Legislation In New York To Ban Anonymous Speech Online

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Legislation In New York To Ban Anonymous Speech Online

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday May 23, 2012 @12:13AM from the enjoy-funding-the-internet-anonymity-police dept.

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.'"

26 of 398 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Ridiculous, Impossible, Etc. by eldavojohn · 2012-05-23 00:13 · Score: 5, Insightful

21 2. A WEB SITE ADMINISTRATOR UPON REQUEST SHALL REMOVE ANY COMMENTS 22 POSTED ON HIS OR HER WEB SITE BY AN ANONYMOUS POSTER UNLESS SUCH ANONY- 23 MOUS POSTER AGREES TO ATTACH HIS OR HER NAME TO THE POST AND CONFIRMS 24 THAT HIS OR HER IP ADDRESS, LEGAL NAME, AND HOME ADDRESS ARE ACCURATE. 25 ALL WEB SITE ADMINISTRATORS SHALL HAVE A CONTACT NUMBER OR E-MAIL 26 ADDRESS POSTED FOR SUCH REMOVAL REQUESTS, CLEARLY VISIBLE IN ANY 27 SECTIONS WHERE COMMENTS ARE POSTED.

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.
1. Re:Ridiculous, Impossible, Etc. by durrr · 2012-05-23 00:17 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  They are technological illiterates like most legislators and belive that human laws work like laws of nature, if you write them down they'll start enforcing themself.
  Did i mention they're also first rate morons?
2. Re:Ridiculous, Impossible, Etc. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-05-23 00:23 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  The New York State Legislature has been a complete retard rodeo for as long as I've been paying attention to it. Anyone with half a brain uses it as a jumping-off point to a better office, i.e. US Congressman, NYS comptroller, lieutenant governor, etc.
  Occasionally there will be one smart person who decides to remain there to corral them in and lead them in a solid, purposeful direction. Unfortunately this "one smart person" is often a crook, and the "solid, purposeful direction" is therefore, well, you get the idea. The last one was Joe Bruno; he's currently in prison.
  This is why I never bought the whole "we should leave more things up to the states to decide" line of argument: as bad as the US Congress is, state legislatures are generally solidly worse; they just don't get as much press. Or maybe this is just a New York thing and other states are different, I don't know.
3. Re:Ridiculous, Impossible, Etc. by HungryHobo · 2012-05-23 00:24 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  they can't, that's the point. So anon comments will effectively be banned.
  since verifying the person is who they say they are is prohibitively hard it'll also do away with user generated content and we can go back to the way things were in the good old days with massive media companies telling us what to think without every tom dick and harry giving their opinion.
4. Re:Ridiculous, Impossible, Etc. by freeweaver · 2012-05-23 00:41 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Yes it is impossible to enforce. But please don't think for a second that the people writing these "laws" are just stupid, that would be dangerous.
  The intention behind this move is simply to create a legal framework which allows those in control to censor ANY comment which is contrary to propagandised opinion.
  If you or I make a valid yet controversial comment on a website based in NY, the appropriate people will be alerted, the comment will be taken down, and a statement will be issued in its place:
  "This commenters identification could not be verified."
5. Re:Ridiculous, Impossible, Etc. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-05-23 00:58 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Hello? Thomas Paine published Common Sense anonymously. James Madison published The Federalist Papers anonymously, and Ben Franklin published a whole host of material anonymously. Anonymous political discourse was absolutely instrumental in creating the United States.
6. Re:Ridiculous, Impossible, Etc. by silentcoder · 2012-05-23 01:06 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  >You could hand write everything, but making copies would be very troublesome and time consuming.
  Oh and this line... guess those historians also got wrong the date of the invention of the printing press - since this event which changed the world forever is supposed to have happened a long time before the U.S. constitution got it's first amendment.
  Wait... didn't Benjamin Franklin use to run a newspaper ? With a printing press ?
  If anything we have LESS anonymity now than we had back then. Nobody 400 years ago could actually prove beyond a reasonable doubt which printing press produced a copy, or where it was originally typeset.
  
  --
  Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
7. Re:Ridiculous, Impossible, Etc. by 1u3hr · 2012-05-23 01:13 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  Well, when the first amendment was written, pretty much all speech was not anonymous. The first amendment was passed in 1789. ... . The people who have caused political change have done so by being intentionally not anonymous.
  Wrong. Very wrong.
  
  The Federalist Papers
  The Federalist Papers are a series of 85 articles or essays promoting the ratification of the United States Constitution written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay. Seventy-seven of the essays were published serially in The Independent Journal and The New York Packet between October 1787 and August 1788. ...At the time of publication, the authorship of the articles was a closely guarded secret
8. Re:Ridiculous, Impossible, Etc. by AngryDeuce · 2012-05-23 01:13 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  This is why I never bought the whole "we should leave more things up to the states to decide" line of argument
  As someone living in Wisconsin, I completely agree.
  I shudder to think how much worse the fuckheads in this state's government would have screwed us if they'd had more power. They did enough damage with the power they have. We've got a full-blown witch hunt going on right now over people who signed a recall petition against Governor Walker, our Supreme Court justices are physically assaulting each other, disenfranchisement efforts are in full swing, and women now have to prove to a doctor they're not being coerced before they're allowed to have an abortion (because, you know, there are tons of forced abortions in this country, am I right?) and allowing schools to restrict sex-ed programs to abstinence-only...
  Luckily we can still recall our reps, although they did everything they could to try and take that right away from us, too.
9. Re:Ridiculous, Impossible, Etc. by Cytotoxic · 2012-05-23 01:21 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  so then, how is it you know these people published anonymously...and exactly what it was they had published? seems it wasn't so anonymous.
  Because they won.
10. Re:Ridiculous, Impossible, Etc. by MightyMartian · 2012-05-23 01:39 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  The Federalist Papers, you moron.
  Fucking hell but it's a sad testament to the American education system that you could say something like that.
  
