Perspective: The Erosion of Anonymous Internet Speech

Reprinted with permission from CNET News

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution safeguards freedom of speech. The right to speak freely generally includes the right to speak anonymously. And developing case law holds that the right to speak freely embraces the liberty to speak anonymously on the Internet.

All well and good, right? Wrong.

A law designed to thwart telephone harassment has been updated and signed into effect by President Bush. But this is troublesome. The newly updated law in part prohibits annoying Web postings or e-mails that do not disclose the true identities of the authors of this speech.

Let's drill down a bit.

While the U.S. constitution places an extremely high value on and provides protection for free speech, such speech is not completely unbridled. That is why our nation has a developed body of law pertaining to defamation. In a nutshell, if someone says something false about someone else that causes harm to that person, liability and monetary