Anonymous PublicationWhy it is important to allow anonymous publicationComments compiled by David Week The Supreme Court has affirmed the importance of anonymous publication: “Anonymous pamphleteering is not a pernicious, fraudulent practice, but an honorable tradition of advocacy and dissent.” McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Comm’n, 514 U.S. 334,
342 (1995) http://www.eff.org/Privacy/Anonymity/Fraudulent_Online_Identity_Sanctions_Act/ Anonymity is a shield
from the tyranny of the majority. It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the
Bill of Rights and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular
individuals from retaliation—and their ideas from suppression—at the hand of an
intolerant society. Pseudonymity allows
people who are experimenting with different sorts of interests to do so without
social repercussions. People can temporarily obscure their real life and play
with a different conception of what their life might be. http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/crcl/vol38_1/stein.php |
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You cannot have freedom
of speech without the option to remain anonymous. Most censorship is
retrospective, it is generally much easier to curtail free speech by punishing
those who exercise it afterward, rather than preventing them from doing it in
the first place. The only way to prevent this is to remain anonymous. It is a
common misconception that you cannot trust anonymous information. This is not
necessarily true, using digital signatures people can create a secure anonymous
pseudonym which, in time, people can learn to trust. Freenet incorporates a
mechanism called "subspaces" to facilitate this. http://freenetproject.org/philosophy.html Journalists who
use anonymous sources say that without the promise of confidentiality, sources
in government and in other sensitive positions would be unwilling to provide
information. As long as the media uses anonymous sources responsibly to produce
accurate stories, the value of those stories should outweigh any concerns about
where the information came from, free speech advocates say. The Post's use of
anonymous sources in reports about the Watergate scandal that drove President
Nixon from office often is cited as journalism that would have been impossible
without confidentiality. http://www.usatoday.com/educate/firstamendment/press_090304.html CONTRA: Anonymous speech has the potential to
damage lives and careers. Victims of that speech have little recourse,
absent expensive litigation, to uncover the original speaker, to dispute the
facts, to attack bias and (where appropriate) to seek redress for damation or
libel. http://www.jonathanbwilson.com/ The Subud Vision editors agree with the contra
argument, and will certainly not allow anonymous libel or insult on the Subud Vision web site. |