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