Fake A Name Online? 3rd Degree Felony Charge

Posted on February 10th, 2010
A blog post by DN (2 Comments)

As of the last quarter in 2009 it is illegal in Austin, Texas to post messages on social networking sites using a name other than your own (impersonating) with the intent to harm, defraud, intimidate or threaten.  In fact, it is now considered to be a third-degree felony.  This law is seeing quite a bit of favor from the Austin police as the department has been on the receiving end of a number of impersonations and attacks.  On the surface, this seems to be a law that is easy to understand and implement.  However, digging a bit deeper will show how this may not be as simple as we think.

Defining

Part of the problem with proving the intent is on the definitions of harm and intimidate.  Harm is defined at physical injury or mental damage.  Physical injuries are simple enough to prove.  It’s not so easy when it comes to proving mental damage – mental damage to one person may simply be an annoyance to another.  Intimidation is another difficult concept to pinpoint.  The truest definition is to make timid or to fill with fear.  Again, we’re left with wide interpretations of what causes fear for one person and not another.  Some very clear definitions should be put into place in order to keep frivolous lawsuits from happening.  With very broad definitions, one could easily state that grievous mental harm was caused when in reality all that occurred was some minor annoyance and since intimidation is very personal, just about anyone could claim they were filled with fear as a result of a faked posting.

Tracking

The next issue with this new law is the cost that could be involved in tracking the imposter.  There are hundreds upon thousands of programs available to the average internet user allowing him or her to fake his or her IP address, route through one of many proxies and generally make their digital path a lot more hidden and harder to track than one might expect.  And it’s even easier to just use a public connection at one of the local hot spots to do whatever anonymous and possibly nefarious things you wish to do.  With all the anonymity tools at the user’s disposal, how much money would be spent purely in the act of attempting to track the supposed criminal?  Will this sort of tracing be left to the owner of the web site or will a third party become involved?  And if a web site owner is considered responsible for this sort of activity, how will they need to protect themselves from possible legal action?

Broader implications

And where will it stop?  This sort of law inevitably leads to broader issues.  What is to stop the creation of a law where it simply is illegal to post out information with the intent of harming, defrauding, intimidating or threatening another individual all the while not being anonymous or posing as another?  Case in point, Perez Hilton.  Notorious for his scathing “reporting” of many celebrities in their not so great moments, postings by this man could be considered by many to be mentally harmful and threatening on many levels.  It’s all left up to the individual’s personal definition of harm and how it applies specifically to them.

Final Thoughts

Simply put, the more effective law would have been to make it illegal to impersonate another online, period.  Just as it is illegal to impersonate any official in “real life”, so should it be on the internet.  The way the law stands now, the monetary costs may be prohibitive and the frivolous suits to come may prove more than what the law originally intended.