Woman Blogs About Police, Goes to Jail. Fair? Unfair?

[Lemur]

Well, given how the world works these days, there's a lot of information about you available to anyone who has the obsession time. Should there be consequences for those who aggregate and organize that information when it could bring harm to the subject?

Should there be laws that cover aggregators, or should we work harder on making more information private?

[Sasaki Kojiro]

She shouldn't have been arrested. It's just a blog.

She broke the law yes, but there are all kinds of crazy statutes...

[Crazed Rabbit]

Unfair. She may be obsessed, but that law against 'harassment' is stupid. The cops provided no evidence that she was actually harming them in any way.

And they're really lousy at being 'undercover' if she found all this out about them. Compiling information should definitely not be a crime.

Eugene Volokh, what I would call an expert, also has this to say;

One thing I stress in the article is that much (though not all) such crime-facilitating speech does have value to law-abiding readers as well. Knowing the identity of an undercover police officer can help noncriminals know which of their acquaintances aren't what they seem, and can help criminal defense lawyers figure out how to better defend their clients. Even knowing a person's home address could be useful if you want to organize picketing of their homes. Such residential picketing could be restricted by city ordinance, but in some cities it isn't; and even if focused residential picketing is banned by a city ordinance, parading through the targets; neighborhood in order to express your message of condemnation to the targets' neighbors is constitutionally protected. See Madsen v. Women’s Health Ctr., 512 U.S. 753, 775 (1994); Frisby v. Schultz, 487 U.S. 474, 480-81 (1988).

CR

[Louis VI the Fat]

Unfair.

You can say that, but I bet you're just getting a bit nervous.


*mails links to CR's Backroom posts to the Seattle PD*

[Banquo's Ghost]

Well, given how the world works these days, there's a lot of information about you available to anyone who has the obsession time. Should there be consequences for those who aggregate and organize that information when it could bring harm to the subject?

Should there be laws that cover aggregators, or should we work harder on making more information private?

Quite the opposite, in my opinion. Most countries need laws making more information available to the citizens. Information is power, and the less of it conserved to government discretion, the better.

Any information that is publicly available, is publicly available. If a blogger can access and aggregate it, you can be sure villains can and will. This woman wouldn't have made it any easier for organised "bad" people to find this policeman if they wanted - which is, I presume, the rationale for implying this should be illegal.

Government agencies ought to get used to the idea they work for the citizenry, and in most cases, the citizen has a right to information. If someone working in law enforcement or national security may be exposed, then a judge should be approached prior to need, and a case made to suppress the information on their identity from the public record.

I would have thought your First Amendment would have trumped any tin-pot local statute - but then that Constitution seems to be largely ignored these days. And then we get into a discussion about whether bloggers have the same consideration as "mainstream" journalism.

[Lemur]

I think the legal consensus that's congealing in the courts and state legislatures is that bloggers have exactly the same rights and responsibilities as "normal" journos.

The First Amendment has many exceptions, including the age-old "yell fire in a crowded theater" chestnut. There are also State Secrets, which are rightfully and justly exempted from free speech. Libel, slander, incitement to violence, the list goes on.

I dunno, posting the identity and home address of undercover police strikes me as serving little or no public benefit while endangering a schlub who puts his life on the line for his community. Don't see the upside, and the downside is obvious.

[Banquo's Ghost]

I dunno, posting the identity and home address of undercover police strikes me as serving little or no public benefit while endangering a schlub who puts his life on the line for his community. Don't see the upside, and the downside is obvious.

I don't disagree, except the information was already public. The downside was already extant.

[Marshal Murat]

I would think most police officers information is public, but looking it up and then moving it into a more public spotlight is endangering the officer who is trying to work undercover.

[Sasaki Kojiro]

I would think most police officers information is public, but looking it up and then moving it into a more public spotlight is endangering the officer who is trying to work undercover.

I really don't think it is though. This isn't like a movie where johnny depp spends years undercover for a mafia family trying to get into the inner circle. This is a local drug unit where "undercover" means he's the guy who pretends to be buying drugs from someone in order to bust them.

[KukriKhan]

But the real problem here is the Virginia statute, in which an overly broad, ill-defined ban on harassment-by-identification, specifically in regard to police officers, seems to criminalize just about anything that might irritate targets.

Yes, that. Therefore = 'Unfair', imo.

[Proletariat]

She's crazy like we all agree but who cares, the undercover cops should be more undercover. Let them be a little scared


Great thing we have here, even if it's a little irrelevant.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom...ited_States%29