Washington State is enforcing its brand new law prohibiting Internet gambling with a vengence:

The first casualty in the state’s war on Internet gambling is a local Web site where nobody was actually doing any gambling.

What a Bellingham man did on his site was write about online gambling. He reviewed Internet casinos. He had links to them, and ran ads by them. He fancied himself a guide to an uncharted frontier, even compiling a list of “rogue casinos” that had bilked gamblers.

All that, says the state — the ads, the linking, even the discussing — violates a new state law barring online wagering or using the Internet to transmit “gambling information.”

“It’s what the feds would call ‘aiding and abetting,’ ” says the director of the state’s gambling commission, Rick Day. “Telling people how to gamble online, where to do it, giving a link to it — that’s all obviously enabling something that is illegal.”

[...]

Gambling officials told me The Seattle Times may be afoul of the law because we print a poker how-to column, “Card Shark,” by gambler Daniel Negreanu. He sometimes tells readers to hone their skills at online casinos. And at the end of each column is a Web address, fullcontactpoker.com, where readers can comment.

If you type in that address, you whiz off to Negreanu’s digital casino based in the Antilles.

It’s a tangled Web, isn’t it? The state says we’d best do our part to untangle it.

“My suggestion to you is to remove from your paper any advice about online gambling and any links to illegal sites,” Day said.

So even this column could be illegal?

The state’s gone from trying to control gambling, which is legit, to trying to control people speaking about gambling.

The columnist and I obviously disagree on the legitimacy of gambling prohibitions. A state arrogant enough to think it has the right to ban consensual private behavior (while at the same time encouraging such behavior when it comes to state-sponsored institutions like the lottery) is certainly arrogant enough to go after people for endorsing said behavior, too. He should be outraged, but not surprised.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 15th, 2006 at 11:34 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Gambling and Poker, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.