On 12/6/05, Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org> wrote:
geni wrote:
If you post something libilus under US law (which
is the only law that
matters) and the person finds it fast enough they can get a court
order and get the relivant server logs from wikipedia. If you don't
log in then I'm afaraid we can't protect you from being stupid. You
can't expect the foundation not to respect a US court order. As a
result the fact is that under certian conditions posting something
false on wikipedia could get you into legal trouble. It is important
people understand this.
The reference to authoritarian countries is a red herring. Assumeing
you avoid local monitoring it is only US law you have to worry about
because only US law affects the foundation.
It isn't a red herring, because I'm not talking about the possibility
that a court order could be made for our current logs. I'm talking
specifically about Mr. Seigenthaler's calls for us to add additional
logging facility specifically for the purpose of making it easier to
trace anonymous contributors, which would be a very bad idea. We can't
guarantee people's anonymity, but we shouldn't---contrary to his
suggestion---go out of our way to make contributors more easily
traceable back to their real identities.
-Mark
Exactly. As Seigenthaler has already alluded to in his rant in USA
Today, he already has the ability to file a John Doe lawsuit and, if
his lawyers can convince the judge that there is sufficient evidence
of wrongdoing, get a subpoena to force BellSouth to give the identity
of the ADSL customer. For whatever reason, he's chosen not to do that
but instead to publically complain about the system.
As I said in my other post, though, I can't figure out what it is that
he's actually suggesting be done. I find it hard to believe that he's
lived such a long life and just figured out that allowing free speech
is sometimes going to lead to gossip.
Anthony