Slashdot points us to a somewhat odd lawsuit in which a court determined that the game Dungeons & Dragons could lead to gang activity, and thus could be banned in prisons.

Basically, a guy who is serving a life sentence for murder, Kevin Singer, was apparently an avid D&D player as well, and had a collection of D&D books and related paraphernalia. However, it was confiscated by the prison after another prisoner complained that Singer was building a "gang" around D&D.

...Waupun's long-serving Disruptive Group Coordinator, Captain Bruce Muraski, received an anonymous letter from an inmate. The letter expressed concern that Singer and three other inmates were forming a D&D gang and were trying to recruit others to join by passing around their D&D publications and touting the "rush" they got from playing the game. Muraski, Waupun's expert on gang activity, decided to heed the letter"s advice and "check into this gang before it gets out of hand."

Singer and the other prisoners named in the letter filed a complaint about the confiscation, and then a lawsuit. Singer got numerous experts to explain that D&D is not related to gang activity. The court claims that some of those experts actually claimed otherwise, but the interpretation here is fuzzy. The court says that these experts disagreed with Singer's assertions because they claimed that D&D could keep people away from gang activity, and thus it's "connected" to gang activity. I can't see how this makes any sense at all. By that reasoning anything that someone does that keeps them away from joining a gang is automatically considered, itself, a gang activity. How does that make sense?

The explanation as to why D&D serves to create gang activity seems absolutely ridiculous:

Muraski elaborated that during D&D games, one player is denoted the "Dungeon Master." The Dungeon Master is tasked with giving directions to other players, which Muraski testified mimics the organization of a gang. At bottom, his testimony about this policy aim highlighted Waupun's worries about cooperative activity among inmates, particularly that carried out in an organized, hierarchical fashion. Muraski's second asserted governmental interest in the D&D ban was inmate rehabilitation. He testified that D&D can "foster an inmate's obsession with escaping from the real life, correctional environment, fostering hostility, violence and escape behavior," which in turn "can compromise not only the inmate's rehabilitation and effects of positive programming but also endanger the public and jeopardize the safety and security of the institution."

Read that a couple times. The argument is basically that (1) any activity that involves a hierarchy mimics gang activity and thus can be barred and (2) anything that lets inmates have an imagination might hurt their chances at rehabilitation. The court seems to suggest that part of the problem is that Singer failed to directly answer specific questions or make the specific points he needed to in order to prevail -- which is entirely possible. However, it still seems like a silly result all around.

To hear the US entertainment industry talk, Russia is a horrible "haven for pirates." The US has been putting diplomatic pressure on Russia for yeas to improve its copyright laws and enforcement, with Russia regularly receiving a place on the "naughty or nice" Special 301 Report from the USTR. And yet... it certainly sounds like Russian copyright laws and enforcement are pretty damn draconian, with the news coming out that a guy, who is accused of uploading 18 songs to the social network Vkontakte, is now facing six years in prison. While it's true that Russia has (quite reasonably) argued that Vkontakte itself is not liable for uploads of others, just the fact that someone could be facing any jail time for simple uploading, let alone six years for basically an album's worth of materials seems way out of proportion to the "crime." It's things like this that make people respect copyright even less than they already do. When they see that someone is facing so much time in prison just for sharing less than 20 songs, it's the sort of thing that makes them realize the laws don't make any sense at all.

We've talked a lot about how prosecutors have been abusing the CFAA (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act), which is supposed to be a law against malicious hacking. However, it's being stretched in all kinds of ways. It looks like similar state laws are also being abused similarly by prosecutors. A bunch of folks have sent in this story of a guy in the suburbs of Detroit who is facing five years in prison for reading his wife's email. He did access her laptop and then logged into her Gmail account using her password, which she supposedly kept in a little notebook next to the computer. What happened next is a bit complex, so we'll toss it over to the Detroit Free Press to explain the chain of events:

Leon Walker was Clara Walker's third husband. Her e-mail showed she was having an affair with her second husband, a man who once had been arrested for beating her in front of her small son. Leon Walker, worried that the child might be exposed to domestic violence again, handed the e-mails over to the child's father, Clara Walker's first husband. He promptly filed an emergency motion to obtain custody.

After Clara found out about the emails, she apparently reported Leon for snooping on her emails, and prosecutors thought it was a case worth prosecuting claiming: "The guy is a hacker. It was password protected, he had wonderful skills, and was highly trained. Then he downloaded them and used them in a very contentious way."

Not that any of this makes it okay to snoop on a spouse's email when they wish to keep it secret, but it seems like a huge stretch to claim that it's a crime worthy of five years in prison under a law designed for malicious computer hacking. The issue here had nothing to do with "computer hacking," at all. It's an abuse of the law by prosecutors.

