My column from last year: http://news.com.com/2010-1028-5155054.html The U.S. Congress is hard at work trying to punish Internet users who value their privacy. That's not how Capitol Hill politicians describe a new bill introduced last week, of course, but that's what it would accomplish if it becomes law. Called the Fraudulent Online Identity Sanctions Act, the measure would increase prison sentences by up to seven years in criminal cases if someone provided "material and misleading false contact information to a domain name registrar, domain name registry, or other domain name registration authority." That's a reference to the Whois database that lists information about who owns each domain name. [...] -Declan -------- Original Message -------- Subject: FOISA is law. Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2005 00:17:19 -0500 From: Tom Cross <tom@private> To: declan@private Declan, I found out today that the "Federal Online Identity Sanctions Act," which you wrote about in February of last year is now the law of the land. It was melded into the "Intellectual Property Protection and Courts Amendments Act" and passed in December. There was hardly a peep about this in the press and other usual outlets. Just a short blurb in one of EPIC's newsletters. This law creates significant risks for people who run websites that they might commit some sort of Intellectual Property thoughtcrime and find themselves facing willful infringement charges simply because they gave a fake phone number on their DNS registration. Its hard to see what purpose this serves in terms of Internet crime. Criminals usually don't need domain names, and its doubtful that this law is going to influence them to be forthcoming with contact information when they do use them. What is most frustrating to me about it is this "savings clause" it includes which says that nothing about this law impacts the freedom of speech. Nothing about that clause mitigates the actual risks that this law creates for people engaged in protected speech online, or the impact that it may have on what is said by whom. It simply provides for a silly semantic argument that the government can make if faced with a constitutional challenge. "The emperor is fully clothed, your honor! See, it says so right here!" I find it disheartening to see fundamental constitutional rights shrugged away with such trite wordsmithery. http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d108:H.R.3632: Regards, Tom Cross _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)
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