A difficult law

The Good Life with Eli F.J. Tajanlangit

One question that many people are asking these days is how that libel provision got inserted into the final version of the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012 that the President signed recently.

It is a legitimate question, and the answer, or answers, could have far-reaching impact. It will expose how the Senate works in its sacred duty of crafting laws of the land. Look, after all the work the senators put into a prospective law, conducting hearings and consultations and listening to all sides, including the unseen, someone can just stealthily insert an important provision on a proposal before it becomes final and ready for the President’s signature? Of course, the Senate is not about to investigate this matter, but there is another question, to my mind, that also begs to be answered.

How are we going to enforce this law? Just how will our courts prosecute a case of libel committed in cyberspace?

There is a problem, for example, of identifying the evidence. Since the Net is such a limitless world, how can a court prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that somebody libeled someone there? It might be easier if the libel is done via established blogs and websites and social networking pages – what if it is done in a new site whose owners cannot even be identified? We can go by the so-called IP address, but what if the culprit does it from a public address, like an Internet café? And then, there is the very real prospect of the libelous material getting uploaded from other parts of the world; given the Pinoy diaspora, the relatives of your enemies who work in Europe can just spread the libel from there and hit you here.

This is not saying there shouldn’t be a libel law for cyberspace. Cyber-bullying, as the plagiaristic Senator Tito Sotto had once decried, is a crime that needs to be redressed. Yes. There is this propensity among social media users and cyber-writers like bloggers to exploit the freedoms allowed in cyberspace to really destroy characters and personalities.

In fact, some of the most venomous writing can be found in the Net, where authors can conveniently hide behind fictitious names. One need only go to the chat rooms and discussion boards and see how easily people and reputations can get maligned and defamed.

In fact, if we can recall, the libelous term “Abnoy” for the President started in cyberspace; so is the word “Noytard”, for his supposedly brainless, avid fans. Those words are tame compared to “kawatan!” and “corrupt!” that cyber citizens freely dispense on former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. There are other examples, but let’s leave it at this; libel in the print media is the easiest to prove.

The venom in cyberspace will continue to bubble over in the coming days, especially with elections in May next year. Already, political war rooms now have cyber departments whose work includes prowling the Net 24/7 and finding forums where they can attack or rebut things according to their communications plans.

Interestingly, these political heads work on computers with shifting IPs and use various names to avoid detection and identification. Among themselves, however, they joke about who pays best – there are operators who shell out per post so their income can be limitless.

This is indeed a whole new world, and trust the politician to exploit it, even to the point of being criminal. The irony is, one or several of them have made a law to temper it and it looks like it is unconstitutional and even unenforceable.*

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