I'm trying to track down the truth of this allegation, that a new law was signed by President G.W. Bush Thursday 2006.Jan.05, which therefore may have gone into effect already or may not go into effect until later.

One of many articles posted on newsgroups about this new law: Message-ID: <_kEwf.805$ee6.573@newsread3.news.pas.earthlink.net>
> http://tinyurl.com/czaml
-> Direct link to article by Declan McCullagh Excerpts:
It's no joke. Last Thursday, President Bush signed into law a prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity.

"Whoever...utilizes any device or software that can be used to originate telecommunications or other types of communications that are transmitted, in whole or in part, by the Internet... without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass any person...who receives the communications...shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than two years, or both."

Buried deep in the new law is Sec. 113, an innocuously titled bit called "Preventing Cyberstalking." It rewrites existing telephone harassment law to prohibit anyone from using the Internet "without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy."
End of excerpts.

I called the office of Rep. Anna Eshoo on Jan.12 to try to learn whether this story is true, and if so when the law goes into effect, and I'm waiting to hear back. Meanwhile I tried to search online to find any official source of information. For example:

Starting at http://thomas.loc.gov/ I clicked on the the link Bills, Resolutions and from there I clicked on the link Search Bill Text which took me to a big search form. In the textfield for [Word/Phrase] I filled in

I left all other fields and buttons etc. in their default condition, then I pressed the
button, and it gave me this:
Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. The server may be experiencing a temporary error condition; please retry your request later.
End of quoted server error text.

Now the weird thing is that after I went to all the trouble to describe that error, and hand-code a HTML form with all the fields set up just the way that failed, and put that hard-wired SEARCH button in this Web page, my hardwired SEARCH button (above) actually works even though the online form with exactly the same POST data bombs!! I have no idea what the problem with the online form is.

Anyway, I called Eshoo's office again and asked the person who had told me to try the Thomas search, and he suggested using another search form directly on the home page. So I tried that, back on http://thomas.loc.gov/ there's a short search form:

Search Bill Text
(Note: The visible text field is only 20 characters wide, not large enough to show the last part of "e-mail".)

Anyway, I clicked on that SEARCH button, and now it works (both the actual search form, and the hardwired link I have above), giving me a very large WebPage (109 screens full):

1000 Bills from the 109th Congress ranked by relevance on "felony+annoying+e-mail ".
0 bills containing your phrase exactly as entered.
0 bills containing all your search words near each other in any order.
0 bills containing all your search words but not near each other.
1000 bills containing one or more of your search words.
End of excerpts.

I remembered that the bill was supposed to be an attachment to the funding for the Justice department, so I searched for "justice", found:

334 . Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act of 2005 (Engrossed Amendment as Agreed to by Senate)[H.R.3402.EAS]
337 . Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act of 2005 (Enrolled as Agreed to or Passed by Both House and Senate)[H.R.3402.ENR]
346 . Department of Justice Appropriations Authorization Act, Fiscal Years 2006 through 2009 (Reported in House)[H.R.3402.RH]
End of excerpts, many more like those followed.
Those first two (both H.R.3402) sound like the rignt one, so I clicked on them and looked around, and saw a note that the last major action was that it became public law, but no info about when it became law, and nowhere in the outline was there any mention of harassing or annoying or e-mail or Internet, so I wasn't able to confirm that this law even mentions anonymous-annoying e-mail as a crime.

So I'm needing to know: Does this bill actually outlaw any e-mail that annoys but fails to identify the sender? Did this law go into effect, and if so when? If both of those are affirmative, how do I report such crimes which have been committed against me since the law went into effect?

Edit done for now. Awaiting response by tagged e-mail followed by online alert. I'll be out for the rest of the afternoon (Jan.13), back sometime in the evening. Update: I'm back, it's late evening, and I haven't heard back from Eshoo's staff yet. I don't expect to hear from them over the weekend, nor Monday Martin-Luther-King Day, so is there anybody else who can tell me about this new law before Eshoo's staff returns on Tuesday Jan.17?

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