jkh001@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
>
> Brian Lafferty wrote:
>> jkh001@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
>>> samsloan wrote:
>>>> On Mon, May 5, 2008 at 4:35 PM, Eric Schiller
>>>> <chessworks@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> You live in your own universe with its own rules. There is
nothing
>>>> wrong with moderators discussing specific postings. It is customary
>>>> not to mention the name of the poster, but I have never seen any
>>>> rules. You just make this stuff up.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Eric,
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I have never seen you post to the USCF Issues Forum and you obviously
>>>> know nothing about it.
>>>>
>>>> During the election campaign, the "moderators" deleted over one
>>>> thousand postings. Anything remotely pro-Sam Sloan or anti-Polgar and
>>>> Truong was deleted.
>>>>
>>>> We had two good moderators, Mike Aignar and Duncan Oxley. Both of
them
>>>> were pressured by the higher-ups especially Channing to become more
>>>> active in deleting postings. As a result, Mike Aignar resigned in
>>>> protest. Duncan Oxley, as you know, killed himself for reasons
>>>> unknown.
>>>>
>>>> Their places were taken by several others who soon quit also
>>>> complaining about pressures from above and finally Vaughn and
>>>> Sawmiller were appointed.
>>>>
>>>> Also, during this time, there was the Forum Oversight Committee or
FOC
>>>> that had the power to restore a posting that had been deleted by the
>>>> moderators. The FOC was also stacked with anti-Sam Sloan and pro-
>>>> Polgar posters. However, several of the FOC members finally saw the
>>>> light and stopped sup****ting Polgar and stopped attacking me. Notable
>>>> examples of this were Steve of Tennessee and Ron Suarez. Also, Louis
>>>> Blair stopped attacking me as much as he had previously.
>>>>
>>>> This meant that even the Fanatical Polgaristas such as Gregory
>>>> Alexander and Terry Winchester who had been appointed as moderators
>>>> often had the posts they had deleted restored. To deal with this
>>>> situation, the insiders Goichberg and Channing created a new middle
>>>> tier. A new "Moderation Committee" consisting of the pro-Polgar
>>>> moderators plus one or two others was created with authority over the
>>>> moderators. By then, there were only four remaining members of the
>>>> FOC. All the others had quit, basically all saying that they had not
>>>> accepted this assignment only to be told what to do by the
higher-ups.
>>>> So, to effectively get rid of the remaining FOC members, they took
>>>> away their power to restore deleted postings, leaving them only with
>>>> the power to restore people who had been banned or suspended.
>>>>
>>>> All this happened while the election campaign was going on. Although
>>>> there were not that many regular members of the USCF Issues Forum,
all
>>>> of them can and do vote in the election. Their votes are easily
enough
>>>> to swing the election.
>>>>
>>>> Remember that the Office is supposed to remain neutral and
politically
>>>> independent. Obviously, this was not happening. Bill Hall, the
>>>> Executive Director, was doing everything he could to get Polgar and
>>>> Truong elected and to stop Sam Sloan from being re-elected. I believe
>>>> that Bill Hall even allowed Polgar and Truong to run without paying
>>>> the required $250 filing fee. He has never responded to questions
>>>> about this.
>>>>
>>>> In short, due to this and other manipulations by the USCF Insiders
>>>> including especially Goichberg, Channing and Hall, it cannot be said
>>>> that this was a fairly conducted election.
>>>>
>>>> Sam Sloan
>>>
>>> Q: How many lies can balance on the point of Sam Sloan's head? A: See
>>> above.
>>>
>>> Sam, the voters had ample op****tunity to see you and hear you bray.
>>> They threw you in the trash bin where you belong. Democracy works.
>> Well, John, if you say so it must be true. I'm still waiting for the
>> citation sup****ting your first amendment interpretation regarding
>> harassment. When can I expect you to provide it? Thanks!
>
> Brian, if you are honestly asking for a citation of Volokh's comments
> on this (I find it hard to assume good faith on your part, but with a
> Herculean effort I suppose I can manage it), here it is. Of course he
> could be wrong. But I rather suspect he knows more about the subject
> than I ... or you. (Sorry, bolding in the original won't transfer.
> Original is here: http://volokh.com/posts/chain_1136873535.shtml
>
> ______________________________________________________________
>
> [Eugene Volokh, January 10, 2006 at 3:07pm] 58 Trackbacks / Possibly
> More Trackbacks
> Annoying Anonymous Speech Online:
>
> People are troubled by a just-enacted statute that extends part of
> telephone harassment law to the Internet. I think they're right to be
> troubled by it, and here's why.
