Rou

Those little words seem harmless. They are uttered thousands of times day. And they are probably posted onto forums, blogs, IRC and instant messages even more often. But, hey, some people will annoy others. It’s a fact of life. It’s not like they’re breaking the law.

Oops. Turns out, that all changed recently. You see, on Jan 5th, Bush signed a new law. It’s a relatively normal law. It’s the “Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act of 2005”. The problem is a small section entitled “Preventing Cyber-stalking.” Check this out:

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.

Nice, eh?

The word annoy is too imprecise. It’s not practical. I mean, on this site alone we’ve annoyed readers. I annoy people on Prounreal all the time (because I’m right and they suck). People read my blog, and I’m sure they’re annoyed from time to time. Hell, Steeler and Bengal fans aren’t really chummy this week. And I’m willing to bet that almost none of the conversations on their bulletin boards involved people signing their real name.

Now, I’m sure that’s not what our lawmakers intended. Far from it, I’m sure. But that is what they wrote. And in a court of law, the law is exactly what is written down.

The idea behind this well intentioned strike against the freedom of speech is supposed to be a nice way to help prevent someone from stalking a woman over the internet. Or more accurately, punish them more. It’s already illegal to stalk someone internet or not. This is just an extra crime to tack onto the list. The problem is that they suck at phrasing. This isn’t a well placed law. It’s a huge net cast over more or less everything in an attempt to catch a few select criminals.

Vague broad wording in laws are almost always cause bad laws. This one is no exception.