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Legislation In New York To Ban Anonymous Speech Online
Fluffeh writes "Republican Assemblyman Jim Conte said, '[this] turns the spotlight on cyberbullies by forcing them to reveal their identity.' Republican Senator Thomas O'Mara added, '[this will] help lend some accountability to the Internet age.' The two are sponsoring a bill that would ban any New York-based websites from allowing comments (or well, anything) to be posted unless the person posting it attaches their name to it. But the bill also goes further, saying New York-based websites, such as blogs and newspapers, must 'remove any comments posted on his or her website by an anonymous poster unless such anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post.'"
What about CDNs physically located in NY that serve news and video from very popular sites? And how are you going to verify all this information? Like, I go through Tor, I tell you I'm Jim Conte, I give you his home address and then I verify that I'm indeed him and all this time someone on the staff of this news site is ... doing what exactly? Verifying how? Are they calling ISPs and saying "Hey, does this IP address check out for this home address? And how on Earth are they going to be able to afford to do this for anonymous comments?
My work here is dung.
Lawmakers don't have a clue what they are doing and whenever they do something it's only for the ruination of things we enjoy.
He posted as Silence Dogood, Polly Baker and Richard Saunders. Clearly he is a threat to American and should be killed if he weren't dead already.
-- MyLongNickName
Guess I won't be posting on any more websites hosted in New York.
What a great way to drive business away from your state. How long before they're all relocated in Jersey? Days?
...and I say: Fuck you, Jim Conte and Thomas O'Mara.
Stupid lawmakers don't understand the difference between anonymous individuals online, and an organized bunch of hackers.
... that sissies are not allowed on the internet. Is trolling/cyber-bullying bad, sure it is and I'm not condoning it. It's just sad that people are so thin-skinned that some goobers in politics feel the need to attempt to outlaw trollish comments!
Of course this probably has nothing to do with cyber-bulling or trolling and likely has everything to do with stopping leaks, dissent and general repression of free speech. After all, there is no speech more free than anonymous speech. Are they banning anon tips to the police and anon letters to the editor as well?
Good thing we didn't have laws like this when the Federalist Papers were written.
Three things:
* So if the comments are really anonymous, whom do they prosecute?
* If the comments and/or the websites originate from outside the jurisdiction...?
* The First Amendment.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
Which isn't a big deal... It is too expensive to host a company in New York. You host it in an other state.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
If there's one thing New York is good at, it's driving away businesses. I've watched cities around the state raise commercial taxes claiming it will bring in businesses, vote down major infrastructure improvements because it would "hurt businesses" and try to turn already clogged five lane avenues into two lane streets to "force people to slow down so they will see all of the businesses along that road".
you fuckers will start treating AC posts with some respect!
This will probably cost New York a pretty penny if it passes and they get sued over it.
Fortunately, crap like this wouldn't even make it out of the gate in New Hampshire, where I live, not after our legislature created a "constitutional review" standing committee a couple years ago. Any bill that a legislator believes to be possibly unconstitutional gets referred to that committee after coming out of its first committee, and they get to attach their recommendation when the bill gets voted on by the full legislature.
Liberty in your lifetime
The law does not, apparently, require that takedown demands have a name attached. Clearly, the cyberbullies will give up in abject defeat in no time...
Just goes to show how out of touch our legislators have become to believe it's even technically possible, let alone constitutional.
They're so disconnected from reality (i.e. the normal lives of their constituents) that it's like being ruled by space aliens.
Anonymity is necessary for Joe Public to exercise his right to free speech. The rich and powerful can't crush him like a bug if they don't know who he is.
So if you are referred to as "John Doe" (if your IP address was snooped somewhere, for instance), you cannot reply as John Doe?
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
"unless such anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post"
:) Nice wording there, senator.
The definition of an anonymous poster
Eradication of whistle blowers, opinions and free speech in general? Nice move.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
We all agree on that, but I have to wonder where this is coming from? I don't mean from the (R) fellow, but where the money trail leads to. Maybe because I'm tired, but I can't think of who stands to monitarily benefit from this. Google? FBI? What's the point...?
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
It'll never get anywhere. Yes, it's awful that someone even thought of it, but the whole thing is so ludicrous and impractical (never mind the 1st amendment issue) that it'll never go much further than this stage.
Sometimes it pays to remember that politicians are often monumentally stupid.
Listen, I'm not saying that anyone who posts anonymously is definitely racist, I'm just saying that we can't currently prove that they aren't.
- MickB1942.
In the US, you can call yourself anything you want to, as long as you aren't trying to defraud someone. While they *might* be able to enforce this for NY residents, people who live in other states or countries would be free to do as they pleased.
I'm Jim Conte, you're Jim Conte, we're all JC. If this bill passes, I propose that slashdot change "Anonymous Coward" to "Jim Conte" (Oh, I see, he just wants to go down in history with Ted "Series of Tubes" Stevens, and Santorum)
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
One must bear in mind that this was back when private companies still had a shot at establishing the network effect now realized by the Internet.
Seastead this.
I hope this doesn't signal a new "I'll get my bill auto-approved by saying it addresses _____" era. While I support almost any thing to stop bullying, I worry that this is just a "well we tried bill".
Yeah, I've got nothing...
This law would likely do exactly the opposite of what it's theoretically intended to do. When someone posts something that you don't like, you'll have all the information you need to stalk and harass the poster. Forget online bullying, this would enable physical bullying.
Also Jim Conte and Thomas O'Mara are poopie-heads.
In McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission, a 1995 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Court found that "Protections for anonymous speech are vital to democratic discourse. Allowing dissenters to shield their identities frees them to express critical minority views . . . Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. . . . It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation . . . at the hand of an intolerant society."
How does this alleviate bullying, again?
I assume that the 'deanonymized' data would not be shown for most people, but it must be for the site owner (apparently), so even if it's not hacked and exposed, the site owner is now a target for social engineering or direct manipulation or even bullying
Leela: "Is all the work done by children?" Alien: "No, not the whipping."
Republican doesn't like "baseless political attacks"??
I mean, seriously, what's he doing in politics then?
Can't handle the heat? Then GTFO of the kitchen. This is how politics works in free countries.
...let Anonymous kindly step in and do its thing with Mr. Conte/O'Mara...that would be a nice ironic touch here.
I love when politicians bring forth these kinds of "true identity" issues, for they are usually the LAST ones who wish to have certain activities tied to them. Perhaps feeding them a dose of their own medicine would shift opinion.
Assuming one wanted to be able to identify people, the correct way to do this would be for the government to set up an openid host and give an account to every citizen, much like an id card. Third-party websites could then ask users to log in through their government account, the government openid host guaranteeing the identity of the person to the third party.
I'm Jim Conte, wtf are you talking about?
Shit like this, which the Supreme Court has already taken a dim view on constitutionally needs a new amendment to 42USC1983:
It would be nice for the supreme court to formally endorse internet anonymity.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
http://assembly.state.ny.us/mem/James-D-Conte/contact/
http://www.nysenate.gov/senator/thomas-f-omara/contact
Everyone, not just NY'ers, send them feedback. But use an obviously fake name, address, phone, email. Tell them you did this to prove a point. Don't make the message threatening - try to be informative. If they get thousands of messages, maybe....just maybe...they'll get the point.
(I know they won't, but it least I feel like I'm doing something about it)
... colocation facilities in New Jersey and Connecticut see a rise in business.
Do these idiots know that electrons don't care about state boundaries?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
With this we could not have Valentine and Peter Wiggan posting on the nets as Demosthenes and Locke, becoming powerful demagogues and setting each other up as straw men for their arguments.
Silence is a state of mime.
I live in New York. I also blog under a pseudonym and don't reveal my real name on there. Would my blog postings run afoul of this law? What about my commenters that use pseudonyms? If "BloggerGuy" leaves a comment on one of my posts, has this broken the law? Or is it only if he leaves the comment as "Anonymous"?
Given that I know a bunch of bloggers in New York, I think I'll rally the troops (so to speak) and work against this law. I'm a big fan of preventing bullying, but not at the expense of everyone else's right to free speech.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
1) who donated to their campaign for office (not just trust and corporate names) but people
2) who voted/authored any given legislation
so it IS okay to force cyberbullies to reveal their identity
No, not even this is ok. Because then you just have to re-define the word "bullying" to mean whatever you want, and you're back to square 1. It should never be illegal to be an idiot, or to be rude. Otherwise we will all end up in jail one way or another.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
My first thought, like many of the comments here was that this would be completely unenforceable. Then I realized, it doesn't have to be enforced across the board. Sure, there is no way a law can completely eliminate anonymous speech on the internet, especially a law that is only applied to one state. What this does do however is give anyone who is against free, anonymous speech a new tool for removing posts they don't like from the internet. If the site is hosted in NewYork this is a 'get it off the net free' card for anybody who wants to remove something.
