now Sony wants access to your e-mail and cell phone recordsFollow

Ok. I can almost buy those examples. But not quite.


Here's the problem. If you are *truely* anonymous, then how do we apply any weight to what you say. Now, if you want to just talk about the war in Iraq for example. You can do that. I can grant you that case. The problem is that *isn't* what's likely to happen. The anonymous blog will almost always start with:

"I'm a US soldier in Iraq, and I think..."

So. You're in essense wanting your cake and to eat it too. You want to have anonymity, but also use your identity/employment/whatever to lend weight to what you say. But anonymity goes both ways. How exactly can someone anonymously be a corporate whistleblower? If you are really anonymous, then there's no way to distinguish the legitimate whistleblower from some guy who just thinks it would be funny to pretend to be an employee of some business and make stuff up about them.


The reader has *no* way to know the difference. Most blogs are worthless for that reason. If you don't have any sort of real insight into something, you're just presenting one person's opinion. The fact that you write it down and put it on the web should not in any way add any additional weight to what you say. Unfortunately, it often does.


The problem is that by and large, most people don't make decisions based on the facts they are presented with, but by who is telling them those facts. Anonymity is great if you just want to present those facts. But inevitably, even anonymous people will want to show that they are in some way more knowledgeable or connected to an issue then the average joe in order to add weight to their argument. Everyone does this to some extent. And it's usually not a big deal. But then not all of us are trying to do any grandiose manipulation of the public either.


I guess I see it in two different ways. If you just want to put things out there for consideration, then anonymity is fine. But that's hardly the "important speach" and is hardly a "free speach" case. The issue is the idea that if you can't speak anonymously, that you can't have free speach at all. That's totally the wrong measure. Free speach is measured by the degree to which I can stand up, identify myself, say what I want to say, and *not* fear any sort of reprisal as a result. In a world where you can largely do that (yeah, military personel are one exception), the most common use of anonymous speach isn't to enable speach at all, but to allow "harmful speach" to occur without repercussion.


To me, all freedoms come with responsiblity. Sure. I'm free to make any statement I want about anything. But I must take responsiblity for that speach. If I'm expressing an idea or agenda, and it's incredibly unpopular, then I must deal with my friends and neighbors not liking me for my ideas. That's their freedom as well, right? And if I say blatant lies about someone, I should be held responsible for that as well. How exactly does anonymous speach work in that case?


I just don't see a need for this freenet thing. You can already post pretty much what you want on the internet and count on a degree of anonymity. Sure. You *can* be tracked down, but unless what you are saying falls in the catagory of harmful speach, then who's going to bother to do so? To me, that preserves the freedom to speak, allows for a degree of anonymous speach, and also ensures that if people use speach to harm that they can be held accountable as a result.

Ok. But how anonymously did you talk to that magazine? Clearly, you must have identified yourself in order for those guys to track you down. Clearly also, the reason the magazine put weight in what you said was *because* of your identity as a member of the military. If you'd been just an anonymous voice, it's likely they would never have bothered with what you had to say.


The military is an exception. However, it does go both ways, right? If you'd not been in the military, what you had to say wouldn't have had any value to the magazine and wouldn't have seen print. It was valued because it would be assumed that as a member of the military you had some special insight into whatever the topic was. Um. That's more or less exactly *why* there are rules forbidding that. Because while a magazine, and the people reading the magazing, might put special weight into the tale of an enlisted soldier (don't know what your rank was, but just tossing out an example), the actual likelyhood of that soldier really knowing the full story and reasons for whatever it was that happened are likely to be low.


Heh. But the flip side is that those guys posting all that information about you were *also* excersizing their free speach. Didn't exactly feel good, did it? How much worse would it have felt if they'd been anonymous?


Take another example. If you were unfairly targetted for an attack like that, and things were said about you that could affect your career just by the implication of them (which can certainly happen in the military or political professions), wouldn't you want there to be some way to know who was saying them? Shouldn't people be held accountable for what they say?


Free speach is a double edged sword. You must be both free to say what you want, but others must also be free to react to what you say as they wish (within legal limits of course). If you don't have both of those, then free speach has no real meaning.

That's a very good question. If we lived in a world where "the people" placed weight on information based on the ultimate source, I'd say I had no problems with it. Unfortunately, too many of "the people" simply assume anything they see or hear in the media must be true. Well. It's "true" that an anonymous source told some reporter X, but that doesn't make X true, right? It's amazing to me how many people don't get that distinction. Just look at the whole Al-Jezeera bombing thing for an example of this. The entire thing is based on rummors of the contents of a document that *no one* who's actually read the document can or has confirmed. Yet, there are some in the thread that are treating it as though it's an absolute fact simply because it was stated on a news source.


As a practice, I don't think a truely anonymous source should be given much weight. If a reporter wants to protect a source, that's a different issue though. But then the burden of fact checking and actual investigation lies with that reporter if he chooses to run his story. He knows who's telling him X, and should actually spend the time verifying as much as possible before going to print.

Again though, what we often see is reporters so intent on being the first to break a story, that they don't bother to check out anything, but fall back on the catch all "allegations" wording. After all, it's always "the truth" to say that a source has said something. Unfortunately, as I stated earlier, this often gives a level of weight to that statement that isn't really justified or earned.


What makes this even more difficult is that over time, our media has moved away from making *any* factual statements of it's own. I don't know if this is a reaction to lawsuits or what, but it's just an easily observable fact. Watch a news broadcast sometime. Count the number of times the words "alleged" or "believed to be" or "reported to be" are used. It's virtually every single sentence. That's because those reporters are trained to insert the words (or ones similar in meaning) into any statement of fact. That way they can't be accused of saying themselves. They're just reporting what someone else has said, so they can avoid potential lawsuits (presumably). The side effect of this though is that the public has no tools by which to judge the relative "truth" of any two statments. For example, a typical news agency could make the following two statements:


"The alleged bank robber was arrested by police after a high speed chase" (while showing video of exactly that happening).

"New research alleges that eating junk food may actually be good for you".


Clearly, if they're showing live footage of the result of a high speed chase that started with a bank robbery, the odds that the person in the car was actually involved in the robbery is high. Yet they use the words "alleged" anyway because they don't know at that point if he is or not, and can't make that assumption. Clearly also, the odds of junk food being good for you is pretty low. But the exact same wording is used. Based purely on the wording there's no specific way to state that one is more likely to be true then the other. We're given the same blanket "we're not saying this, but someone else is" statement from the media outlet, so we're left to make the decision ourselves. Unfortunately, many many people out there simply don't have the critical thinking skills to make a good assessment of those statements and apply rational probabilities to them. They're going to just treat them as both equally likely or unlikely.


And that's how the use of such sources gets very dangerous. I honestly don't think that most people can really tell the difference between an actual factual statement that's been checked and verified to be true, and one that's simply an allegation. And who can blame them? They're often not given enough context to make that decision. It would be nice if reporters would actually "investigate" their stories before printing them, but unfortunately there is very little motivation in our news media to do that.