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EFF Guide To Blogging Anonymously
jacksonwest writes "Annalee Newitz and Kurt Opsahl just published a great how-to on blogging anonymously. How To Blog Safely About Work (Or Anything Else), covering both the legal and technical aspects of blogging about your job and staying truly anonymous. A must read for those blogging from or about their office."
Most useful in Iran, China and may be in USA
If free speech is to mean anything, it must be done with a name and responsibility attached. Anonymous speech is really worthless, consider the quality and substance of AC posts on this site.
If you have something to say about your company, then say it. Have some balls and do what it takes to make change. Unless you're willing to put your name and reputation on the line, why should anyone take your speech seriously?
So you have a choice, skulk around in the shadows like you are some kind of lowly criminal looking to the world like you're trying to get away with something, or stand up and post proudly and make a big noise. If you want to be treated like a criminal, then act like one. The EFF has just posted your guidelines. If you want to be treated like a human being with something important to say, then post without fear.
Googling someone does not a background check make. If you googled my name you might get the impression that I'm an Irish athlete and mountain climber. Not so.
Forget google.
You need to do a background investigation on your hires - criminal and civil - check job history, references, and do a skills assessment.
I don't care if someone mouthed off on Slashdot, Boing Boing, The Well, or wherever. I care about whether or not I can trust them to do the job and play well with others. Googling someone won't tell you these things.
It's called discrimination.
Example:
You interview an ace programmer who's been out of the industry for a few years and he does really well with all the interviewing managers. One manager decides to take it upon himself to "background check" the guy. It turns out that the reason he hasn't been in the industry for a while is because he's been in jail for child molestation. Well, you don't want to work with this guy, of course. So the manager circulates the weblinks and everyone agrees to reject the candidate.
Next thing you know, the guy is filing suit against your company for discriminating against him for past crimes which he has already "paid for". Just as he was in jail, now your company is doing the bending over for him. All because one manager decided to step beyond the bounds of his role (and the law).
Snap back into reality and you realize that almost nobody is capable of making a decent living and maintain 100% of their principles. The society we live in generates the opposite.
It isn't human nature. It is the system we live in. Until that system might change you will always have the problem where your reputation in the business world changes significantly simply because you stand behind what is right. You see, there are too many potential haters out there which have the power to (and will!) ring your neck on a whim simply because they are religiously or politically against your ideas. The repurcussions(sp?) are limitless.
Your ignorance is infinitely greater than you realize.
Considering his other comments, I'm guessing Microsoft.
JK.
On the other hand, do be careful with Google. If you google me, I've apparently built bike frames, been a tax attorney, am Colorado's premier one-legged skiier, made several games, founded a birdwatching society, and am several computer consultants. One or two of these people is actually me. I'm one of 9 or 10 of me online. Unfortunately, according to the phone book there are over 50 of me in the US alone, meaning that if you google my name you only have a 1 in 5 chance that I have anything online at all, and then a 1 in 10 chance of guessing which one I am. And I don't have a very common name. If your candidate is named "Tom Jones" or "Hong Li" or "Sanjay Singh", you're pretty much firing at random.
As a side note, I've always wondered if someone with your name could sue you for defamation for doing dumb things under your own name online...
The ______ Agenda
"Free speech" is a nice little term that gets bandied far too often in a nonsensical way, by people who don't think about rights concepts in a particularly rigorous way.
If an employer's decision to censure or fire an employee based on work-related blogging is an infringement of free speech, then what about a person/group who decides to boycott a company because they disagree with that company's decisions? Or how about when there's a demonstration outside my window and I shut the window because I don't agree with them and don't want to hear it?
"Free speech" becomes an *abusive* concept when you deprive people of their rights to avoid associating with people they don't like, or to take otherwise legal actions (like not shopping at a particular store) based on their opinons about an entity. After all, isn't the constitutional guarantee of freedom of association embedded in the exact same amendment as the right to free speech?
"Free speech" cannot mean "speech without consequences from anyone". That would just be silly. I'll say what I want, and you'll decide whether you want to associate with me based on how you feel about it.
Terrible example - in many places such practices are legal.
Now, the difference is when your personal activity they're considering is something totally lawful. For example, lets say your employer is very opinionated Mormon, and thus believes that alcohol is spiritually unhealthy (or is just otherwise rather prudish). They stumble upon your blog, where you describe your last drunken bender with your friends, how you puked up your lungs and were hung over for 2 days. Its all perfectly legal, but many people object to that kind of behaviour - and it's not constitutionally protected like race and suchlike.
That sort of stuff is none of their business in their professional capacity as an employer. They are perfectly free to ask you about your habits, read about them, whatever - but not to use that as a basis for hiring/review decisions.
Ever hear of Deep Throat and Watergate? It doesn't take much imagination to think of scenarios where disclosiing your name is not an option and the alternative to being anonymous is being silent. You appear to be in confortable circumstances where this isn't an issue. Not everyone is so fortunate.
Heya, Beka... What if you've been raped by your dad and you want to let people know about the hell it's put you through, but you don't want all the attention and bs you'll have to deal with if you post it under your real name?
What if you work for a government agency, or corporate entity, etc, that is engaged in all sorts of chicanery? Would you post with your real name, and be fired on the spot, or would you post anonymously so you can be a "voice from the inside"?
What if you are an atheist in a strictly Muslim country? Or a drug user in a country currently engaged in a "War on Drugs"?
What tripe. What complete unadulterated tripe.
Empty words, since you didn't back up your opinion with any logic or reasoning.
Or are they not really thoughts worth standing up for?
What you fail to understand is that just because something is worth standing up for that doesn't mean that there won't be negative, unjust, or undesirable consequences for posting something. The world isn't fair or just, and until it is (ie: never), there will be a need for anonymity.
Breeding a group of people who are convinced they're doing their thing for the world, yet who write anonymously behind the safety of a pseudonym or "Anonymous Coward" moniker?
Get some integrity people, and write with your real names. Stand up for what you believe in and put your name next to your thoughts.
I suppose you've never heard of the Federalist Papers.
must... stay... awake...