release

Not satisfied with the ever-multiplying panoply of ways a citizen can fall afoul of federal criminal laws, Congress has now seen fit to make it a Federal crime to post anonymous flames on the Internet. Those convicted may face up to two years of prison.

This new law, which extends existing law against telephone calls mean to harass or annoy, would prohibit using a “device” such as a computer to transmit communications by the Internet, “without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass any person.” This definition broadly includes pretty much every type of digital communication.

If this law had been in effect when I was a teenager, I would have been a federal criminal. I was fifteen, I had a modem, and I rarely, if ever, used my real name while engaging in flame wars. Almost everything I wrote was specifically calculated to annoy someone. (Many would say I haven’t changed a bit since then.) My FBI dossier under his law could have been terabytes large.

Then, as today, I was fully protected by the First Amendment.

It takes almost no imagination to see how much of the political discourse on the Internet today would run afoul of this law. Annoying one’s political opponents is often a highly effective form of political communication, anonymous or not. And while political speech is the at the core of the First Amendment, its protections do not end there. Religion, love, money, sports - all provoke strong feelings inviting the occasional troll post. And that’s the way it should be.

What’s the difference between a harassing phone call and a harassing blog post? Plenty. It’s awfully hard to make a political point by making an anonymous phone call. It’s very easy to make one publishing an anonymous political essay. The more public the message, the less potential for abuse exists. There are exceptions, of course, such as the public release of extremely private information, but such things already have legal remedies. This law is clearly infringes our First Amendment rights and should be overturned quickly.

By passing this legislation, Congress has lumped in the good with the bad. I hope they get a lot of anonymous e-mails telling them how stupid they were.