Someone doesn't get it...

... specifically, a legislator in Kentucky who thinks anonymous comments should be banned -- and websites that allow comments without recording the commenter's full name, full address, and email address should be fined up to $1000 per occurance.

Worse, the man admits that there are obvious first-amendment issues with the proposed law, and submits it anyway.

The purported justification is "online bullying". If a legislator is willing to fly in the face of the First Amendment for something as, frankly, trivial as "online bullying", then how can we possibly trust him to respect the Constitution when it comes to real crimes?

For that matter, how can we trust him to craft realistic solutions to difficult problems when he apparantly is unable to make the cognitive leap between requiring all commenters to include a name and address and commenters providing false names and addresses? The only useful evidentiary information in a case like this would be the ip address of the commenter, which is almost always stored already.

NOTE: I draw a distinction between "online bullying", which invokes images of lunch money extorted from pre-teen youth, and the more serious threats that many others have received as part of their online activity, primarily but not exclusively women. While I do consider such threats much more serious than kids dissing each other on social networking sites, I don't believe even those more serious threats are sufficient to make anonymous speech illegal. If you make a threat that is taken seriously, online or off, you can generally be found and held accountable. That's the way it should be.

UPDATE: Some clarification is probably useful here. Threats aren't protected speech. It's generally possible to determine, with some effort and legal assistance (subpeona power), who posted a particular comment -- or at least which ISP account was used to post it, which often but not always points to a single person. But it's not EASY to do this, and it's possible for a technically-savvy user to take measures to defeat it. To my mind, this is just about right; most people can be casually-anonymous simply by not posting their name with their comments, yet can be held accountable with non-trivial effort, while those willing to put in the effort to be truly anonymous can still do so.

Posted on 2008-03-10 14:27:32.0 by matthew@triggerfinger.org

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