[Wikimedia-l] Block evasion might be a federal offense

[Nathan]

On Wed, Aug 21, 2013 at 4:09 AM, Peter Gervai <grinapo at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 21, 2013 at 9:37 AM, Martijn Hoekstra
> <martijnhoekstra at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Aug 21, 2013 8:56 AM, "Peter Gervai" <grinapo at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> The account and/or underlying IP is
>> blocked. That is the technical impediment. The action that is now a federal
>> offense, it seems, is to defy the warning, by circumventing the block by
>> changing IP and/or account to do what you were told not to do on the
>> warning.
>
> Technicalities aside if I follow you right then it is a federal
> offense to edit Wikipedia when you were told not to (eg. banned but
> _not_ blocked). If that's the case the IP part of the discussion is
> mainly irrelevant as one does not have to evade a block to violate the
> ban.
>
>> The central issue though, that it
>> seems block evasion is a federal offense, is not affected by the difficulty
>> in proving evidence for it. It is the question whether the evasion is a
>> crime that bothers me.
>
> [insert meetoo here]
>
> g
>

This is actually incorrect, as were some of your comments about the
irrelevance of IP blocks in your prior post. Have a look at some of
the links I posted earlier in the thread, I think the issues should
become more clear.

To FT2's comments - it's not actually true that the IP ban, or a cease
and desist, have to be specific to a person. In fact in the linked
case, they are blanket to a company. I see no particular reason why
the same reasoning can't be applied to a school, or a church. A
geographic area is probably harder to support. Additionally, we
generally give warnings, and block accounts. For the most egregious
harassment, the only instances I can see this ever coming into play
for Wikimedia, virtually every perpetrator has a long history of
blocked user accounts. I think that makes the debate over the
"personally identifying nature" of IPs irrelevant for this discussion.