Crime on the frontier
By Patrick Kelley
Originally published 01:36 p.m., May 19, 2008
Updated 01:36 p.m., May 19, 2008
In this settled country, people put great store in the law and in defending against crime. Safe streets, safe homes and safe schools are primary goals for every community.
By and large, the goals are met. Most Americans can go about their lives unarmed and only minimally wary and not be in danger.
But rubbing up against this relatively safe world is one that can be much more dangerous. And that world has a doorway into almost every home.
The Internet is new, shiny, exciting and useful, but in many ways it harks back to the old frontier. On the Internet, among peaceable explorers and honest settlers, outlaws roam unimpeded. The law is often far away and justice sometimes beyond reach. It is a new land with new rules and new dangers. People must rely on their own skills and instincts to keep them safe.
The Internet is a created world and exists only in moving electrons and digital code, but its dangers are real. Internet outlaws can steal money, identity — even, it seems — life. And it is all done with words.
The federal indictment last week of a Missouri mother accused of using the Internet to deceive and eventually destroy a teenage girl illustrates how deadly words can be.
Prosecutors says the woman used the unique properties of the Internet to created an online suitor for the 13-year-old girl, wooed her until she was infatuated, then dropped her with consummate cruelty.
The girl hanged herself.
Had the woman carried out her plan in the real world — on paper, by telephone or face to face — there would have been no question that a crime had been committed. But because this plan was effected on the Internet, in the unreal world of numbers, words and images, Missouri could find no statute that applied. That is why the federal government stepped in. The woman is charged not with murder or manslaughter, but with conspiracy and computer crimes.
Her attorney is likely to argue that this is a free-speech issue. Certainly, the woman participated in a lie, but — by itself — lying is not illegal.
But freedom of speech has always had its limits. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously wrote for the majority in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court:
The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic. [...] The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.
That is the standard in the physical world — freedom linked to responsibility. In the virtual world of the Internet — with its networking sites, blogs and anonymous posters — freedom is complete, lies hold the same credence as truth and responsibility is lost among the tangled, crossing strands of the World Wide Web.
Like the frontier, the Internet must go through its own civilizing process.
Perhaps the Missouri case will be a step in that direction.
jayhawker (anonymous) says...
Mr. Kelley makes a reasoned argument for limited restrictions upon the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech. He points out, correctly, that some limitations are necessary to protect us from crazed and evil people that would prey upon us and our civilization. Certainly, reasonable restrictions of the kind that he proposes will not cause our entire constitutional system to fail and send us into a police state.
I am perplexed, however, that he comes to the opposite conclusion when our President and others make equally reasoned arguments regarding surveillance of radical Muslims who are a clear, unmistakable and present threat to us and to our way of life. Protecting ourselves from evil people, whether on the internet or on airplanes, will not destroy our constitution. In fact, to do otherwise would be irresponsible.
May 19, 2008 at 9:32 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )