Supreme Court Says People Can’t Be Banned From The Internet

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170620/10455137631/supreme-court-says-you-cant-ban-people-internet-no-matter-what-theyve-done.shtml

by ForFreedom • 9 years ago

240 106 9 years ago

techdirt.com

elkos• 9 years ago

If I recall correctly Kevin Mitnick was banned from using a phone or a computer quite a while back. Right?

ionised• 9 years ago

Well they had to.

They couldn't very well give him the opportunity to initial a nuclear attack by whistling down the phone could they?

ceejayoz2• 9 years ago

My understanding of the ruling is that individuals can still be banned, on a case-by-case basis, but not an entire class of offenders by default.

dis-sys• 9 years ago

This is now interesting. Apparently prisoners in the US and many other countries are not allowed to have Internet access. In the US there is a system in place that allows inmates to communicate text only emails. I don't think you can call that plain text messaging "the Internet" in 2017.

With this supreme court ruling, how prisons in the US are going to allow inmates to have access to the real Internet? I mean you can not ban those inmates from accessing the Internet, right?

xbmcuser• 9 years ago

Make it extremely expensive people in prison or family have to pay a lot of money to just talk on the phone. This will just give another way for profit based incarceration system to make money for putting and keeping people in jail.

snvzz• 9 years ago

Let's continue this until everybody is in jail.

That's for the best. Reform and all that.

amelius• 9 years ago

Perhaps a prison would even be the ideal environment for working on e.g. a large open source project.

matt4077• 9 years ago

That would be fitting continuing of all the great books that were written in prison.

DiThi• 9 years ago

That would have meant ReiserFS would have continued.

kelnos• 9 years ago

Traditionally (for better or worse), prison inmates do not have the same rights/freedoms that everyone else does. For example, they usually don't get unsupervised calls and visits, and depending on their sentence, may not be able to take/make calls or accept visitors at all for a period of time. It's not a stretch to think that this SCOTUS decision is only related to people outside prison.

alphydan• 9 years ago

> they usually don't get unsupervised calls

Does anyone? NSA and all ...

kristofferR• 9 years ago

Prisoners in the US have barely any rights, they don't even have voting rights as felons in many states.

belorn3• 9 years ago

The court decisions focused on peoples ability to be part of society, and as far as I know that US prison system is the opposite of that. If in the future the prison system was reformed to be rehabilitation rather then retribution, then question like how inmates can access the real internet become really interesting. To quote: "convicted criminals—might receive legitimate benefits from these means [social media] for access to the world of ideas, in particular if they seek to reform and to pursue lawful and rewarding lives."

denzil_correa• 9 years ago

Ban != Access

You can NOT ban someone from the Internet but you may deny access to Internet in prisons.

haggy2• 9 years ago

I'm confused by your statement. If "Ban != Access" then what's preventing courts from simply denying access (not a "Ban" under your assertion above) to people outside of prisons as well?

izacus2• 9 years ago

What's the difference?

ngold• 9 years ago

Prisoners are slaves under the constitution. It is a bummer but it is our last slave institution.

maxlybbert2• 9 years ago

The headline (and perhaps the article; I haven't read it since the headline is so bad) overstates the importance of the ruling.

The case involved someone on his state's sex offender registry. He was also prohibited from accessing social media sites, and got in trouble for posting a complaint about a traffic ticket on Facebook.

The actual ruling is that not allowing him on any social media site for any reason was too broad. Apparently the opinion makes comments about how important internet access is to modern society, which does give a hint about how the court might rule in the future, but a concurring opinion says there's no need to go off into the weeds for that discussion.

pflats• 9 years ago

I don't follow your concerns on the headline. How is "a blanket ban on social media sites is unconstitutional" substantially different from "people can't be banned from the internet"?

Perhaps we're reading it differently, but to me, the headline says "you can't be banned from the internet as a whole", not "you can't be banned from a narrowly-tailored subset of the internet".

GhostVII• 9 years ago

You cannot ban someone from the internet, but you are not forced to give them access to it if they do not already.

wahern2• 9 years ago

Reason #516 why people should only send plain text e-mail.

brandonmenc• 9 years ago

re: sex offender lists and sentencing

The implication is that the people on the list are still a threat. If that's true, shouldn't they still be in prison?

Tomte• 9 years ago

No. You don't get thrown into prison for being a threat. You get there for a specific action.

mtgx• 9 years ago

Unfortunatley, with the machine learning hype, a lot of companies are pushing "AI-assisted software" that does put people in prison for "being a threat" or for a longer time they should normally get, simply because of factors like being black, or poor, or from a bad neighborhood, etc.

https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessm...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/13/ai-progra...

Udik• 9 years ago

On the other hand, you can only be considered a threat as a consequence of specific actions you took in the past. When you get out of prison that means that, according to the law, you're no longer a threat, and there shouldn't be any reason or justification for limiting your freedom or shaming you publicly by putting your name on a list.

jorgeleo2• 9 years ago

This is interesting... then what happens to the concept of 3 strikes and out?

Navarr2• 9 years ago

3 strikes is not law, it's policy of some ISPs. They can still do whatever they want.

belorn3• 9 years ago

Its voluntary system in the US, while law in several other countries.

jorgeleo2• 9 years ago

But if a policy is found unconstitutional, can it be challenged?

Not a lawyer here

cronjobber• 9 years ago

Does this apply to seizing domains?

bitwize• 9 years ago

What's gonna end up happening is law enforcement is going to strike deals with the major sites like Facebook and Twitter, which are the internet now, to ban anyone on the sex offender rolls -- and nothing much of value will be lost. These companies are not ready for the shitstorm of outrage that will ensue when it is discovered that they are allowing predators to communicate with children.

throwaway2048• 9 years ago

The people most likely to respond to dumb outrage like that are also the least likely to stop using such platforms.

I don't think they have much to worry about.

kodt• 9 years ago

Isn't it advantageous for law enforcement to keep as many criminals as possible on social media? Many criminals these days are caught because they boast about their illegal actions (or live stream them) on Facebook.

ransom15382• 9 years ago

After a prisoner has served their said time [for felons]:

1) remove their right to vote [in florida 1/4 african americans can't vote] [i]

2) force them to divulge they are felons to all new employers

3) force them to tell their neighbors they are criminals [sex crime cases which often only involve one witness testimony]

4) garnish their wages

5) seize their property [drug cases]

6) place them on parole to increase mental fear [at any moment they can return to prison without trial]

7) force them to provide random urine tests and body searches [creates anxiety for people with addiction]

8) force them into community service mixed with other felons

This is a system designed to create crime.

[i] https://theintercept.com/2016/12/22/a-quarter-of-floridas-bl...

trinifar• 9 years ago

"After being a felon..."

Sounds like they were a criminal before that.

AlecSchueler• 9 years ago

So rehabilitation's completely out the window then? Why take an offender and create a situation for them in which they'll be more likely to re-offend and work more closely with other criminals?

I know that personally if my vote was taken away, for example, that I'd lose a great deal of respect for and connection to the state; the meaning and validity of laws would be seriously diminished.

opportune• 9 years ago

Yeah, that's the whole point. If you make it so a felon is essentially completely shut out from mainstream society, it will be really hard for them to not commit crime again, since they may not even be able to get a job or find a place to live. So in effect you just incentivize them being jailed again, which is bad for them and for all of society, since we have to pay for it.

clarkmoody• 9 years ago

Lots of felonies are completely ridiculous and cater to special interests, such as felony copyright infringement.

noer• 9 years ago

6) happens before conviction in a lot of cases

kasey_junk3• 9 years ago

6/7/8 are not after a prisoner has "served their said time" its an alternative to that.

mschuster912• 9 years ago

Oh no, 6/7 are not just alternatives.

Parole after release is common (e.g. you're sentenced to X years, get released earlier at Y years and are now on parole for X-Y years). Depending on country, a simple traffic ticket(!) can be a parole violation, so you get why this is an issue.

Same goes for alcohol and drug testing, again often used in combination with parole.

clamprecht2• 9 years ago

You are wrong. Look up federal supervised release.

Source: I served it, after completing my federal sentence.

sdca• 9 years ago

9) remove their right to own firearms

cheath2• 9 years ago

This one is a big deal in states like Montana, where you can no longer hunt for food as a felon. And Archery is now in a gray area too, where they aren't letting felons hunt with bows either.

Ccecil2• 9 years ago

10) Ineligibility for many govt. subsidized programs (SBA loans being one)

11) No longer able to become a doctor, nurse, banker, most govt. jobs, etc. (Many colleges won't accept you for the program based on the low possibility of employment after graduation)

Sex offenders have quite a few extra rules. i.e. no playgrounds or places where kids are present typically. I am not against a rule saying "You cannot knowingly communicate with minors online" but excluding people from the internet is a bit extreme.

edit: 12) Unable to rent housing. A large majority of property management companies will not rent to felons...period.

Another comment further down reminded me of that.

ahallock• 9 years ago

Call me simple-minded, but if you serve the time, you should regain all rights. How is any of this constitutional? Like, how can your right to vote be removed?

wahern2• 9 years ago

The concept of universal suffrage is a relatively recent thing. Indeed, it doesn't even exist given felon disenfranchisement.

Long story short, it's constitutional because the disenfranchisement of felons was expressly contemplated by the 14th Amendment.

  But when the right to vote at any [Federal] election ... is
  denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being
  twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States,
  or in any way abridged, except for participation in
  rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation
  therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number
  of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male
  citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

Technically speaking any kind of disenfranchisement is contemplated here. It's just that, excepting felons, the consequence is that a state loses representation. That said, most forms of disenfranchisement would be disallowed under Federal constitutional law for other reasons.

yaakov34• 9 years ago

People are commenting here without reading or understanding the ruling [edit: I should say that headlines like the one techdirt gave their article are also misleading; they are playing up the "banned from the internet" angle]. What happened is that North Carolina passed a law making it a crime for someone previously convicted of a sex crime to access social media sites (unless the site completely prohibits access except by adults, which most sites do not do). The court ruled that this law is unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds.

The court did not rule that "no one may be banned from the internet" an so on. A specific person can still have conditions attached by the courts to his release; for example, it's common for judges to impose conditions like "no use of computers" on convicted malicious hackers as part of their probation. This hasn't been made illegal. Restricting internet access of current prisoners certainly hasn't been held illegal. What's been held unconstitutional is criminalizing a priori certain modes of speech by a broad class of people.

EDIT2: Since this is apparently attracting a little bit of controversy, I want to add that I did not express any opinion about whether it's good to ban people from using computers or whatever; I just wanted to describe what the ruling says. I am actually not a fan of the general concept of not restoring people's rights after they serve their punishment, although I think it's justified in specific cases.

erroneousfunk3• 9 years ago

The problem is that so many sites have social networking aspects to them, like the Supreme Court ruling pointed out. The North Carolina law is this: http://www.ncleg.net/gascripts/statutes/statutelookup.pl?sta...

This law does not prohibit the offender from _making a profile_ on these sites, but from accessing them altogether. So any site that allows users (news commenters, product reviewers, whatever) to have a "user profile" page cannot be accessed.

Amazon.com meets these criteria: https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AGRXMFWYARWR...

Stack Overflow meets these criteria: https://stackoverflow.com/users/8131287/data-scientist

Github, all of Google, Wikipedia, ALSO meet this criteria. (Although Hacker News does not)

There are a few key things that are problematic with the wording of this law:

1. "Facilitates the social introduction between two or more persons for the purposes of friendship, meeting other persons, or information exchanges." The key word is "or" Every website is involved in information exchanges. This effectively does not limit the scope of the law.

2. The requirements of the profile pages contain "and" statements, but they're fairly generic. Name or username/nickname, photographs, and links placed somehow to other friends and associates. If there's a profile page, you can usually access some sort of activity log of the user (comments they've replied to, which may lead to users they've interacted with directly or indirectly) The only real limit here is the photograph, which not all websites (like Hacker News) have.

3. There is an exception involving "Has as its primary purpose the facilitation of commercial transactions involving goods or services between its members or visitors." However, this does not exclude sites like Amazon, given the strict wording of the law. Members are not exchanging goods with each other. This would exclude sites like Craigslist.

4. There is another exception: "Provides only one of the following discrete services: photo-sharing, electronic mail, instant messenger, or chat room or message board platform" The problem with this is that there aren't many "discrete service" websites that exist anymore. Google provides all of these services, Yahoo provides all of these services. Hotmail provides all of these services. Services like chats, forums, e-mail, and photo sharing are often bundled by a huge collection of other services.

5. The vague wording of "Web site" Is it a single domain? A single corporate entity? A single subdomain? The vague wording only works in favor of the law here.

ivraatiems• 9 years ago

(Although Hacker News does not)

I think it does - we have profiles with info like our personal website URL, twitter handle, a brief description on them. Here's mine, for instance: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ivraatiems

dragonwriter• 9 years ago

With regard to the profile page elements, you seem to be reading “information, such as...” (which is usually read in legal, and plain, English as introducing a lost of examples) as meaning “information which includes, at a minimum, all of...”.

The more normal reading of “such ad” makes the scope of the law even broader than you describe (and would seem likely to include HN, which you view as excluded because it doesn't include every enumerated kind of information, specifically missing pictures, in it's profile pages.)

btilly5• 9 years ago

OMG, another terrible "think of the children" law.

Did you know that 1/4 of all sex offenders offended as juveniles and are not particularly likely to reoffend as adults?

Did you know that well under 5% of "convicted" people actually were convicted? The rest plea bargained out of a combination of not being able to afford trial, and facing much worse potential penalties if they tried to fight it.

Before heaping more punishments on people who have been through our (in)justice system, we need to fix the system so that its results are more believable.

convolvatron• 9 years ago

the criminal justice systems is always going to have flaws. sure we should try to address them.

but it would also help a lot if we remembered that criminals are people. members of society who screwed up, felt they didn't have a choice, or have psychological problems. punish them, treat them, restrict them, but they aren't unhuman.

forrestthewoods• 9 years ago

Edit: Misread parent.

ericfrederich• 9 years ago

Are prisoners people? Should inmates have access to the internet?

Supreme Court Says People Can’t Be Banned From The Internet

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