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

[Fred Bauder]

> 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.

Although I don't think it rose to the level that a federal court would
take it seriously the Scientology socks are an example. There, ips were
usually irrelevant as was the individual identity of users; although we
knew a few.

Fred