House committee targets electronic harassment

Technology has its benefits, but a bill passed by a House committee Friday seeks to ensure that some of its troublesome aspects do not go unpunished.

HB221 broadens the current law on telephone harassment to include other forms of electronic communication, including faxes, e-mail and pagers.

"What this has to do with is people who get excitement in their life by making obscene phone calls and threatening phone calls and that kind of thing, which, of course, has now spread to many other forms of technology that we have," said Paul Boyden, executive director of the Statewide Association of Prosecutors.

The bill, passed by the House Public Utilities and Technology Standing Committee, would create an offense for using electronic means to "annoy or alarm" a person. That includes repeatedly attempting to contact a person via electronic means after having been told not to contact that person and causing "disruption, jamming or overload of an electronic communication system through excessive message traffic or other means utilizing an electronic communication device."

It does not, however, include broadcast transmissions or other communications that are not targeted to any specific person.

"This has nothing to do . . . with telephone or fax advertising or telemarketing or any of that kind of stuff, or broadcasting. None of those really fit in. This has only to do with those who have the intent to annoy or alarm — that kind of thing — not people with intent to sell," Boyden said.

"One thing that makes this drafting a little tricky is we want to make sure that this is talking only about the targeted communication that is going toward a person and is not covering broadcast fax. And that's why some of the language is more complex than we might have liked."

The bill also does not cover spam because "spam is intended to sell," although Boyden said activities under the bill could have multiple victims.

"This only deals with the kinds of things where the intent is to annoy, alarm, intimidate, offend, abuse, threaten and harass — none of which includes 'sell.' "

Boyden added that "there really is a certain amount of antisocial personality that is involved in all the cases that this is intended to reach," but legislators posed several questions to clarify how narrow the bill's application would be.

"If you go to broadcast fax, we just didn't want to broaden this into that big an area, . . . but it's still broader than what we have now," he said.

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