It is not at all clear to me that any criminal activity is proposed or encouraged in this thread. Yes, it may be in violation of some terms in the contract represented by the air ticket, but what law would be broken? Possibly some kind of fraud, but whom has been defrauded of what? An air ticket is a unilateral contract, and any use of the ticket is in compliance, as long as it does not specifically violate a stated term.
My second issue is one of prior restraint, which is what the registration agreement sounds like. The moderator remarks suggest that a poster may not post anything, ever, that afterward might be deemed to encourage illegal activity “in our opinion”. In other words, having an opinion that differs from an unstated one of the board administration may be grounds for sanctions such as warnings or suspensions.
You realize prior restraint is a legal concept that applies to the government, right? Near v Minnesota doesn’t apply to a message board owned by a private company. They could very well instruct you to never post the word “bandersnatch” and ban you if you did with no problem, legally, morally, ethically or otherwise.
Of course, but the reason it binds the government is because it is fair. Which I expect this board to be. It is not fair to sanction a poster who in good faith did nothing worse than to suggest a strategy which, “in our opinion” might have been illegal.
I’m pretty sure boarding a plane with somebody else’s ticket makes you, technically, a stowaway.
Boarding with somebody else’s ticket means you are not entering with the “consent of the owner, charterer, master, or person in command of [the] aircraft.” The consent is being granted to the person named on the ticket, not the person holding the ticket.
But if you entered in plain view of consenting airline personnel who inspected your documents, the criminal case for stowaway would be flimsy. The flight attendant examined your boarding card, and possibly removed the stub .
But my question is about the moderator assessing the scenario, judging a criminal act to be likely present, and determining at a later date the culpability of a poster for having raised the suggestion in violation of board rules…
The question here, however, is whether the post in question actually broke the rules. The post was moderated for violating the rule against encouraging illegal activity, and Colibri says, regarding travelling on someone ele’s plane ticket, that such behavior is “almost certainly highly illegal.”
I’m sorry, but despite the level of certainty implied in his post, i remain unconvinced. Claims about illegality are, in many cases, pretty easy to back up. Is there actually a law that prohibits a person from flying on someone else’s ticket? I know it’s an airline rule, but as the OP points out, that’s not the same as a law. And i’m not particularly convinced by Johnny Bravo’s claim regarding stowaways.
I’ve done a bit of searching, and i can’t find very much specifically on point. In the post-9/11 age of airline security paranoia, if there were a law that specifically prohibits traveling on someone else’s ticket, surely we should be able to find it pretty easily. After all, the TSA will actually let you fly with no ID at all, as long as you arrive early enough for a more thorough screening and they can find your name in their databases.
I’m not very worried about this issue. The advice in the post was silly anyway, and probably deserved to be smacked down. But i’d also prefer that moderators base their assessments about legality on a little bit of actual knowledge and research, rather than a strategy that, in this case, seemed to be little more than “This doesn’t sound right to me, so it must be illegal.”
Moderators aren’t lawyers. We are given no legal training whatsoever.
My first thought when reading the post in question was that it violates the anti-terrorism laws enacted after 9/11. I assume Colibri came to the same conclusion. But does it actually violate the law? I have no idea. I’m an engineer, not a lawyer.
We generally don’t have the time to research the legal issues for post reports. We do the best that we can with the knowledge and time that we have. It’s not reasonable to expect more than that.
If you have more legal knowledge than we do, feel free to address the issue in the thread.
But the question remains: Can a poster be held to have violated the terms of the registration, for posting an ideas that may, by someone who admittedly has no legal expertise, be thought to be illegal?
*
You agree not to post material that in our opinion encourages activity that is illegal in the U.S. *
I hasten to add that this did not happen in this case, but the phrasing of the board rule indicates that it could. How can a poster know in advance “our opinion”, and agree not to post such material?
Like I said, we do the best that we can with the knowledge and time that we have. It is possible that we’ll make a mistake and we’ll moderate something for violating that rule when it isn’t illegal. That can be addressed either in the thread or in an ATMB thread, depending on the situation. If it turns out that a warning was issued in error, that warning can be reversed.
