There are times when I really don’t enjoy living in California, this is one of them.
The idea for a law, by Rep. Linda Sanchez, Democrat, of California is sheer lunacy. She has proposed a bill that would make it a federal felony to use blogs, text messages, and Internet messaging (“electronic means”) to harass someone and cause them “emotional distress.”
So if my local paper, the Enterprise Record, posts a web story that “causes somebody emotional distress”, do the aggrieved then just dispense a lawyer from a vending machine in front of the newspaper office and walk in with a lawsuit? There will be DMVesque line with a wait.
It’s coming to that it seems.
Linda Sanchez (D-CA) coming after bloggers
“Greg Pollowitz at NRO Media Blog sends the alert (via The Volokh Conspiracy) that Rep. Linda Sanchez, Democrat of California, has proposed a bill that would make it a federal felony to use blogs, text messages, and Internet messaging (“electronic means”) to harass someone and cause them “emotional distress.” Eugene Volokh pulls these snippets out of H.R. 1966:
Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication, with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person, using electronic means to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both….
[“Communication”] means the electronic transmission, between or among points specified by the user, of information of the user’s choosing, without change in the form or content of the information as sent and received; …
[“Electronic means”] means any equipment dependent on electrical power to access an information service, including email, instant messaging, blogs, websites, telephones, and text messages.
(h/t to Helogenic Climate Change)
Here is her official website where you can contact her and let her know what you think about this idea. Be nice.
http://lindasanchez.house.gov/index.cfm?section=contact
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Well, if she were just after California, you’d have my sympathies. But she’s after us all. So we all should be afraid. Very afraid.
I would hope that the unconstitutional nature of this (1st Amendment, anyone?) doesn’t escape someone.
I’ve posted many messages with the sole intent of Harrasing, Intimidating and Causing (Al Gore) to Cease snd Desist from his insane ramplings about Climate Science.
Am I a Felon? Give me a break. I wonder if China (where I have worked numerous times) isn’t a little freer than than the USA. Perhaps Congress should just offer to sell us to them to pay our $ 80,000,000,000,000 in unfunded programs. Might be an even trade, and if people like Sanchez continue if office, we may come out ahead.
I think the key is “severe, repeated & hostile”.
Bad enough but maybe not as bad as it seems.
Probably open to abuse though.
DaveE.
See here: Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act (Introduced in House)
Sorry I just can’t say anything nice here…what a moron. As if California does not have enough REAL problems to be solving. Just shows the inane degree to which the incompetent clowns in the legislature will go in order to make it look like they are getting something done when in fact they are doing nothing but frittering away the state’s money while pushing an extreme agenda.
Does Al Gore using the word “denier” on national tv constitute “intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person,”?
Ooops – I guess that last comment could potentially be outlawed.
Not to worry, because her hispanic surnamed constituents won’t let it happen. Hate to drag the good name of Gorebull warming into the realm of racism, but the same hysteria reigns….
http://www.aztlan.net/
The real problem is going to be the interpretation of the definitions, unless of course, the interpretations are one-sided.
“Does Al Gore using the word “denier” constitute “intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person,”?
Do death threats sent to scientists like Timothy Ball constitute this also? (I know he is Canadian, not a citizen of the US. I’m just trying make a point here.)
She’s trying to add a “Cyberbullying” section to the US CODE that covers Extortions and Threats
http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/usc_sup_01_18_10_I_20_41.html
So I think its pretty clear this is not intended for use against blogs and general internet communication but at targeted use of the internet to harrasss and intimidate a specific person.
Clearly the language of her bill as presented is way too broad and also a tad vague, but then the original language of bills often start out this way and then get modified as the flaws in the specificity (or lack there of) are pointed out.
This attempt at making “Cyber Bullying” a crime is in response to what happened to Megan Meier, the 13-year-old girl who was allegedly CyberBullied until she committed suicide, and the fact that the adult (Lori Drew) who impersonated a schoolboy to bully her via a MySpace page could only be charged with accessing protected computers without authorization.
In the end, because of a lack of a clear law that made what she did illegal, Lori Drew was only found guilty of three misdemeanors.
Which brings up the potential need for a law to plug this gap.
So the more relevant questions are:
Was what Lori Drew did wrong?
If so, was it criminal and thus should it be punishable by jail &/or fines?
and if so, then the toughest question:
How would you write a law that would make similar activities illegal, but at the same time not infringe on 1st ammendment rights of free speech.
Personally I think it is wrong to do what Lori Drew did, but since I’ve yet to see a good answer to the third question, I have to stay with No on the second question.
Arthur
Be warned from the UK experience:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2696031/Anti-terrorism-laws-used-to-spy-on-noisy-children.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1952551/Anti-terror-law-used-to-snoop-on-fishermen.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/antiterror-laws-used-to-spy-on-family-807873.html
The list is huge.
I read it could be abused to make it almost like it’s illegal to give critisism for anything. Not only crits. on why AGW theory is on a very shaky foundation, but also have extreme implications for the religious as well.
Then again it could boomerang and cause havok for the left as well if it gets abused, at the worst the jails could literally burst with tons of new people getting booked.
