Prepare for backlash in 5.. 4.. 3.. 2..

Good god, has anyone else seen this?

Annoying someone via the Internet is now a federal crime.

It's no joke. Last Thursday, President Bush signed into law a prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity. In other words, it's OK to flame someone on a mailing list or in a blog as long as you do it under your real name. Thank Congress for small favors, I guess. This ridiculous prohibition, which would likely imperil much of Usenet, is buried in the so-called Violence Against Women And Department of Justice Reauthorization Act. Criminal penalties include stiff fines and two years in prison.

"The use of the word 'annoy' is particularly problematic," says Marv Johnson, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. "What's annoying to one person may not be annoying to someone else."

So what this means is, your opinions, as long as someone else disagrees with you, can be held against you in a court of law, but only if you don't sign your name to them. The quote from the ACLU rep is the most illuminating to me, actually. Who's to say Conservative Republicans don't find Liberal blogs annoying, and vice versa? This seems a pretty blatant attack of Free Speech. But I don't want to name names, as I could be arrested...

Oh what the hell, why not. Fuck Bush, and fuck the Republican party. Not that I'm a Democrat supporter either, to be honest. I think both parties are corrupt and intent on keeping this country locked into a two-party system which offers no real viable choice anyway. But as George and his buddies seem intent on turning us more and more into a police state ruled by fear and terrorism (look up the definition for the word, and see if it doesn't describe the "terror alerts" from a year plus ago), they earn my wrath at this moment.

So yeah, hopefully (and I'm willing to bet) this law gets changed fairly quickly, or some major shit will go down. Maybe. Probably. I think.