Slashdot Mirror
Right to Post Anonymously Protected
JudTaylor writes " ZDNet has an article decribing a decision by a Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge allowing Yahoo to protect the privacy of posters to message boards.
Lee Tien, an white hat attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, stated "This is a great victory for anonymous speech. I believe Judge Cabrinha's ruling will signal to other companies that judges will not permit corporate executives to abuse the courts in ferreting out their critics." Critics of Pre-Paid Legal Services had posted messages disparaging the company on Yahoo boards. Representatives of the company had no immediate comment." I'm glad to see a decision for freedome can still happen in this country.
My interpretation of this: If you've got an account, there's the account data to be subpoenad. (Spelling?) I think the only thing you have to give that's _real_ when setting up the account is the e-mail address. There are ways of making that hard to trace, but the FBI has sometimes been able to force "anonymous" services into giving up their users. Or they could put a tracer into /. so that the next time you open it, it will record the IP address, etc. Cmdr Taco might not be overly cooperative with this, but maybe they've got a decent hacker on their side...
If you're an anonymous coward (and you can log out and become one anytime), then apparently the only thing identifying you is a cookie and a log that's erased every 48 hours or less. So if you want to make sure you remain anonymous, use an anonymizer, erase cookies afterwards, and try to keep it low-key enough that they won't react within 48 hours.
Of course, I'll give a scurrilous attack by someone unwilling to even put his screen name behind it the weight it deserves...
Although not IRON CLAD the anonymous server I run can stop almost everyone from Finding out who the originator of the message was. Including me! Although a lot of this lies on how the user uses the site. This is do to the fact that the server uses encryption and can use chaining to bounce e-mail or usenet posts through several remailers before the destination is reached. I have been asked by LEO's , AG's, and DA's (Asked being a nice way to put it.) for logs. As I do not have logs for more than about 4 days, there are no logs to turn over. Even the logs I have do not show where the messages came from or where they were going they simply show incoming and outgoing mail. There are no laws that require a site or business to maintain logs of people who look at there site or use the sites services.
Jan 1, 1970, midnight. Apparently, the part of the program that was supposed to supply the "last-posted" timestamp returned a zero instead, which is a Unix clock-time of 1/1/70 12:00:00.