>
> First, the statute, with deletions marked by strikeouts and insertions
> marked by underlines:
>
> 47 U.S.C. § 223(a)(1)(C): Whoever ... in interstate or foreign
> communications ... makes a telephone call or utilizes a
> telecommunications device, whether or not conversation or
> communication ensues, without disclosing his identity and with intent
> to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass any person at the called number
> or who receives the communications....
>
> (h)(1) The use of the term “telecommunications device” in this
> section --
> (A) shall not impose new obligations on broadcasting station
> licensees and cable operators covered by obscenity and indecency
> provisions elsewhere in this chapter; and
> (B) does not include an interactive computer service [= any
> information service, system, or access software provider that provides
> or enables computer access by multiple users to a computer server,
> including specifically a service or system that provides access to the
> Internet and such systems operated or services offered by libraries or
> educational institutions].; and
> (C) in the case of subparagraph (C) of subsection (a)(1), includes
> 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 ....
>
> What does this practically mean?
>
> 1. This potentially criminalizes any anonymous speech on a Web site
> that's intended to annoy at least some readers, even if it's also
> intended to inform other readers. This is true whether the poster is
> berating a government official, a religious figure, a company that he
> thinks provides bad service, an academic who he thinks is doing or
> saying something misguided, a s****ts figure who he thinks is
> misbehaving, or what have you; so long as he's trying to annoy any
> recipient (whether the target, if the poster thinks the target is
> reading the blog, or the target's partisans or fans).
>
> 2. How is this different from traditional telephone harassment law?
> The trouble is that the change extends traditional telephone
> harassment law from a basically one-to-one medium (phone calls) to
> include a one-to-many medium (Web sites).
>
> This is a big change. One-to-one speech that's intended to annoy the
> one recipient is rarely of very much First Amendment value; people are
> just rarely persuaded or enlightened by speech that's intended to
> annoy them. It has some value (see item 3 below), but to the extent
> that it's in some measure deterred, the loss to public debate isn't
> that great — speakers are still free to speak to others besides the
> person they're trying to annoy.
>
> But one-to-many speech that is intended to annoy one or a few readers,
> but intended and likely to enlighten or persuade many other readers,
> is potentially much more valuable. Juan might think that the target of
> the speech deserves to be berated for his misconduct, and that the
> target's sup****ters deserve to be berated for siding with the target;
> but Juan might also want the rest of the public to hear about the
> target's misbehavior, and to be persuaded to think less of the target,
> or to act differently themselves.
>
> Though the desire to annoy may sometimes be petty (and I'm using Juan
> just because Juan is our one anonymous coblogger here, not because
> Juan generally tries to annoy people!), it shouldn't strip the speech
> of constitutional protection. "[I]n the world of debate about public
> affairs, many things done with motives that are less than admirable
> are protected by the First Amendment.... [E]ven when a speaker or
> writer is motivated by hatred or ill will his expression was protected
> by the First Amendment ...." And the same is true, I think, in
> discussion of consumer matters, of religion, of s****ts, and of other
> things, not just public affairs.
>
> 3. Orin suggests that this isn't a problem, because even traditional
> telephone harassment law has already been limited to exclude "speech
> [that] is protected by the First Amendment." Orin cites United States
> v. Popa, a case that set aside as unconstitutional a conviction of Ion
> Popa, who made several racist calls to the U.S. Attorney for the
> District of Columbia (the chief federal prosecutor in the District).
> The trouble, though, is that it's far from clear just what speech Popa
> protects.
>
> A. One possible interpretation of Popa is that it bars telephone
> harassment prosecution when the "speech is protected by the First
> Amendment." At some level, that's almost tautological — of course when
> the speech is protected by the First Amendment, the First Amendment
> prohibits prosecution for that speech. But it also returns us to the
> underlying question: When is speech that's intended to annoy the
> recipient protected by the First Amendment? If someone calls not a
> prosecutor but a law professor and leaves an anonymous deliberately
> annoying racist message, is that protected? What if he calls a law
> student with such a message? What if he posts an anonymous blog post
> that says this? The poster would have little guidance about what he
> may or may not say.
