

How Cyberbullying Prevention Act Could Land You In Prison - pideon
http://startupearth.com/2009/05/23/how-cyberbullying-prevention-act-could-land-you-in-prison/

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petercooper
_“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.”_

Good! People who set out to _intentionally_ ("with the intent") intimidate,
harass, or distress another individual ("a person") deserves punishment. The
word "substantial" demonstrates it's for incidents far beyond just saying
something like "You're a dick" or "You're wrong because X, Y and Z."

As is usual, though, the problem here isn't with the law as-written but the
way it can be _misinterpreted_ and abused by unethical lawyers and judges. How
do you prove _intent_ to cause distress? If I were to make a flippant comment
about "Christians" believing in "fictional characters", let's say, it should
be obvious I'm not intending to offend or cause emotional distress to "a
person", but could the law be twisted to force me to prove my innocence in
such a minor instance?

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CalmQuiet
IANAL, but _intent_ is explicitly required: "...with the intent to coerce,
intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person..."

To a lay person, it seems no small thing to _prove_ such an intent in writing
critical material on web (or elsewhere).

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jrockway
I doubt this law will pass constitutional muster.

But, if you don't want to be the first test case, I suggest using Tor for
posting anything online. You might want to use an anonymous username, but
every time cops have been sent to my house over a forum posting, the username
gets lost and they only care about the IP that they got obtained from the site
operator. (But also keep in mind that an IP address and a username don't prove
that you did anything illegal, so laws like this are extremely hard to
enforce.)

IANAL, of course, but I do have firsthand experience on this matter. (Also,
Slashdot says they delete the IP address of comments, but they don't. :)

Anyway, let them harass the Tor endpoint in Egypt, or something, not you.

