Tuesday, June 03, 2014
Stop arresting children for stupid tweets, and make our laws suitable for the internet age
Criminal law is such a blunt instrument online. What we already have is a poor fit, and analogies don’t seem to work. Downloading a film is not the same as stealing a car. Threatening someone on social media is not the same as threatening them in the street. And enforcing what laws you have is really difficult – when you do, you come off like an overzealous idiot.
Which brings me to today’s news. Police have investigated 2,000 children over the last three years for stupid things they have said on social media. And more than 1,300 of them have been charged or cautioned. Some of them were as young as nine.
Neither have adults got off lightly: over the same period almost 20,000 were investigated under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003: “sending grossly offensive or indecent messages”.
That is quite a lot of police time. Indeed, according to our story today “investigating online abuse is creating a headache for police forces, who have complained it is taking up so much time that they are unable to devote resources to more serious crimes”.
But social media offences aren’t just absorbing police resources, they seem to be absorbing all the heaviest punishments too.
In 2012 a British student called Glenn Maugham hacked into Facebook “just to see if he could”. He didn’t use the information he found, but still got eight months in jail.
Then, in the same week that Justin Lee-Collins got 140 hours of community service for harassing his girlfriend, Matthew Woods was jailed for 12 weeks over Facebook comments about April Jones.
But most tragic of all is the case of Aaron Swartz, the computer programmer who downloaded a large number of JSTOR articles (with no profit in mind). For this he was handed a 30 year jail sentence – using the same laws set up for bank robbers and organised criminals. He later committed suicide.
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6 comments:
What's the point of this article? All of the people cited exhibited anti-social behavior. It's easy for the author to talk, wonder how he would fell is it was his site that got hacked. The kid didn't do any thing this time but what about the next or if he spreads his methods to others? Would he feel the same if it was his daughter that was harassed. The purpose of charges is not just punishment but to set an example for others. There's an old saying: If you can't do the crime; don't do the crime.
"Justin Lee-Collins got 140 hours of community service" -- you (and the person who wrote the original article) should do some basic research. Google him. Justin Lee-Collins is not a child as the article implies, He's 38 and embarked on a nasty campaign to brutalize his ex-girlfriend.
Soon they'll arrest parents who have their kids babtised or refuse to send them to these indoctrination centers called Schools
I looked it up online and Aaron Swartz was still facing charges not convicted at the time of his death .
"But most tragic of all is the case of Aaron Swartz, the computer programmer who downloaded a large number of JSTOR articles (with no profit in mind). For this he was handed a 30 year jail sentence – using the same laws set up for bank robbers and organised criminals. He later committed suicide."
As Anon 12:17 said, this is statement is false. He had not yet accepted the plea deal at the time of his death.
The idea that Swartz wasn't doing anything "for profit" is not quite accurate. What he had done was start d/l'ing information off of a private server using faked accounts. That information was the for for profit business model of the JStor company and Swartz wanted the information to be free, depriving the rightful owners their profit.
Swartz was caught, banned, caught, banned again, and finally caught trespassing again into both the servers of the company, the grounds of MIT and the MIT network servers.
The writer of the blog article, Martha Gill, was more interested in making a point rather than being truthful.
Free Speech should trump all liberal eleltists speech codes
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