Slashdot Mirror
Masked Email Activist Can Stay Anonymous
Mitchell writes "The NewStandard is
reporting that a Texas judge ruled in favor of an anonymous political activist who used a Yahoo! email account to notify the press and to potential voters about the wasteful spending practices of Texas politician Jimmy Cokinos. Cokinos lost relection, and tried to nail "recall_carl01" with a defamation lawsuit, but a judge threw out the bid since the emailed critiques weren't defamatory."
This case isn't really that interesting, since it was rejected before an issue of privacy became involved. Someone sued for defamation; the judge said no defamation had taken place; end of case. It would be a lot more interesting if the judge had considered the case worthy of being heard, and had to decide whether the unmasking of an anonymous emailer was appropriate. Is there any precident for this?
apterous.org
Pretty soon, some judge will rule that voting is private too, and you know what that leads to: freedom! Who knows when this madness will end?
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
It appeared that Cokinos was under the impression that Yahoo! had recall_carl01's real identity. I'd bet any money that the person behind recall_carl01 used fake sign-up information to get the account.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
"Which one, your honor, there's 2 grillion of them."
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
This is how its supposed to work (aka "dog bites man"). How is it news?
Maybe because it hasn't worked in such a long time (privacy), that it's newsworthy when it does.
Truth is an absolute defense to libel and slander and so forth. My only question is how they served process on a Yahoo ID. You can't sue someone that you can't bring into court, and it's difficult to remain anonymous when you do get brought into court. This case is interesting to me purely for its procedural side. Substantively, it's boring and I have no idea how it made the front page over more interesting cases such as the lawsuit against Sony's legal affairs director for illegally enslaving his housekeeper.
You should not have an impenetrable shield from criminal prosecution or civil compensation just because your actions are online. Think about phishers - I cannot think of any reason whatsoever why their identities should be protected. Another good example is slander - I can understand the need for rape victims (for instance) being able to have true anonyminity when reporting abuse to authorities, but that anonyminity ends when they publicly accuse somebody of committing a crime - a person has the right to defend themselves from false allegations.
On the other hand compelled disclosure of our true names on demand would be analogous to 7-11 demanding your driver's license before you could buy a soda. It's reasonable - even prudent - to maintain multiple pseudonyms across multiple sites.
In the middle there are illegal acts that can be performed by maintaining multiple pseudonyms. A classic example is "pump and dump" stock manipulation.
It's a very complex question and it's important to remember that there's a distinction between "pseudonymity" and "anonyminity".
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
One of the aims of the politician who brought the lawsuit would have been to unmask the poster. I guess he/his lawyers thought it would be a significant detterent to critics if an anonymous email poster's identity could be revealed (and hence his privacy could be breached) by means a bogus defamation lawsuit.
It is newsworthy that this tactic was tried, and newsworthy that the courts barred it.