Can Outing an Anonymous Blogger be Justified? 197
netbuzz writes "Absolutely, depending on the circumstances, yet a Florida newspaper's attempt to unmask 'a political group hiding behind the name of a fictitious person' has sparked outrage in some circles. Part of the reason for that outrage is that the paper posted to its Web site a surveillance video of the blogger visiting its advertising department, a tactic the editor says he now regrets. What's really at issue here is the right to publish anonymously vs. the right to remain anonymous. The former exists, the latter does not."
Re:Does not, eh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Does not, eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
> but it's OK if the government ignores it because you don't have the right in the first
> place?
No. Aside from the fact that you do have the right to habeas corpus, this has nothing to do with the government at all.
> How can one claim that someone has the right to "publish anonymously" if a person cannot
> be anonymous?
You have the right to "publish anonymously". You have the right to be anonymous. However, no one is obligated to help you be anonymous. It's up to you to keep your identity secret. If you screw up and your secret gets out, tough.
I wouldn't do business with a paper that publishes surveillance videos of its customers, though.
Re:Does not, eh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Can Outing an Anonymous Blogger be Justified? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Can Outing an Anonymous Blogger be Justified? (Score:1, Insightful)
Does that include journalistic sources? If someone were to follow up on Woodward and Bernstein and expose "Deep Throat", would that be fine by you? After all, he had his secret agenda as well... (Anger at not being promoted to be head of FBI after Hoover left).
Never has been absolute (Score:3, Insightful)
Society exists because of law and peer pressure to conform to its rules. Where anonimity is guaranteed, peer pressure cannot exist, and law cannot be enforced.
There are restrictions on what government can do to invade your privacy, but privacy and anonimity are two different things. In fulfilling its duties to you, government necesarily has a lot of information about you. Because this information is required by the government, there are also restrictions on accessing that information by other parties. Because of these government restrictions, people mistakenly think those restrictions can and should carry over to everyone. There is a mistaken belief that all people are or should be restricted from determining information about another person. This is patently false and rediculous on its face. Who is to say that the blogging groups right to private criticism of a public figure is more important than my right to find out the motives behind that criticism? Who is to say that opening my eyes to observe someone else is a crime? Is there some sort of "I want to remain anonymous" flag that people have? Like the broadcast flag? You go around wearing this flag, and this makes it so no one is alowed to observe or recognize you.
The blogger(s) waded into a public debate. They can do what they want to try to remain anonymous, but the newspaper along with any other member of the public has the right to do what they can to find out who it is.
In short, YOUR RIGHT TO ANONYMITY ENDS WHEN YOU DO ANYTHING THAT SOMEONE ELSE CAN OBSERVE. If you want to stay anonymous, don't do anything.
Re:Does not, eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Does not, eh? (Score:2, Insightful)
Unless you mean that seeing someone with a gun causes you to keel over and die, I'd think it's you with the non sequitur here.
Good try though.
It is clear from the writings of the founding fathers that what he quoted does not mean "that other rights retained by the people cannot be trampled on inadvertently by the rights enumerated". It is clear that they wrote the Ninth and Tenth Amendments in order to indicate that A) the rights of people enumerated in the Constitution are not exhaustive and B) the powers of the government enumerated in the constitution are.
Re:Does not, eh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Does not, eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
These and their like are the only "natural" rights "endowed" upon you by the universe -- in fact, they are *forced* upon you.
Any other supposed rights (freedom of speech, freedom to vote, freedom to chase girls, a.k.a. freedom to pursue happiness) are fictions created by the mind of man as he negotiates his way in the company of other humans.
Now, I certainly enjoy having these rights (especially the one about chasing girls), but I'm under no illusion that they exist in nature external to homo sap.
Re:Does not, eh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Either the press has the freedom that allows it to publish anonymous sources or it doesn't. If they have the right they should have respected the bloggers rights.
Re:Does not, eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Good try though.
"I go further, and affirm that bills of rights, in the sense and in the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed constitution, but would even be dangerous. They would contain various exceptions to powers which are not granted; and on this very account, would afford a colorable pretext to claim more than were granted. For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do?" -Hamilton, Alexander. The Federalist Papers, #84. "On opposition to a Bill of Rights."
The 9th (and 10th, for that matter) was included to address Hamilton's specific issues. But let us read the 9th amendment itself, and deduce its meaning based on what it actually says:
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
See, I don't know where you get the hare-brained idea that the 9th has something to do with enumerated rights trumping one another. It very fucking clearly says what it means. Allow me to paraphrase:
"The fact that we chose to write down a Top Ten List of rights does not in any way imply that the people do not retain a multitude of other rights"
I'd sure love to see you cite a source for your laughable interpretation of the 9th Amendment. The 9th has been routinely ignored by many, but no sane person has ever claimed it meant other than what it says.
Re:Does not, eh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Your ability to resist imposed authority is as natural as the law of gravity, therefore the only time your rights don't naturally exist, is when you don't defend them.
