In these days came into effect in California a law that will punish those who use the Net were false or someone else's identity to make illegal practices, the Senate Bill 1411. This is a bipartisan measure, proposed by Democratic Senator Joe Simitian and signed by Republican Governor Schwarzenegger, and, in the original plans, designed primarily to curb the phenomenon of cyberbullying, punishing the so-called e-personation, namely the appropriation of identity theft or the creation of false identities in order to make illegal practices such as fraud, harassment, intimidation and defamation. In this way those who create under the name of another blogs or profiles within social networks face up to one year in prison and fines of a thousand dollars in the state of California.
Certainly, the intention is good, however the measure does not fail to raise a debate between those for and against. Erica Johnstone, San Francisco lawyer who deals with cases involving identity theft online for example, has stated that "almost all the cyber-offenders remain unpunished, with serious consequences for the victims such as loss of reputation, shame, mortification , pain, loss of job opportunities and emotional stress. " Others have focused more on concerns about possible restrictions on freedom of speech and satire, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, though, as others noted, to protect these basic freedoms is always the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
What is certain is that, as in many other topics, what always emerges is the irreducible ambiguity of the electronic media and its consequent virtuality, in comparison to the rocky reality of safety: identity, such as property are much more difficult to define on the Internet in everyday life, from one hand, the traceability of an individual exposed to some potential law of everyone to privacy on the other any more difficult to trace the real identity opens the way for those who would perpetrate fraudulent serious. Harmonizing law in a balanced all that remains between these opposites is very difficult mission and one of the puzzles of our times.
