Unmasking Blog Commenters Not a Huge Threat To Freedom

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday May 20, @11:01AM
from the hiding-behind-the-internet dept.

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes with his take on a recent court decision about the rights of online commenters. "Although a court has ruled that the police can subpoena the identities of users who posted comments in a newspaper's blog, I think this is not as big of a threat to journalistic integrity as it might seem. And in any case when the judge ruled against the privacy rights of 'bloggers,' he didn't actually mean 'bloggers.'"

After writing that a Virginia court made an error in saying that spoofing an IP address in e-mail headers was analogous to using a "pseudonym," and that an Ontario court was wrong in saying that an IP address could be subpoenaed by a court because it was no more secret than personal information like a "home address," I think that the latest court ruling against online anonymity — an Illinois judge ordering a newspaper to reveal the identities of people who posted comments on its blog — is not as big of a threat to online privacy, and is not apparently based on any misconceptions about how the Internet works. However, the ruling has the potential to frighten bloggers more than necessary (as well as possibly set a bad precedent for future courts if they don't read the decision closely enough) because the ruling uses the word "bloggers" repeatedly to refer to what everyone else calls "blog commenters."

Police had asked the Alton Telegraph to reveal the identities of five people who had posted comments in the newspaper's blog which indicated they might have knowledge relevant to an ongoing murder investigation. The newspaper sued to avoid being forced to hand over the commenters' identities, saying that they were "news sources" protected under Illinois's newspaper shield law. Judge Richard Tognarelli ruled that blog commenters did not count as "sources" under the shield law, and allowed the police to go forward in obtaining the identity of two of the commenters, but denied the request to unmask three others, on the grounds that those commenters did not appear to have information relevant to the case.

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/20/1422208&from=rss

Oh, noes, what will the undeclaredy-cats do...

between bloggers and commenters. That aside, what an unbelievably stupid idea. An excellent example of the 'chilling effect' in action. Don't say anything to out of line, or you could get a knock on the door.