Re:ya (Score:5, Insightful)
There is lot that is not illegal. But, the paper's ethics must be called into question. Aside from threats to national security made in a blog, or confession to a felony in a blog, I'm hard pressed to see why outing someone who has chosen to write pseudonymously would be considered ethical.
Without the ability to publish, blog, speak anonymously, many of the world's tyrannical governments would not have been challenged, taken down, or seceded from. We, the U.S., did it to King George III and much of the public was influenced to support the effort, in part, through the publishing of anonymous, or pseudonymous tracts.
Yes, there are those who tried to uncover the writers, publishers, and distributors. But, in the end, whose interests do they serve?
I will put this forward, a newspaper that denies another's freedom to speak politically under a cloak of anonymity, should lose its right to exist. In other words, they protect the rights of others so their right is protected.
Re:Can Outing an Anonymous Blogger be Justified? (Score:3, Insightful)
Whistleblowers and informants are a case where the privacy of a source should be protected by the government officials that they are working with, but that is not a constitutional right. Again, this is how it should be. Whistleblower's treatment need to be balanced against the rights of the accused. An incredibly important right in the constitution is the right of an accused person to face their accuser. Anonymous whistleblowers risk violating that right of the accused, which is a terrible thing and ripe for abuse.
Re:Does not, eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
What evidence or reasoning supports this?
The framers of the constitution believed that this was a "self-evident" fact -- something that would be understood to be true by any reasonable person upon considered reflection, requiring no evidence beyond that.
Now, that's a rather controversial idea. But, whether we accept the existence of self-evident facts or not, it remains true that the U.S. Constitution was written by people who specifically did believe that rights were not granted by government. Rather, that rights are inherent in persons by their very nature. A government can, in this view, protect your rights, ignore your rights, or even infringe upon your rights. But it can't possibly grant you any rights nor remove any rights from you, since that's not something within the power of government. Government is just a collection of people, with no ability to make fundamental changes to human nature by fiat. To assume otherwise is to assume collections of people are somehow able to wield god-like powers simply by virtue of acting collectively, and that's absurd.
So, whether one accepts this premise or not, one needs to read the Constitution with the understand that it was written with this point of view in mind, and needs to be interpreted accordingly.
Re:Does not, eh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Note: There is no similar Federal Law. I'm not sure what you mean by that. If the newspapers find out your secret... then you're subject to their whim. They do, at the state level. What right did he have? The right to publish anonymously?
He used it.
You seem to be fundamentally misunderstanding the right to publish anonymously. All it means is that the Government can't make anonymous publishing a crime. What it doesn't mean is that no one is allowed to figure out who you are and tell the world.
Staying anonymous was the bloggers job.
What legal obligation did the newspaper have to keep his identity a secret?
Perhaps some examples might be enlightening? (Score:4, Insightful)
In this case the anonymously-posting group whose member was exposed was critical of a prominent county politician.
Suppose the anonymous poster(s) had been critical of the Chinese government's suppression of Falun Gong or occupation of Tibet.
Suppose the anonymous poster had been Salman Rushdie, at the height of the "Satanic Verses" flap, and the outing included his address.
Suppose the time was shortly before the American Revolution and the posters were people like Samuel Adams, William Molineux, Thomas Paine, Alexander Hamilton, and Paul Revere.
Think about what happened to people like Yuri Orlov, Alexander Litvinenko, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Wang Xiaoning, Nathan Hale, Theo Van Gogh.
I could add names for hours. And, yes, only some of these particular critics of the powerful did so anonymously, so don't bother pointing that out: This list shows what can happen to critics and why they might want to be anonymous.
Maybe this guy won't be sent to a gulag, poisoned by thallium, vanish into the Chinese prison system, or assassinated on the street in broad daylight. But would you be surprised if he is the subject of continual harassment from now on - at least until he moves to another county?
Re:Does not, eh? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:ya (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm hard pressed to see why outing someone who has chosen to write pseudonymously would be considered ethical.
Because it's a question of public interest: Is the person a single entity acting on his own or a front for a political group or "think tank"? In short, is it grass-roots or Astroturf?
Re:Does not, eh? (Score:3, Insightful)
I would like to add that it was probably unethical to use a video surveillance tape to attempt to out the blogger when that was not the purpose of the tape. There's a difference between setting up a camera for the express purpose of identifying your customers and setting up a camera to keep your advertising department safe. He wasn't informed that he was being taped for the purpose of outing him. It's reasonable for me to assume that unless there's some pressing criminal investigation that video surveillance tapes will not be used to out me in any way.
To clarify, it would've been okay to identify the blogger if he had made threats or attempted to assault the advertising people. The purpose of the surveillance camera is to identify people who are obviously engaged in criminal activity. I admit that there's a case to be made for it being ethical as a case of public interest, though. Feel free to argue.