My Independence Institute colleague Rob Natelson examines the question from an originalist perspective, in a new working paper published on SSRN. His analysis is summarized in this blog post on his website. In brief: political contributions are best analyzed as a form of Freedom of the Press. The Freedom of the Press includes the right […]
Archive | Anonymity
No Right to Anonymously Visit Government Meetings
An interesting decision in Paridon v. Trumbull County Childrens Servs. Bd. (Ohio Ct. App. Mar. 11, 2013) (some paragraph breaks added): At issue is whether appellee, Trumbull County Children Services Board …, may require attendees of its public meetings to sign in before being admitted to such meetings…. [Appellants allege] they attended a public meeting […]
Tennessee County Seeks to Identify Authors of About Ten Thousand Comments
So reports Paul Alan Levy (Public Citizen Consumer Law & Policy Blog), with links to various documents, including the letter objecting to the subpoena, which in turn includes the subpoena as Exhibit A: Shelby County, a government body in the southwestern corner of Tennessee that contains the city of Memphis, has subpoenaed Memphis’ daily newspaper, […]
Nearly Half the New York Assembly Republicans: Require Deletion of Anonymous Comments Whenever Anyone Complains
Twenty-three of the forty-nine New York Assembly Republicans, plus one Independent and one Democrat, introduced this bill last Fall but just “unveiled” it yesterday: 1. Definitions. As used in this section, the following words and terms shall have the following meanings: (a) [“]Anonymous poster[“] is any individual who posts a message on a web site […]
Criminal Defendant Outs Anonymous Web Site Commenter — Who Turns Out to Be One of the Prosecutors
Ars Technica reports; the New Orleans Times-Picayune reports that the prosecutor is being investigated by the Justice Department for possible violations of Justice Department policies. An excerpt from Ars Technica (read the whole thing, which also includes many links): A federal investigation involving New Orleans landfill magnate Fred Heebe took a surprising turn this week. […]
Ahmed Rushdie
An interesting New York Times article about Facebook and people’s identities: The writer Salman Rushdie hit Twitter on Monday morning with a flurry of exasperated posts. Facebook, he wrote, had deactivated his account, demanded proof of identity and then turned him into Ahmed Rushdie, which is how he is identified on his passport. He had […]
Anonymous Speech, Subpoenas and Internet User Identities, and Government Investigations
Over the last several years, various courts have held — in cases such as Dendrite Int’l, Inc. v. Doe No. 3 and Doe v. Cahill — that the First Amendment provides substantial, though limited, protection against subpoenas aimed at unmasking anonymous commenters; for more details on that protection, see this EFF analysis. But last week, […]
Subpoena for Library Records
There has been a lot of controversy in the past about whether the government should be free to subpoena library records or bookstore records, or execute search warrants for such records. (See, for instance, this post of Orin’s, this Congressional testimony by Orin, and pp. 30-37 of this article of mine.) I just ran across […]
The Costs of Campaign Contribution Disclosure
James L. Huffman, former Dean of Lewis & Clark Law School and the 2010 Republican nominee for Senate from Oregon, has an op-ed in Monday’s WSJ explaining how his experience as a political candidate convinced him that mandatory disclosure of campaign contributions is a bad idea. The reality is that public disclosure serves the interests […]
North Carolina Department of Revenue’s Demand for Amazon Customer Records Violates the First Amendment
So holds Amazon.com v. Lay (W.D. Wash., decided yesterday): Amazon pursues summary judgment as to its First Amendment claim that the DOR’s request for all information related to Amazon’s sales to North Carolina residents violates the First Amendment. The Court agrees and GRANTS the motion. The First Amendment protects a buyer from having the expressive […]
The Future of Privacy: Facial Recognition, Public Facts, and 300 Million Little Brothers
It’s been a pleasure to blog this week. I hope you’ve enjoyed this conversation and I’d love to continue it. If you’re interested in reading more, check out our book, Wild West 2.0. It is the most-discussed Internet policy book of 2010 (Jimmy Wales called it “an invaluable guide” to the “brave new world of […]
Fixing the CDA 230 Subsidy While Preserving Online Anonymity
Thanks again for the great responses in comments. I’ve learned a lot about how people think about the Internet of 2010 and whether it fits the “Wild West 2.0” model. On Monday, we discussed why the Internet of 2010 resembles the closing of the Wild West frontier. On Tuesday, we talked about whether CDA 230 […]
Google Changed Reputation and Privacy Forever
In the early Internet, it was impossible to find isolated references to people, places, and things. Many users navigated using directories like the original Yahoo, and early search tools like Gopher (structured documents) and Archie (FTP) were limited . The search engines changed everything. Starting with Lycos and AltaVista, information was freed from obscurity. Suddenly, […]
The Communications Decency Act of 1996 Meets the Closed Frontier
By David Thompson on June 8, 2010 12:15 pm in Anonymity, Cyberspace Law, Freedom of Speech, Internet
(Thanks for the great comments! I’ll be speaking in Las Vegas this afternoon 3:45 pm today at the EduComm conference at the Mirage, Ballroom D.) Anonymous and pseudonymous speech dates back at least to the early days of the printing press. Anonymous online speech has been a powerful force for change in situations ranging from […]
Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett Subpoenas Identity of His Critics, for a Criminal Probe
TechCrunch reports on this subpoena issued to Twitter, seeking the identity of two twitterers that had apparently been critical of Corbett. The striking thing is that this is a subpoena to provide evidence in a criminal investigation. If it had been a subpoena related to a civil libel lawsuit, then either Twitter or the anonymous […]