Civil liberties attorney Harvey Silvergate estimates the average person commits three felonies a day, and we’re all, “that’s all?!”
Probably not, particularly if you’re working on the internet. Like this guy, mentioned in a WSJ piece about Silvergate:
In 2001, a man named Bradford Councilman was charged in Massachusetts with violating the wiretap laws. He worked at a company that offered an online book-listing service and also acted as an Internet service provider to book dealers. As an ISP, the company routinely intercepted and copied emails as part of the process of shuttling them through the Web to recipients.
The federal wiretap laws, Mr. Silverglate writes, were “written before the dawn of the Internet, often amended, not always clear, and frequently lagging behind the whipcrack speed of technological change.” Prosecutors chose to interpret the ISP role of momentarily copying messages as they made their way through the system as akin to impermissibly listening in on communications. The case went through several rounds of litigation, with no judge making the obvious point that this is how ISPs operate. After six years, a jury found Mr. Councilman not guilty.
I breathed a miniature sigh of relief when I read that particular case — we’re not an ISP, so we’re pretty much untouchable, right? Wrong.
Other misunderstandings of the Web criminalize the exercise of First Amendment rights. A Saudi student in Idaho was charged in 2003 with offering “material support” to terrorists. He had operated Web sites for a Muslim charity that focused on normal religious training, but was prosecuted on the theory that if a user followed enough links off his site, he would find violent, anti-American comments on other sites. The Internet is a series of links, so if there’s liability for anything in an online chain, it would be hard to avoid prosecution.
I don’t even have to check to know that, if you followed enough links from this website, you’re almost guaranteed to find something raunchy (readers, if you feel like testing this theory, send us your raunchiest and we’ll link directly to it — no reason to make things more difficult than they need to be).
Three felonies a day keep the man at bay
Probably not, particularly if you’re working on the internet. Like this guy, mentioned in a WSJ piece about Silvergate:
I breathed a miniature sigh of relief when I read that particular case — we’re not an ISP, so we’re pretty much untouchable, right? Wrong.
I don’t even have to check to know that, if you followed enough links from this website, you’re almost guaranteed to find something raunchy (readers, if you feel like testing this theory, send us your raunchiest and we’ll link directly to it — no reason to make things more difficult than they need to be).