>
> Of course, when prosecuted, the speaker can say "my speech is
> protected by the First Amendment." But given that the statute draws no
> distinction between what constitutes protected annoying anonymous
> speech and what constitutes unprotected annoying anonymous speech, the
> speaker doesn't know what he may safely say, and the prosecutor
> doesn't have much guidance about what he should prosecute. It's as if
> Congress enacted a whole bunch of speech restrictions but tacked on an
> "except if the First Amendment prohibits this" to them. The result
> would be speech restrictions that are technically not overbroad (since
> by their terms they don't bar First-Amendment-protected speech), but
> that are practically too vague, since they provide little guidance to
> people about what they may say.
>
> B. Another possible view is that the telephone harassment statute bars
> any prosecution for speech unless the speech falls within the
> traditional First Amendment exceptions, such as threats, obscenity
> (which means hard-core ****ography), false statements of fact,
> fighting words, and the like. These exceptions are at least tolerably
> well-defined, and all of us already generally have to avoid speech
> that falls within these exceptions (since the federal and state
> governments have taken advantage of most of these exceptions to in
> fact outlaw or at least make tortious speech that fits in the
> exceptions).
>
> But if that's the interpretation of Popa, then most garden-variety
> telephone harassment, of the sort that most people assume is fully
> prosecutable, would be unpunishable. Calling someone anonymously
> simply to insult them wouldn't be covered (such insults don't fit
> within the "fighting words" exception, since the anonymity and
> distance of the speaker makes it unlikely that the speech will start a
> fight). Likewise for calling someone to make an indecent suggestion,
> except when the suggestion is an actual threat of violence or is so
> ***ually explicit as to be obscene (which is a pretty high threshold
> to meet). The very premise of telephone harassment law, as it's
> generally understood, is that some such speech — while protected in
> many media — is unprotected when said with the intent to annoy (and
> perhaps said to a particular person). Harassment law thus rests on the
> theory that there should be a new First Amendment exception recognized
> for "telephone harassment" that goes beyond just threats, fighting
> words, and the like. So the "speech is protected unless it's threats,
> fighting words, obscenity, incitement, or false statements of fact"
> theory is thus almost certainly not what Congress has had in mind, and
> is unlikely to be adopted by the courts.
>
> C. Popa can easily be read, I think, as holding that speech that's
> "intend[ed] in part to communicate a political message" is protected
> from punishment by the statute. But it's far from clear that this
> would protect speech on a Web site that's intended to communicate a
> message about some company's allegedly mistreatment of its consumers,
> that's intended to criticize the performance of a s****ts figure,
> that's intended to express an annoying view about theology, or
> whatever else. What's more, it's often not easy to tell exactly what's
> a "political" message and what's not. The court in Popa held that
> racist insults of a high-level official are political. What about
> speech that criticizes law professors (whether racist speech, speech
> that casts aspersions on their intellect or teaching ability, or what
> have you)? What about speech that criticizes a particular student in
> racist terms, but implicitly conveys a message about school
> admissions? (Not that I would endorse such speech, of course; I just
> think that (a) it ought to be constitutionally protected, when posted
> on a Web site, even if it's intended to annoy, and (b) there's likely
> to be controversy about whether it's political.)
>
> D. Finally, Popa can also be read as holding that speech is protected
> from the statute when the speaker "intend[ed] to engage in public or
> political discourse." "Public discourse" is broader than just
> "political message," and would certainly include religion and probably
> consumer matters involving large businesses and the like. But it too
> is a pretty vague term. Is publicly distributed personal criticism of
> a particular professional's skills, for instance, a lawyer's or a
> professor's, "public discourse"? There's no well-established First
> Amendment test for this, and the Court's use of the related term
> "public concern" has proven to be unpredictable and, I think, often
> misguided (see Part V.B of this article, starting with PDF page 46).
>
> So on balance I think the extension of the telephone harassment
> statute to the Web is a mistake. The statute already has problems, and
> the extension risks substantially exacerbating those problems, by
> potentially covering one-to-many annoying Web speech as well as the
> somewhat less valuable one-to-one annoying telephone calls.
LOL. Mr. V. conflates annoyance to harassment. Wrong. Sounds good in a
forum such as the one he posted to for general consumption by aging,
budding legal beagles such as you. Annoying behavior does not
necessarily rise to harassment, civil or criminal. There's a reason the
statute uses the word harassment, not annoyance.
Now, provide a citation to a scholarly work by Mr. V. in which he makes
this argument.
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