And if passed will only cause the state to waste money defending against a lawsuit they can't win. Someone who lives there might want to point that out to them. Unless you enjoy your tax dollars being wasted on such endeavors.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I'll put my real name on all online communications, right after I change my name to "Kiss My Ass"
Bloughme Jochoss
Furkhofstrasse 3, 21327 Munchen
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Republican Assemblyman Jim Conte is a cunt. Now, I may think that Republican Assemblyman Jim Conte is a cunt. You may not think that Republican Assemblyman Jim Conte is a cunt but many do.
I am not saying that Republican Assemblyman Jim Conte is a cunt all of the time, just a lot of the time. For example, when Republican Assemblyman Jim Conte is trying to pass technologically unenforceable laws, then he's definitely acting like a cunt.
I'm Jim Conte and so's my wife!
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
Goombah99. Honest.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
So does this include Super PACs and other politcal action committees where corporations donates billions of dollars anonymously ?
when you are in Syria, where there are death squads, you should be anonymous
when you are fighting large multinational corporations or political representatives, where there is a power imbalance, you should be anonymous, like Anonymous
when you are probing the workings of spy agencies, like wikileaks, you should be anonymous
when you are posting on a national or statewide board, like slashdot, you might as well be anonymous, because your actual name doesn't matter, isn't paid attention to, and only the force of your ideas matter
but on local boards, anonymous hate is really ridiculous and highly personal:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/us/small-town-gossip-moves-to-the-web-anonymous-and-vicious.html
here you have people who hide and pick out neighbors by name and viciously lie and attack them, constantly, always carefully from hiding
you have a right in a court of law to know who is accusing you of a crime, right? well in local forums you have people hiding and hating and constantly and viciously slandering real world people in a small community. this requires that the person doing this attack be identified, do you not agree? the court of public opinion is being manipulated, someone is using anonymity to do evil
anonymity is just a tool, it can be used for good and evil. so in SOME ways, such as small local forums, anonymity is not a good thing, when it is used to attack and hide, attack and hide, constantly
ONLY in this scenario, do i support this legislation
cyberbullying is real and has real consequences. the problem can't just be ignored and it goes away. the victims might be teenagers or people on the psychological edge, and the cyberbullying has real and awful consequences. if you don't like this legislation, fine. then what is YOUR answer to cyberbullying in small local communities? ignore it? really? that's your answer? sorry, the cyberbully knows it works, the victim knows it works. you need to understand anonymous cyberbullying is a real problem in small local forums and you must find a way to stop it
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Isn't this the place that hates Anonymous Cowards?
For those in the near, the speakers are worth hearing: http://canopycanopycanopy.com/programs/60
Those should be allowed to be anonymous just as much as Internet postings.
This is not even conceivably constitutional.
'[this will] help lend some accountability to the Internet age.'
Why don't we focus on transparency and accountability in our leadership first?
How could the problems caused by any individual even begin to compare to the damage government failures cause?
I'm Thomas O'Mara and I approved this message.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
apply this to all media, including print and radio.
What? You can't really verify someone's identity when they call in to a radio show? And those letters to-the-editor are similarly also difficult to ascertain the true authorship of?
Oh my, we've NEVER had any way to do this? The horror!
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
It's all part of the long march toward fascism. Make every stupid little thing illegal so the government always has some surface justification to bother any person at any time.
"remove any comments posted on his or her website by an anonymous poster unless such anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post"
So if an ANONYMOUS poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post, its okay. So all we have to do is contact an ANONYMOUS poster, correct? That should be easy! So I suppose they aren't really anonymous then, are they?
First, this is totally unenforceable. It's not even remotely practical.
Second, assuming they somecrazyhow made this work, they'd likely destroy themselves. The same politicians that are crying about nasty people online are often supported by political machines and SEO organizations that flood the internet with traffic to bias internet results in their favor. If everything were actually IDed to the point where the SEO people couldn't fake their way out of it then these guys would be boned.
Look at the people that show up protests. How many of them are paid to be there? You don't know. How many of them even live in the area assuming it's a local issue? You don't know. There have been many situations where protesters were literally picked up from the front of a home depot like a disreputable home builder, given pre made signs the people carrying them can't even read, and then asked to wave them angrily.
