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Anonymous Blogger Outed By Politician
Snoskred writes with the story of a blogger who chose to remain pseudonymous, who has been outed by an Alaskan politician in his legislative newsletter. Alaska Rep. Mike Doogan had been writing bizarre emails to people who emailed him, and the Alaskan blogger "Mudflats" was one of those who called him on it. (Mudflats first began getting noticed after blogging about Sarah Palin from a local point of view.) Doogan seems to have developed a particular itch to learn who Mudflats is, and he finally found out, though he got her last name wrong, and named her in his official newsletter. The Huffington Post is one of the many outlets writing about the affair. The blogger happens to be Democrat — as is Doogan — but that is immaterial to the question of the right to anonymity in political speech. Does an American have the right to post political opinion online anonymously? May a government official breach that anonymity absent a compelling state interest?
I don't know. If you worked in public relations, for instance, then I'm not so sure your boss would be happy about you also being a vocal political activist. It's not so much that he'd fear reprisals from the government. It could just as easily be boycotts of their products from people of the opposite political persuasion.
We saw this in action a bit with Proposition 8. There were websites listing the highest donors in the area and people boycotted their places of business and even vandalized property. That doesn't mean I would agree with any firings but I can understand wanting anonymity without fearing the government directly or indirectly.
If there was nothing more important, why would it be in the first amendment, instead of in, say, the original constitution itself?
Because the original constitution was written on the premise that people had every right that the constitution didn't explicitly give government the power to curtail. Note the language there; the constitution grants powers to the government (which otherwise has none), not rights to the people (who otherwise have all of them). It was feared that explicitly enumerating rights might imply that such a list was exhaustive, ruling out any rights not listed.
The Bill of Rights was only added because many states only agreed to ratify the constitution once such a bill of rights was promised to be added. The ninth and tenth amendments were the compromise added to quell the fears of the list being taken as exhaustive (the ninth explicitly stating that the list of people's rights is not exhaustive, and the tenth explicitly stating that the list of the Federal government's powers is exhaustive).
And of the rights people were worried about explicitly enumerating, freedom of speech (and the press, and religion, and assembly, all bundled together) was priority #1.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
As recently as 1995 (in McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission) the Court ruled that anonymous pamphleting is protected by the First Amendment
What that means is:
What it doesn't mean is:
Unfortunately, it was a complete fabrication by the reporter who ascribed the comment to the anonymous crowd.
No it wasn't. The "Kill him!" is clearly audible at thirteen seconds into the video.
Jackass.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.