I don’t know what more you expect from us. We can’t run every instance where we apply this rule through the company lawyers.
When we do invoke this rule, it is almost always fairly obvious, even to those of us with no legal training, that the rule is being violated.
As engineer_comp_geek says, you can’t. This is a free anonymous message board, not a court of law. In this case, a mod note was issued. Even if a warning were to be issued in error, it could have been reversed.
But even if the actions suggested were not illegal in the sense of being a crime, they would still have been in violation of the terms of service of the airline. We are not going to allow giving advice as to how to violate contractual or other agreements either. If you really want to rules-lawyer this to death, this would be in violation of the “don’t be a jerk” rule. I would have moderated that post anyway even if the actions were not technically a crime.
Yes. Not really sure why that’s even a question. I don’t really understand why some people think that a free (or mostly free) message board is going to keep a lawyer on staff to research whether brief posts discussing things that are actually illegal or not. In real life, boards like this have a volunteer moderator make a judgement call and run with it, and if the board requires someone with legal expertise to review a post, then it’s a bad situation, and if it happens often the board will close down because of the direct expense and risk involved.
The poster would need to act like a real person in the real world instead of some kind of limited posting AI that’s attempting to parse rules written for humans as though they were written for computers. That means you use your best judgement, then if you get a warning take it into account. It’s not like you go to jail or get fined if the mods close a thread. And if you don’t trust your judgement or consider getting a mod note or warning too terrible to bear, just don’t post in the first place. Message boards are really a casual arrangement.
Moderators can take actions on a whim … and that’s generally considered a right of ownership … SDMB is private property, their opinion on the law stands as the law here … 1st Amendment “Free Speech” rights belong solely to the owners and no one else, we post here strictly for these owners’ pleasure …
The Moderator Note is how this “opinion” is communicated to us … which is a reasonable approach … the trick is to not post anything that looks illegal, and follow moderator instructions … if this site gets too risky for the owners, they will shut it down …
I think one of the important aspects of the rule, as written, is to dissuade people from posting things that aren’t just over the line of advocating illegal behavior, but also to stay far away from the line, period.
That seems like a reasonable thing for a privately-owned message board to do, in my opinion.
Right. Problems could often be avoided by trying to employ some common sense in understanding why a rule is there, rather than trying to interpret it according to its strictest sense.
In any case, I can’t ever recall issuing a warning for violating the “no illegal advice” rule. I’ve issued notes to remind people of the rule.
My first impulse was to get all defensive and say “Aww, come on, man.” but then I thought “eh, it was just a heads up, probably a good thing to remind everyone what the rules are.” shrug And I don’t have a problem with the in our opinion part of the rule. When you’re calling balls and strikes, somebody has to be the umpire.
However, I can recall many times in the past when I saw other posts encouraging activity that is unquestionably illegal and I didn’t see any warnings issued there. For example, we’ve had more than one thread discussing whether it’s safer to break the speed limit when most of the other traffic is speeding. Several people took the position that you should definitely speed when everyone else is doing it. That seems like a much more blatant violation of this rule, actually stating your intention to break the law and telling other people that they should do it too.
I don’t want to sound like a whiner here. I’m just saying that it’s easy to forget that this rule exists, given the many times it went unenforced in the past. Should we interpret this to be a shift in policy, that the rule will be taken more seriously starting now? Or is it just that the level of enforcement is proportional to the seriousness of the crime being discussed?
FWIW, I’m glad to be in a place where there actually are rules and the rules get enforced. I’ve seen several message boards where either they don’t have rules or the rules are not enforced; that drives me crazy. Just four months ago, I stopped going to a message board (I won’t say which one) because people were making political jabs in a technical forum and the moderator never did anything about it. I kept saying “Please move this political discussion to the appropriate non-tech forum”, but no action was ever taken and no warnings were ever issued. Finally I got sick of it and left. I like it here much better.
Were the posts reported? Also, were they providing explicit advice on how to evade the law?
The answer to the question, “Does this single post by a single moderator in response to a single situation represent a new rule or a shift in policy?” is always “No.”