The levels of bullshit going on at this point are hard to understate. So sure... keep bitching you slimy weasels. But this is yet another situation where if you actually got what you wanted it would destroy you.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
If you think it's just Republicans, you're an ignorant fool.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I almost choked laughing at "popup book"... but you posted anonymously so I can't "thank" you in person!
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77 77 77 2e 6d 65 6c 76 69 6e 73 2e 63 6f 6d
First let me say that I agree with everyone who is saying some form of "passing more laws won't make people better" and this is probably an example of pointless legislation, etc.
if I'm guessing at the intent of this legislation - then it looks a lot like what we used to require of the "old media." If someone writes a letter to the editor of the New York Times, they aren't going to print it unless they have a name and address, and claiming "anonymous sources" only goes so far.
As readers we take it on faith that the reporter went to some effort to verify the claims/reputation of the source. The difference between the New York Times ("All the news that's fit to print") and the National Enquirer ("Enquiring minds want to know") used to boil down to how rigorously they checked their sources.
oh, and we don't have complete "freedom of speech" - which would be say whatever you want about anything at anytime. examples: yelling "bomb" at an airport, "fire" in a crowded theater, or write threatening letters to someone in office - claiming "freedom of speech" in those cases isn't going to keep you from getting into some form of trouble with the man
we also have laws against libel and slander - and that whole "thou shall not bear false witness" thing kind of illustrates that this isn't a new problem. anyway, they illustrate the concept of "freedom within the law"...
It ain't what they call you. It's what you answer to. http://mylyceum.us/
I was thinking the same thing.
It was fairly common, some years ago, for people to use a widely known user login to read The New York Times web site without having to create an account yourself. What's to stop something like that from happening and allowing anonymous posts on NY-based web sites? It'll look like one extremely-well-travelled (based on the poster's IP address) "Joe Blow" has nothing better to do than post on tons of web sites from locations all over the world. (And "Joe" will appear to suffer from a major multiple personality disorder as he posts responses to his previous posts.)
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
If you have something to say, do it under your own name.
Donald Duck
If the government wants to shut people up and isolate people again, stripping online anonymity is a very powerful method.
Here in Arizona, there's a major news website that has two types of posting - 1) anonymous posts, and 2) Facebook account-related posts. The former has trolling of course, but there is also considerable serious and valuable discourse that goes on as well. It is also self-moderated - which cuts down on any alleged abuse or bullying. The latter, however, is a dead zone. Nobody comments there, unless it's a superhot topic - at which point only a few people post.
(Speaking of that, Facebook would likely benefit from a law like this, because web sites would scramble to find an easy way to make every poster easily identifiable - and FB would be an obvious choice for them. People would be more encouraged to join FB (or other social networks like it) as a result.)
The NYSenate are mostly first rate Republican morons.
The NY House are mostly first rate Democratic morons.
Some, however, consist of second or even third rate morons, and the level of moronity varies wildly depending on the amount of grandstanding the moron needs to complete to achieve the next level.
For example,
http://www.theagitator.com/2010/03/11/new-york-lawmaker-wants-to-ban-salt/
As you can see, Felix Ortiz needed to graduate to Grand Moron Extraordinaire, and did so with flying colors.
http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2011/01/25/ny-sen-wants-ban-on-chatting-while-crossing-street/
In this example, Senator Karl Kruger, also earned the title of Grand Moron Extraordinaire.
In conclusion, these people are fucking morons, they're elected because they know how to be popular, not because they have a clue.
Perhaps if the process is something like this:
1) Bully321 posts horrid thing about Billy in an attempt to shame him, isolate him, and make him a laughingstock.
2) Billy gets a lawyer and files a lawsuit against Bully321 (really against "John Doe" since Billy doesn't know who Bully321 is right now) demanding his identity.
3) A judge listens to the arguments and weighs the evidence.
3a) The judge rules that the evidence doesn't mean some preset standards and the case ends.
3b) The judge rules that it does and the case proceeds with court orders helping to reveal who Bully321 is.
The difference between this and the NY legislator-proposed "Someone said something mean about me, tell me who they are now Mr. Site Operator" is the judicial system is involved. A simple comment that someone finds offensive isn't likely to result in a lawyer being hired and definitely won't result in a judge approving court orders to reveal the poster's identity. However, real instances of cyberbullying would be able to be addressed. The bill as proposed is simply a chill on free speech.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Under such a law, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay would not have been able to use the pseudonym "Publius" when writing the Federalist Papers.
