Does a new federal law make it illegal to annoy someone via a posting on the web?

At best, there is sloppy drafting in new legislation covering harassing or annoying phone calls. But you could well read it as a First Amendment threat.

President Bush just signed the “Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act of 2005.” Section 113 of the Act expands the list of “telecommunications devices” from which it is illegal to create or make

any comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image, or other communication which is obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, or indecent, with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass another person;

(from 47 U.S.C. 223 here; current definitions at the very bottom)

And now the problem. Telecommunications devices from which those acts are illegal now include

… 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 …

This could be a well-intentioned attempt to include VOIP devices in existing harassment law — Skype, Vonage, and the like could arguably have fallen under the old law’s “interactive computer service” exclusion.

But it literally seems to make all communication transmitted via the internet with “intent to annoy” illegal.

As a test case, can we throw Michael Hiltzik and Paul Krugman in jail?

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H/t: Online News Squared, whose source was a pair of CNET articles (here + here)

This entry was posted on Friday, January 13th, 2006 at 2:12 pm by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under Your Tax Dollars In Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.