| By Kay Steiger - Feb 7th, 2008 at 4:51 pm EST |
| Also listed in: Campus Progress Blog |
Jesse says that anonymous posters can remain anonymous on a website, thanks to their free speech rights. And he says that's good news. But I remember a story from last spring about Kathy Sierra, a woman who was harassed online. She was sent sexually violent threats:
Her Web site, Creating Passionate Users, was about "the most fluffy and nice things," she said. Sierra occasionally got the random "comment troll," she said, but a little over a month ago, the posts became more threatening. Someone typed a comment on her blog about slitting her throat and ejaculating. The noose photo appeared next, on a site that sprang up to harass her. On the site, someone contributed this comment: "the only thing Kathy has to offer me is that noose in her neck size."
Frightened, Sierra canceled her scheduled appearance at a tech conference, where she was scheduled to be the first female keynote speaker. Instead, she called the FBI and stayed home with her windows and doors locked, frightened for her life. The Post article goes on to say:
A 2006 University of Maryland study on chat rooms found that female participants received 25 times as many sexually explicit and malicious messages as males. A 2005 study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that the proportion of Internet users who took part in chats and discussion groups plunged from 28 percent in 2000 to 17 percent in 2005, entirely because of the exodus of women. The study attributed the trend to "sensitivity to worrisome behavior in chat rooms."
It's easy to say that free speech is necessary and should be protected, but in the case of Kathy Sierra, I want the perpetrator to be found and jailed for the longest time possible. There's no reason for Sierra, a female tech blogger, to receive such unwarranted threats. Granted, I'm unclear about the details of the Freerepublic case and why the identities of the commenters wanted to be known, but in a day where the government has access to nearly ever aspect of our identity, I don't see the harm in enforcing such over-the-top assaults that make people live in fear.
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Anonymous free speech rights on the Internet are extremely important for many reasons. For example, progressives should recognize the right for political dissidents and whistleblowers to speak their mind without fear of retribution.
That being said, the case of Sierra certainly raises some compelling issues about revealing the identities of anonymous commenters. And, historically, the Courts have recognized legal routes for those who have a legitimate fear of offline harm to acquire information about the identities of people using threatening language.
However, in pursuing such claims the Courts need to be extremely careful to follow a set of criteria which allows ample protection for those wishing to remain anonymous. Speech on the Internet could be stifled to an extreme extent if message board users feared their First Amendment rights could be exposed by zealous law enforcement, or blog operators who find their commenters to be a nuisance.
So, when you say "I don't see the harm in enforcing such over-the-top assaults that make people live in fear" and yet admit that you don't really know the details of the Freerepublic case, you significantly lessen your argument calling for maximum prosecution. There's a lot at stake when we talk about exposing identity online, and there's ample free market technological solutions for blog operators worried about anonymous speech. Asking the Courts to give law enforcement officials more leverage to expose anonymous free speech just because they have the ability to do so does not sound like the type of progress we need in a country that already has a bit of an Orwellian complex.
Check out the Doe v. Cahill decision for more analysis, or visit EFF or EPIC's websites for more information about why this is an important issue.