Judge To Newspaper - Reveal Name of Commenter

First time accepted submitter Andy Prough writes "A Kansas judge has ordered a Topeka newspaper to release the name of a commenter on one of its stories about the trial of Anceo D. Stovall for the murder of Natalie Gibson. Using the name 'BePrepared,' the commenter posted the following in response to a story about the ongoing trial on July 21 at 1:45pm: 'Trust me that's all they got in their little world, as you know, I have been there. Remember the pukes names they will do it for ever.' The problem? The court is convinced that 'BePrepared' was a juror, and was not supposed to be accessing news about the trial before it ended on July 24th. The court wants BePrepared's name, address and IP address. The jury was ultimately unable to find Stovall guilty of 10 of the 11 charges against him — including murder. Both defense and prosecution lawyers appear to want a new trial, and if it turns out that BePrepared was a juror, they are more likely to get their wish."

Re:Seems reasonable

[JaredOfEuropa]

The request is reasonable, but the only reasonable response is: "We're sorry your honour, but we do not require contributors to register under their real name, and we do not record IP addresses of visitors". For sites that respect the privacy of visitors, the best way to ensure that you never have to reveal the identity of your members is to make sure that you don't have that information on file in the first place.

Of course in Europe, all this info is logged by the ISP's anyway, by law.

Re:News?

[History's Coming To]

You can. Set up your own server, hire a few proxies, it's not a huge problem.

Oh...sorry...you meant we should be able to say what we want on somebody else's website and they should never reveal our details...well that's a little different. Tell you what, let's try an experiment, you set up your server and post the details here, then we'll all come along and post what we want, see where that gets you.

Re:Seems reasonable

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't record IP addresses of visitors, how do you ban people who make abusive comments?

You record a cryptographic hash of the IP address. You don't ban by IP, but by this hash.

Re:News?

[RKBA]

The only time I decided to give jury duty a try they treated people worse than cattle as though our comfort and our time were of no value whatsoever. That is when I decided I never wanted to be a slave of the courts ever again. Fortunately my name was not called and I didn't have to serve on a jury, which is a good thing because I have severe arthritis (and thus could have gotten out of jury duty), and the miserable chairs we were forced to sit in all day long waiting to be called for a jury was like trying to rest while sitting on a block of concrete. The next day I was so tired, sore, and exhausted from the ordeal I could barely move. It took me about three days to recover physically.