Re: Time for a muzzle / The online world of lies and rumor grows ever more vicious. Is it time to rethink free speech? [telecom]

Precisely. And in the absence of legal action, decent people could ostracize them.

When I was doing computer security policy for the University of Georgia, I often heard people whine loudly when I told them that the laws of slander and libel *do* apply on the Internet. They wanted the Internet to be 'free,' by which they meant *they* wanted to be 'free' to harm

*others* but not the other way around.

As I said, the problem is too much anonymity. I don't think anonymity should be done away with, *but* anonymous communication should not be mixed freely with identified communication. As in society as a whole, anonymous comments should be a little harder to disseminate, and should be filtered through identifiable third parties who feel they are prima facie worth disseminating. That doesn't mean agreeing with them, but it does mean having some ability to filter out purely malicious messages and obvious falsehoods.

Another point: Maximum freedom does not result from the total absence of regulation. If you have no regulation, the bullies are free, and nobody else is.

It seems to me that this tired, so-called example is so irrelevant in nearly all situations that Godwin's Law ought to extend to him who invokes it.

This law is needed, but is too broad already, allowing abuse by officials as in the case of Khalen Masi (details here:

Revealing classified information should only be a crime if the agency involved can prove to a judge that revealing that piece of information really could endanger the country -- and even then, if revealing it is necessary to right a wrong, that should take precedence.

These laws are ridiculously badly written, and much too expensive to litigate for both the accused and victims.

I believe it would be better all 'round to simply legalize slander, and tell victims to seek redress by arguing back, except in cases where the victim suffers real loss -- such as losing a job because his boss believed the lie, or being convicted of a falsely-accused crime. Oddly enough, in that last case the law now protects the slanderer because a statement of accusation made to police or officials is legally privileged.

As for harassment -- real harassment of a person ought to be strictly banned, and publication against someone's will of his home or work location, or any info similarly capable of misuse to facilitate attacks or other crime, should cause the law to assume it was done for that purpose. But there are lots of things branded by the law as "harassment" that simply aren't.

US law currently exempts the media from this. I agree with Bill O'Reilly that it should not.

The Internet, especially when it can be used anonymously, makes all forms of speech both easier to do and harder to punish. For most kinds of speech this is a good thing -- enough so that banning anonymity (assuming the ban can be enforced) would do much more harm than good.

It's fairly easy for the law to find the owner of a web site in such a case; if the host ISP won't cooperate, the law can compel them. The exception is where the host ISP is in a foreign country that won't help your country's law enforcement. But again, I'd be wary of creating an international mechanism that can penetrate such sites, or chartering some kind of government cyber-attack team that can crack them. The international mechanism would be used much more by the likes of China, Burma, and Iran against dissidents than by anyone in legitimate ways, and the cracking team would set a precedent we wouldn't like at all when someone does it to us.

A better way to protect your kids is to monitor their use of the net, and to teach them not to trust, or care too strongly, what anonymous strangers say.