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Illinois state senator pushes anti-anonymity bill
 [DAILYCALLER] A recently introduced bill in the Illinois state Senate would require anonymous website comment posters to reveal their identities if they want to keep their comments online.If you're going to comment on this post, don't do it anonymously. Use an assumed name. The bill, called the Internet Posting Removal Act, is sponsored by Illinois state Sen. Ira Silverstein. Wonder what party he belongs to? It states that a "web site administrator upon request shall remove any comments posted on his or her web site by an anonymous poster unless the anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post and confirms that his or her IP address, legal name, and home address are accurate." I presume that's so they can send union thugs to mess you up if they don't like what you post. The Democratic I guessed that. politician's bill, which does not ask for or clarify requirements from entities requesting the comment removal, would take effect 90 days after becoming law. I wonder if the entities can be anonymous? Pseudonymous and anonymous comments have long been a critical part of U.S. public discourse, though, and the bill may be on shaky legal ground. Many of the Federalist Papers were written by some guy named Publius. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) noted on its website that the "right to anonymous speech is also protected well beyond the printed page." But only for lefty sites... "Thus in 2002 the Supreme Court struck down a law requiring proselytizers to register their true names with the mayor's office before going door-to-door," wrote EFF, noting that the Supreme Court protects Internet commentary as it does pamphleteering. Possibly because the two are identical, except for one being electronic. The bill is part of a larger trend of politicians seeking to censor anonymous online speech. Since all the other problems the nation has have been solved. The New York State Assembly sought the passage of a similar bill in May 2012, and Arizona politicians worked to ban Internet trolling altogether in April 2012. Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed the bill into law in May 2012, but only after the contentious language was cut. Personally, I'm all in favor of public execution for trolls, but they probably have a right to be stupid and obnoxious. Local politicians took similar action in Tennessee in 2012, when the Shelby County Commission pressed for a court order to reveal the identities of online commentators who posted nearly 9,000 comments on Memphis news site, Commercial Appeal. The very same online commentor? Or 9000 separate commentors? Posted by: Fred 2013-02-22 |
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