Re: 2/26/01 - [TMRT] Newsbytes: ACLU Defends Internet Anonymity
ACLU Defends Internet Anonymity
By David McGuire, Newsbytes
WASHINGTON, D.C., U.S.A.,
26 Feb 2001, 4:38 PM CST
In a pair of civil actions filed on opposite coasts today, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) renewed its stance that online critics and other speakers should be allowed to remain anonymous if they so choose.
In Washington State, the ACLU filed a motion to quash a subpoena that would force an Internet service provider (ISP) to reveal the identity of a user participating in an online bulletin board discussion. Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania, the ACLU moved to block a state Appeals Court Justice from using the courts to ferret out the identity of an online critic.
"The Supreme Court has made it very clear that it believes anonymity (to be) a very fundamental First Amendment principle," ACLU attorney Ann Beeson told Newsbytes today.
For the past few years, Beeson said, as the Internet has grown, the number "frivolous" defamation lawsuits aimed at exposing and, the ACLU believes, intimidating online speakers has grown tremendously.
"We started following it as soon as it became a trend," she said.
To protect the anonymity of online speakers, the ACLU has asked the courts to impose a higher legal standard on plaintiffs seeking to sue online speakers for defamation, Beeson said.
By requiring plaintiffs to prove that they have suffered "actual economic harm" from an alleged online attack, the courts could strike a good balance between the real needs of plaintiffs and the constitutional right of speakers to remain unnamed.
To drive home that argument, the ACLU has argued that most online speech should be regulated under laws governing "slander" rather than those governing "libel."
Slander is spoken defamation, while libel refers to defamatory statements that have been published. Many courts in the past have applied the "actual economic harm" standard to slander, but not to the more serious offense of libel, Beeson said.
But while bulletin board discussions are written and published - in a sense - Beeson argued that they are more akin to conversations than to written texts.
"We aren't arguing for absolute immunity," Beeson said, conceding that targets of real online defamation should have an avenue for pursuing their antagonists.
In the Washington case, the ACLU is working in conjunction with fellow civil liberties group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to prevent 2TheMart.com from uncovering the identities of an Internet user who used the psuedonym "NoGuano" on an online discussion board that featured comments about the company.
In Pennsylvania, the ACLU is defending the publisher of an online political "zine" from an appeals court justice who was criticized in the publication.
The 2TheMart Web site was not functioning properly as of this writing and other attempts to contact the company were not successful.
Reported by Newsbytes.com, newsbytes.com .
16:38 CST
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