For all of those participating in the denial of service attacks being put together by "Anonymous," you might want to consider that a guy who took down various politicians' websites with DDoS attacks just got 30 months in prison -- along with over $50,000 in fines and 3 additional years of "supervised release." This certainly seems like punishment way out of line with the actual actions, but in this day and age of law enforcement and the legal system not really understanding technology, it's not all that surprising.

Discussions over mobile phone jamming seems to get pretty controversial pretty fast. The technology is technically illegal in the US (except for the government), but that hasn't stopped some from using the tech anyway. Plenty of businesses have tried to get exceptions to the law. Movie theaters, in particular, have petitioned the government in the past for the right to jam mobile phones and a maker of jamming equipment has claimed that banning the technology is unconstitutional. Of course, the problem is that there may be legitimate reasons to use a mobile phone (emergencies, anyone?) and jammers don't discriminate. The collateral damage of mobile phone jamming could be a big deal.

However, there's one other area that has pushed for jammers for a long time: prisons. Mobile phones have become popular contraband equipment in prison, and there are frequent stories of prisoners regularly using mobile phones to communicate with the outside world. So, now, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) is apparently planning to investigate if it makes sense to jam mobile phones in prison. I'm not sure why this isn't coming from the FCC, though it sounds like a bit of a political football, where a bill that would grant the FCC that power stalled out in Congress. I can understand the desire to block mobile phone usage in prisons, but jamming seems like a sledge hammer type of solution, that could cause problems for others (guards?) who might need mobile phones to work.

No one denies that child pornography is a serious problem that needs to be addressed. However, it often seems like the laws related to child pornography are targeted at the wrong thing. That's why we get laws requiring filters, rather than the shut down of whoever is producing the content, and laws against those who end up having any on their hard drive, even as that could make a felon out of someone just because they receive an email. Take, for example (as pointed out by Slashdot), this story of a man who was searching online for regular (legal) pornography, but accidentally downloaded some underage pictures -- which he immediately deleted. Though the FBI officials who eventually searched his hard drive admit that the images had been deleted and could not be accessed, he was still charged with child pornography and is pleading guilty to get a shorter sentence (3.5 years, 10 years probation, and a lifetime on the sex offenders list).

Though this article serves as a warning of why you shouldn't go looking for porn online -- it would seem that the stronger argument is why the laws on possession should change. In cases like this, where the guy was clearly not out there seeking out or collecting such content, it seems ridiculous that he should be charged and feel the need to plead guilty. Anti-child porn efforts should really focus on those who produces and distributes such content. As for those who collect it, I would assume that mental health help would be a more appropriate response than jail time. And, for those who accidentally come across it... it seems fairly ridiculous to charge them as well.

He's certainly not the first such case, but spammer Eddie Davidson has been sentenced to 21 months in prison for both tax evasion and falsifying email headers. Some other sentences have been even longer. However, it makes you wonder how much of an impact these sentences are having on the spam community. Are spammers getting more cautious and going underground now that jail sentences are being handed out? Has the whole spam effort shifted offshore where it's harder to track them down? One thing that doesn't seem to be happening is any noticeable reduction in spam.

Recently, Tim wrote about how aspects of Twitter could represent the future of news, and it appears that may be happening faster than some people expected. In a story that must absolutely thrill any PR person working for Twitter, a UC Berkeley grad student who was filming protests in Egypt was able to alert his friends to the fact he was arrested by Egyptian police through a message on Twitter. This resulted in a coordinated effort to get him released, which eventually involved the US State Department. You get the feeling that this story will move into PR legend like the story of the guy who self-diagnosed a heart attack using Google.

Still, it is a rather remarkable example of how Twitter can be quite useful. While there are plenty of people (myself included at one point) who wrote off the service as being rather useless, it's been evolving in very interesting ways. For those who embrace it, it can become a rather useful quick and easy public messaging and conversation tool. While, James Karl Buck could have sent a text message to a friend, the simplicity and public nature of Twitter allowed him to alert a lot of people nearly instantly to the situation he was in -- and they responded. Not only did they reach out to get help, they also quickly responded to James on Twitter, providing advice on how to deal with the fact that he was arrested. Still, what's not entirely clear in this whole story is how he was able to continue to use his mobile phone while under arrest. While the lesson some may learn from this is that arresting officers will quickly take people's mobile phones away, that doesn't lessen the impact of a service like Twitter and its ability to spread a message to a lot of friends and acquaintances extremely quickly.