Truly, a Brand-New Precedent for Governmental Absurdity Has Been Set

[queerbychoice]

With gratitude to mariness for informing me:

Apparently it is now, ever since last Thursday, officially illegal under United States law for any person to use the Internet to post or send e-mail or web-based messages "without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy."

Since it should be perfectly clear from the information publicly available about me that anyone posting comments in my LiveJournal that attempt to defend almost any action that President Bush has ever undertaken is likely to annoy me, it is reasonable to conclude that any person who does so is doing so with the deliberate intent to annoy me. Therefore, any people bound by U.S. law who leave any pro-Bush comments in my journal and fail to include their full names in their comments are now committing an illegal act. I look forward to seeing Bush's own henchmen prosecute these cases for me to the fullest.

(Note: The law in question is an update that adds Internet communications to a preexisting 1994 law banning intentionally annoying people via telephone. Here is the actual text of the law, with the new changes marked.)

Comments

[pure-agnostic.livejournal.com]

Well, so much for freedom of speech.

And just how would a recipient of the message know the anonymous person intended to annoy? And not just wanted to amuse or inform? That's the funny thing about laws about intention - how could any person truly know the intent of another? How could they know what goes on inside somebody else's head?

And in other news, the US government has made wishful thinking illegal as well.

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

And it's funny how it's not illegal to blow people up in Iraq "with intent to annoy," as long as the Internet isn't involved. Though maybe we could prosecute Bush on the grounds that he's aware that blowing people up will get articles written about the mass murder and posted on the Internet, which in turn tends to annoy a lot of us who aren't actually dead yet.

[rhekarid.livejournal.com]

Not to mention, if you believe in an afterlife like Bush and so many of his kin publically would be expected to, then a lot of this stuff on the internet will also potentially annoy many of the people who ARE dead yet.