The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

I'm obviously not a fan of anonymous bullying on someone's blog.

But I don't think I needed this special law to protect my interests. (I linked to Bruce Schneier's blog post on this, but there are many other civil libertarian bloggers who are similarly concerned.)

From an article on C|Net:

"Last Thursday, President Bush signed into law a prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity.

[...]

Buried deep in the new law is Sec. 113, an innocuously titled bit called 'Preventing Cyberstalking.' It rewrites existing telephone harassment law to prohibit anyone from using the Internet 'without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy.'"

I wonder though whether it would be a crime if the bully didn't actually intend to disclose their identity, but inadvertantly left enough clues so that identification was possible. I wonder also if the law is clear about to WHOM there must be a disclosure of identity. There are several commenters here, for example, who are anonymous to the world but identifiable to me. I suppose the law is indended to cover people who are unidentifiable to the blog owner, but this law seems so poorly thought through that I would doubt the statutory language is that clear. I further wonder how "annoyingness" is calculated. Some commenters drive me crazy with their diffidence, but I wouldn't conflate that with abuse or harassment.

The update on Schneier's site referring to the BoingBoing comment indicates that this law may simply be a statutory articulation of a common law extension to telephonic harassment laws. But be that as it may, it's no less problematic. This is tricky stuff, electronic communications regulation, and it doesn't necessarily neatly parallel pre-existing communications media in such a way that those laws can blindly be extended to cover them. Thus enshrining evolving legal doctrine directly into statute by sneaking it into another bill without any sort of hearings and vetting is doubtlessly not a good idea.

(Oh yeah, and let's not forget that my bully buillied me in Germany on a blog hosted in the US and the whole host of issues THAT raises...)

Edit: There some more analysis in this post and comments at Concurring Opinions, but even though the law may not be exactly as the C|Net article represented it, I'm not sure that it's entirely clear what it actually is or whether and to what extent it's enforceable. This confusion further supports the larger point that legislating by stealth is a Bad Thing. Especially something as complicated as Internet communications.

Edit: Orin Kerr says this is much to do about nothing (and presumably that all my above questions are answerable). Apparently this is a law that's intended to bring the existing telecommunications law to VoIP. I STILL say that whether or not it is intended to or does, and whether or not it does so reasonably or properly, the big problem here is that this was done with no public exposure. It is a rather large question of whether we want to (or even can) regulate VoIP telephony like existing telephony. Too large to be able to legislate without actually answering it.

Edit 1/10: But Eugene Volokh disagrees and thinks it's troublesome. I repeat my already reiterated point: any law that Professors Volokh and Kerr can't agree upon the meaning of is not a good law...