PC World Magazine reports that a the Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act of 2005 was recently signed into law that would make it a crime to “intentionally annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass another person“:

The broad language of the law has some online advocates concerned that it could be used to censure the expression of objectionable opinion simply because those opinions annoy someone, but its backers say that is not the case. “This is about cyberstalking, not free speech,” says [a spokesperson for] for the act’s author, Representative Jim McDermott (D-Washington).

“You may write something and post it online and I may find it annoying, but so what? This isn’t what this is about. This is about keeping people, especially women, safe.” Still, Kurt Opsahl, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group that has published a guide to safe anonymous blogging, says there is cause for concern.

“It has this very loose term of ‘intent to annoy’ which encompasses a much greater area of speech than harassment and threat,” Opsahl says.

As you see, free speech advocates fear that the term “annoy” can potentially include otherwise harmless posts that can be used to punish bloggers or message board participants. In this kind of political climate where certain government officials and agencies apparently feel that they have greater leeway for creative interpretations of existing laws, that fear is certainly plausible.

Nonetheless, I see this law as a step in the right direction. Too often, the anonymity of the Internet gives criminals and other people with malicious intent too much protection and allows them to directly threaten and intimidate others (they are often helped by the ease by which they can purchase personal data and information about their victims).

Hopefully this law will swing the pendulum back more toward those at risk of intimidation and threats, and away from the perpetrators.