  --
  The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
11. Re:Ridiculous, Impossible, Etc. by Bigby · 2012-05-23 01:39 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  So you are saying it is better that those things happen to 300,000,000 people instead of 5,700,000?
12. Re:Ridiculous, Impossible, Etc. by Lucky75 · 2012-05-23 01:56 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  When you give power to the local states, you're not making it smaller, you're just shifting the power to someone else who is just as corrupt and gets less media attention.
  
  --
  DNA -- National Dyslexic Association
13. Re:Ridiculous, Impossible, Etc. by zzsmirkzz · 2012-05-23 02:37 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  When you give power to the local states, you're not making it smaller, you're just shifting the power to someone else who is just as corrupt and gets less media attention.
  and lives close to you, where you can make your opinion heard. Not to mention their sphere of influence is smaller. The point in having people with the power to do things that affect you most, closer to you, and on a smaller scale, is obvious (or at least, it should be). Besides, if they are all morons, why don't you run against them next election and win. It's easier on a local/state scale than on the federal level (which is why you don't want everything handled at the federal level).
14. Re:Ridiculous, Impossible, Etc. by tnk1 · 2012-05-23 03:07 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Are you shitting me? I sit on an HOA Board of Directors for only one reason: no one else wants to do the job. My predecessor *died* and I was brought in because they needed to prevent receivership and loss of property value for everyone that would entail. I do my best to avoid as much of it as I can.
  Let me make this clear. HOAs may seem like they are not accountable. I have joked that I could spend money building a statue of myself in the common area and no one could stop us, but do you know why? Because no one can be bothered to actually a) go to meetings, b) read the shit we send them, c) vote. That doesn't mean, however, that I am less accountable. I am a lot more accountable than some senator or representative. I "represent" only 200 households, not 300,000. And all of those people know where I live. When I take a walk, I invariably pass their houses. The thing is, no one is holding me accountable for anything. The most we get are people bitching at us at hearings when they didn't read the rules and painted their deck puke green and now they have to fix it. And I wouldn't even care about that as much, except as a Director, I have a legal obligation to act in the best interests of the community and according to it's legally enacted rules and covenants.
  We literally have to collect proxies and elect ourselves at the annual meeting. If that's a tyranny, then it is one that is being run with the fullest cooperation of the tyrannized.
  There is no reason this has to be, except the fact that no one wants to bother. And I don't blame them. Being on an HOA Board isn't privilege, it's work. If you wanted to move to my community and get elected to the board, I will be happy to step down. Of course, I will move from the community as soon as I can if you are a moron and enforce nothing, but please don't get the idea that there is no accountability. There is plenty, it's just that no one bothers to care.
I propose an alternative law ... by KillaBeave · 2012-05-23 00:20 · Score: 5, Insightful

... 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?
1. Re:I propose an alternative law ... by SJHillman · 2012-05-23 00:30 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  This is why children generally shouldn't be online unsupervised any more than they should be wandering the town unsupervised. By the time they're old enough to do that, they're usually old enough to cope with a little cyber bullying.
2. Re:I propose an alternative law ... by CastrTroy · 2012-05-23 01:02 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  We always wandered the town unsupervised. Sure we got into a little bit of trouble, but it was a lot better than the current state, where children never go outside, and we have massive problems with obesity. I think it's kind of sad that the baseball fields in my area never get used except for little league games. We used to always play baseball, hockey, football, whatever. Go knock on the doors the doors of every kind in the neighborhood until you had enough people to play, and start a game. Online isn't any different. You just have to teach your kids how to deal with people causing problems. On the internet, it's so easy. If you don't like what someone else is saying, just go somewhere else.
  
  --
  
  Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Federalist Papers by mykos · 2012-05-23 00:20 · Score: 4, Informative

Good thing we didn't have laws like this when the Federalist Papers were written.
So maybe now... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-05-23 00:21 · Score: 4, Funny

you fuckers will start treating AC posts with some respect!
Another reason not to live in New York by J'raxis · 2012-05-23 00:22 · Score: 4, Interesting

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
Anonymity = Free Speech by CuteSteveJobs · 2012-05-23 00:24 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.
Irony by AlKaMo · 2012-05-23 00:31 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.
Re:Hi, I'm Anonymous Coward... by 6Yankee · 2012-05-23 00:32 · Score: 5, Funny

Something tells me "Jim Conte" and "Thomas O'Mara" will be doing a lot of comment posting if this goes through...
This won't take long by gruntled · 2012-05-23 00:34 · Score: 4, Informative

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."
Re:My name is Jim Conte and I'm a clueless legisla by Jim+Conte · 2012-05-23 00:47 · Score: 4, Informative

I'm Jim Conte, wtf are you talking about?