On 12/6/05, Delirium delirium@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