Can I sue her now? Her message and attitude distress me.
Are there not laws that cover the serious sorts of issues she thinks are a problem?
How about a law prohibiting POLITICIANS from causing us “emotional distress?”
Democrats and lawyers tend to work together quite well. Whenever it is their turn in power a lot of laws get written to help the lawyers sue more. So this law really doesnt suprise me any.
David E
Bad enough but maybe not as bad as it seems. WHAAAT!!!
Have you read the other side’s commentary on this blog???
Not “Open to abuse”… but a tool specifically designed for abuse.
How long do you think it would take a $#@&%^ lawyer to call what I’m doing right now “severe, repeated & hostile”??? I intend it to be just that!
Like all the recent high minded / anti-Darwinian (shield the weak) programs developed in recent months, this law uses a tragedy (don’t let a crisis go to waste) to relegate the Constitution to “Hate Speech” status.
Not only no, hell no!
Note: the use of the word hell is not, in this case, intended to be:
curse – profane or obscene expression usually of surprise or anger; “expletives were deleted”
expletive, oath, swearing, swearword, curse word, cuss
profanity – vulgar or irreverent speech or action
curse – an appeal to some supernatural power to inflict evil on someone or some group
execration, condemnation
denouncement, denunciation – a public act of denouncing
anathema – a formal ecclesiastical curse accompanied by excommunication
imprecation, malediction – the act of calling down a curse that invokes evil (and usually serves as an insult); “he suffered the imprecations of the mob”
curse – an evil spell; “a witch put a curse on his whole family”; “he put the whammy on me”
hex, jinx, whammy
magic spell, magical spell, charm, spell – a verbal formula believed to have magical force; “he whispered a spell as he moved his hands”; “inscribed around its base is a charm in Balinese”
curse – something causing misery or death; “the bane of my life”
bane, nemesis, scourge
affliction – a cause of great suffering and distress
curse – a severe affliction
torment
affliction – a cause of great suffering and distress
“Probably open to abuse”??? Gee, ya think???
Astounding how few pols, and how few people in general, have any concept of what the 1st amendment means, and why the founders considered it so important.
This, of course, is another attempt to legislate Correct Thoughts. How, after all, can you know whether or not someone intended “emotional distress” unless you know their thoughts?
And of course, it’s a simple step from here to the obvious corollary – good thoughts (as defined by the government) will be legal, Bad Thoughts (again, as defined by the government) are to be a Criminal Offense.
Of course, it will not only be legal but Highly Encouraged for all those who possess Good Thoughts to cause emotional distress to all the Bad Thought evil-doers.
“coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress” describes exactly what Gore and Hanssen have caused me. Waxman is harrassing me and causing emotional distress by attempting to tax my livelyhood – quite literally- to death.
Lawyers, if you are interested in a front-line high-profile case (pro-bono, of course) post here 😉
This is the result of parents giving children and teens access to the information highway and then blaming that highway for the stress it causes said children and teens. Children and teens do not need any other phone than the one that plugs into the wall at home or resides in a parent’s pocket. Neither do they need unfettered access to the internet. Dumb law. If this passes, maybe we should be able to bring suit against Burger King when parents buy 2000 calorie meals for their children 4 times a day, they get fat, and die of heart disease at 14. Oh wait, we already do that.
DaveE:
That will naturally get ratcheted to the point that a second occurrence is ‘repeated’, because that maximizes the legal profession’s income. ‘Severe’ and ‘hostile’ will likewise become less and less of a hurdle, as the bar is lowered with each subsequent conviction.
But the real key is the subjectiveness of the complainant. Who is to say that a blog post will “cause substantial emotional distress”? Why, the person whose fragile feelings are injured, of course.
The emotionally distressed “victims” themselves will be only too happy to testify about their inner feelings in the endless civil litigation that is bound to follow a vague law like this.
Someone on WUWT mentioned this quote recently: “If two people are thinking the same thing, one of them isn’t thinking.” I’ve found from Google that it is often attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, but I haven’t found the exact wording of the quote.
This is a useful quote in these times of consensus and political correctness.
If you say something that doesn’t offend someone, you probably didn’t say anything important.
Dort wo man Buecher brennt, dort brennt man auch Menschen. This is a German explanation about what happened with non-accepted ideas of people in the dark Eurpean Middle-ages 9 and after) in Europe about what happened with them in those days. Read for Buecher = communicationn and for Jail = brennen. So the Californian USA people can expect something. Finally, why left these old-Europeans Europe and why did they go to America? Probably USA is going to be even worser than Europe because they are giving up LIBERTY!
I agree with DaveE. “Severe, repeated, and hostile” are the key words. Those would make the communication unprotected speech, rather like hate speech or death threats.
Not unless it’s libelous. Your example fails the “support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior” requirement, which implies targeted communication.
The Hansen Haters section will be quiet large.
The boy of John
Does fear of being snipped by Charles the Moderator et al constitute emotional distress?
[SNIP!]
[Well, okay, you didn’t say anything. But you were thinkin’ it! ~ Evan the moderator]