Stop arresting children for stupid tweets and make our laws suitable for the internet
You wouldn’t steal a car, you wouldn’t steal a handbag, you wouldn’t steal a television… (and you call yourself a burglar’s apprentice?). Ah, those 2005 anti-piracy ads. Ridiculously overdramatic, doomed never to be taken seriously. It was 2005, so the resulting meme took about four years to appear (“You wouldn’t download a car.” “F— you. I would if I could”) – but it was pretty good when it did.
I see the problem the film makers had though. Criminal law is such a blunt instrument online. What we already have is a poor fit, and analogies don’t seem to work. Downloading a film is not the same as stealing a car. Threatening someone on social media is not the same as threatening them in the street. And enforcing what laws you have is really difficult – when you do, you come off like an overzealous idiot.
Which brings me to today’s news. Police have investigated 2,000 children over the last three years for stupid things they have said on social media. And more than 1,300 of them have been charged or cautioned. Some of them were as young as nine.
Neither have adults got off lightly: over the same period almost 20,000 were investigated under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003: “sending grossly offensive or indecent messages”.
That is quite a lot of police time. Indeed, according to our story today “investigating online abuse is creating a headache for police forces, who have complained it is taking up so much time that they are unable to devote resources to more serious crimes”.
But social media offences aren’t just absorbing police resources, they seem to be absorbing all the heaviest punishments too.
In 2012 a British student called Glenn Maugham hacked into Facebook “just to see if he could”. He didn’t use the information he found, but still got eight months in jail.
Then, in the same week that Justin Lee-Collins got 140 hours of community service for harassing his girlfriend, Matthew Woods was jailed for 12 weeks over Facebook comments about April Jones.
But most tragic of all is the case of Aaron Swartz, the computer programmer who downloaded a large number of JSTOR articles (with no profit in mind). For this he was handed a 30 year jail sentence – using the same laws set up for bank robbers and organised criminals. He later committed suicide.
“Stealing is stealing,” said the prosecution, “whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars.”
(You wouldn’t steal a handbag…)
Choosing the odd sacrificial lamb and throwing the book at them seems a very odd way of handling the uneasy fit between online behaviour and the law. But it is certainly terrifying. So why aren’t more people scared into caution? Why are quite so many arrests still being made?
Part of the problem is that online forums started out anonymous, and places like Facebook started out pretty private. People learned to talked to each other like they might in the pub or the playground. When it eventually turned out their pub chat was being recorded and doled out to police and the media, it was too late to change the habit. Plus there was no consistency. Police involvement seems so harsh and random it is more like a phenomenon to be weathered rather than a set of laws to abide by.
We need to sort out our online laws, pronto. Time to calm down, stop arresting everyone and work them out.
