Cyberstalking law stirs debate

WASHINGTON — Joelle Ligon spent years terrorized by an old boyfriend in South Carolina who sent her scores of anonymous e-mail messages and posted her phone number on pornographic online message boards before authorities were able to convict him.

"People in this situation just feel so powerless. They don't know where to turn," said Ligon, 37, who works for the Seattle Parks and Recreation Department. "Over time it just dismantles you emotionally. It really messes with your mind."

Last week, President Bush signed into law a Department of Justice appropriations bill that also makes online harassment such as that suffered by Ligon a federal crime.

But the new law has drawn fire from bloggers and free-speech advocates who call it overly broad and say it may allow federal prosecutors to take aim at constitutionally protected speech on the Internet.

The measure changes the federal law governing harassment over the telephone to include "any device or software that can be used to originate telecommunications or other types of communications that are transmitted, in whole or in part, by the Internet."

The provision makes it a crime to "annoy, abuse, threaten or harass any person" through messages sent via the Internet when senders don't disclose their identities.

"Until now cyberstalking was outside the reach of authorities. We've changed that and made the online world safer for Joelle and everyone else," Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Seattle, who worked with other lawmakers to get the language included in the bill, said in a statement.

But Kurt Opsahl, an attorney at the California-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, criticized the new law, saying "a vague word like 'annoy' could make it easier for an aggressive prosecutor to unmask a speaker engaged in politically protected speech.

"Anonymous speech is a vital right to allow people to participate in public debates without fear," he said. "Enacting a statute that pushes against that right unnecessarily is a bad idea."

McDermott aide Mike DeCesare noted that the provision is not aimed at blogs or anonymous message boards but at e-mail messages such as those received by Ligon.

However, even an advocate for the victims of online harassment said lawmakers may have gone too far and real cyberstalking cases could fall through the cracks if the courts are inundated with cases about online messages people merely find annoying.

"I'm annoyed by people every day, but there's a huge difference between stalking or threatening and what's in the law," said Jayne Hitchcock, a one-time victim of online harassment who now heads the Maine-based Working to Halt Online Abuse. "They went beyond what I really wanted to see."

As a result of the Ligon case, Washington state passed its own law in 2004 covering online harassment.

The harassment of Ligon lasted from 1998 to 2003. Her former boyfriend was convicted in 2004 in U.S. District Court and sentenced to probation.