This is exactly the type of speech which the Constitution assures us is protected from government interference.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
While I understand the mindset behind this legislation, enforcing it will be so prohibitively difficult, that I could see companies moving their sites to other states to avoid having to comply with it.
If taken literally, this law basically means that the web site will need people who are available and taking requests 24x7 from irritated users/companies that want other people's posts removed---and not just posts where a name isn't attached, but ones where they suspect that the name isn't accurate or that doesn't match their IP address/physical address.
The way I have always looked at it is that internet laws should reflect the rest of our laws. If I want to speak in public, I do not need to confirm my name, address, and phone number before doing so - free speech doesn't work like that. Legislators need to learn that throwing technology at something doesn't necessarily solve it.
Perhaps we can build a SkyNet to take care of this for us, then we'll never have anything to worry about again!
Would the Federalist Papers ever seen the light of day if Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay were required to identify themselves instead of using the pseudonym "Publius"?
Anonymous speech, whether in print or electrons is vital to our freedoms.
There's this thing called the First Amendment?
I doubt the authors of the Constitution meant for the right to free speech and press to be conditional on identifying oneself--given that their their letters advocating the Constitution were penned anonymously.
...unless you want to say something that might get you in trouble with your boss, your family, someone's lawyer, the government, or anyone else. Then you should just shut your mouth if you know what's good for you.
The problem that we have with freedom of speech is that people take that to mean that they can say whatever they want without repercussion. They believe that they can defame people, lie about them, harass them, spread hate, threaten, and otherwise bully and because they are only words it's all covered and okay. No harm no foul.
Freedom of speech and expression is great when it works to our advantage (i.e. the Federalist Papers) and disastrous when it doesn't (e.g. Ryan Halligan, Megan Meier).
I believe that we should have the freedom to anonymously criticize our government and government officials. I think where that anonymity begins to become cloudy is when it moves from political commentary (blog post, letters, manifestos) and into conversation (comments, forums, chat).
Think about it like this... If I write a manifesto that says that all brown haired people came from the mud and are some lower life form separate from the rest of humanity. I write it, put it out on the internet and maybe someone reads it and maybe someone doesn't. Maybe it resonates with a couple of people and we get a little brown haired hate group going. However, if I go onto CNN and post in the comment section of another article and express my hate for brown haired people and my theories about their origin, then it is part of a conversation and has a much different audience. That audience may include people who are trolling, just for entertainment, and believe it's funny to back up other people's crazy claims. So now I've posted my comment and 5, 10, 20 people start saying "right on", even though the first 4 or 5 people were liars or just kidding, other people start seeing the support and start questioning if they should be in on it. The more people who post, the more it seems "right" to others and the more their small discomfort around brown haired people becomes justified. Soon the number of people who would argue that it's wrong are simply drown out by the number of people who are there trolling for fun and the number of people who are simply following the anonymous mob and reposting the same thing over and over again. Moderators have a hard time keeping up without looking like they are censoring legitimate comments and unmoderated areas explode with nastiness.
The problem areas are defamation, liable, and slander. These issues, which were relatively easy to control in the past, can explode overnight on the internet. What was, at one time, simple bullying in the halls of a school between a few students can be inflated to hundreds of attackers because of the effects of anonymity online.
What we need is a mechanism to ensure anonymity for the known good aspects (political speech, government criticism, whistle blowing) and curtail anonymity for areas where we know it's not really useful or good. That's a tall order from a technological perspective, there's no easy solution. However, that doesn't mean that we should stop trying to think of ways to make things better (not necessarily legislating, but innovating). If we can't eliminate anonymity under certain circumstances perhaps we can find other solutions that curtail the destructive power of online defamation, liable, and slander, especially for those who don't have the resources to engage in lengthy court battles for reparation.
"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon
its a fundamental violation of the first amendment.... there is no argurment.
If some services have better moderation policies and systems, or require different forms of authentication, then I may prefer to use them over some of their competitors. The trade-off should be with the customers.
Some people value anonymity a lot, and can foresee some of its side-effects (people being less respectful).
But nobody is forced to use services that allow anonymous commenting.
Conversely, nobody should be prevented from using services that allow anonymous commenting.
These comments are mine; I do not speak for my employer.
Jon Donym + Secure Browser profile + Servers that don't keep logs. Get fucked. Free speech is not about revealing one's identity. I'm tired of being 'governed' anyway. I do whatever I fucking want, whenever I fucking want it. Fascist motherfuckers.
Same principle as Adolf Hitler.