Pushing the limits of harassment

In Talking Cock the Movie, a parody portrayed a young man who had joined his father's loan-shark business and hatched the idea of using e-mail messages to make demands for repayment. Such notices would otherwise have required the pasting of notices on one's door. Some past practices have progressed in recent years.

A recent report tells of a Singapore architect who was harassed by an unknown caller who made hundreds of phone calls to his home and his mobile phone in a matter of days. The police are investigating this matter while the High Court also granted an application to compel the telcos to reveal the caller's information, if any was available.

Harassment will increasingly become a social issue. In the old days, where carrier pigeons and horse carriages were the only form of communication, you could not send thousands of messages without getting found out. With increase communications access and more sophisticated tools, the ability of stalkers to intrude, harass and intimidate will increase exponentially. I am sure that parties intent on stalking others will hatch up better schemes and push the limits.

The response now is reactive--complaints are made and lawsuits launched--only the empowered and informed are able to take some steps to protect themselves. If, as recent examples in South Korea, China and the USA have showed, harassment is suffered in silence especially by those with a public reputation and much to lose by going public or by the young and naive. Therefore, laws not only need updating but education needs to be carried out to protect against this new threat.

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Bryan Tan

Called to the Singapore and English Bars, Bryan Tan has practised in two of Singapore’s largest law firms and an international law firm. Bryan led many industry firsts including the first mass e-mail defamation case in the world, Singapore’s first publicised telecoms competition dispute, a pan-Asian co-branded travel portal, the first privately-funded cable landing project in Singapore and the world's first registrar-level domain name dispute. His areas of practice include information technology, telecommunications, biotechnology and bioinformatics, Chinese intellectual property, entertainment law and corporate work. He is also an author of Halsbury's Laws of Malaysia: E-Commerce. He also co-wrote the Singapore chapter of 'Digital Evidence' with Prof. Daniel Seng and is writing Halsbury's Laws of Singapore: E-Commerce.