[WikiEN-l] Experiment on new pages

Thu Dec 8 02:01:10 UTC 2005

On 12/7/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> I'm not an expert in US constitutional law; it's not my country.
> Sometimes it does happen though that one right can interferes with
> others.  Reconciling those rights may lead to limitations on one or the
> other.  I don't think that it would be fair to conclude that free speech
> condones defamation.  Whether actual defamation could be proven cannot
> be established unless the person has the right to face his accuser.

The point they were trying to make is that this is a fellow who
supports various civil liberties but seems to desire that it would be
extremely easy for people to get intricate personal information based
only on an IP address, without having the desire to actually file
charges for that information. That's an attitude frowned upon by most
privacy advocates, and S.'s advocacy of it sounds suspiciously like
something he would not want applied as a general rule, but just in his
situation, but I don't know.

Should I be granted access to anybody's personal information just
because I didn't like something they wrote on an internet forum? That
sort of power could be easily abused and I'm sure we've all had
situations where we can recognize that it was a good thing that the
nut on the other end of an electronic exchange didn't have access to
our phone number much less our home address. Of course, if that nut
was filing legal proceedings, that would give them standing for such
information. But if they just want to casually complain -- hard to
justify.

FF