and you aren't prepared to handle the system, well, you're a fool. But most blogging software takes care of that. And if you force people to register, problem solved.
The big problem is that 'recipient of communication' is undefined. So, if I have a blog, and I allow people to post anonymously and they don't annoy me, is it a problem if some politician visits my blog and sees that? The original author is anonymous. Granted, as the owner and effective publisher who is not anonymous, well, I would argue that it's now my problem, and too bad, and so on. But sites, like Slashdot, that allow anonymous and disavow ownership of any kind of the post, well, that could be a big problem, as then Slashdot is not committing a crime directly, but can be considered an accessory.
Hopefully, this thing will be given a reasonable smackdown, but I doubt it.
Three words: (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://syberghost.livejournal.com/)
Easily Handled (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Anytime someone posts something bad about you, immediately call the police with full intent to press charges. After we waste enough of the government's time, it will either do the smart thing and revise the law, or the stupid thing and make it a felony.
Now personally I don't like it when people talk shit about me on my own blog, but I have the tools to remove their remarks thanks to the blog site. I surely don't need a law to protect me. The only way I could see it being useful is if some corporation decided they didn't like me and would engage in a smear campaign against my name on the websites I frequent. Then I would leverage this law (or libel..).
There is more to this than you think (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe this is needed (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://williamfink.blogspot.com/)
I have seen some very vicious blog sites devoted to the defamation of a fellow student. Without the legal ammo, law enforcement has their hands tied as to the extent they can investigate and remove the content.
With the web, you can anonymously bully fellow students from the comforts of your own bedroom.
We need to weigh your right to flame someone with the rights of people to be protected from harassment.
What amazes me, more than anything, is that some people seem to feel the need to draw a line between the real world and the Internet. For example, are on-line auctions THAT different from real-life auctions? How about shopping carts?