The critical question with both pseudonymity and anonymity is traceability. Can one find out who sent the message? On a service like AOL, the answer is yes. Whatever screen name you may have chosen, a message can be traced back to the account owner. Users of the system may not be able to trace back to the original owner - on AOL, again, you get to choose whether others know to whom a screen name is attached - but the system operators can trace the message sent from an AOL account back to the account owner.
On an on-line service like AOL, whether your anonymity is protected depends upon the agreement between you and the service. Simple rule: If you are doing something illegal, or harmful, your identity probably will not be protected. We don't yet have the Swiss Banks of on-line services.
On the Internet, the story is a bit different. There are many "anonymous servers" on the Internet which promise to forward your email to someone after stripping off your identification. (Send a message to info@anon.penet.fi for more information from one such service.) Some of these provide return mail capabilities, so the recipient can reply to your message without knowing to whom he is replying.
Here again, however, your protection is in the hands of the service providers. In a famous incident last year, the person who runs the most famous anonymous server (in Finland) allowed the records of the service to be searched by the FBI, to help the FBI locate a particular user. Again a simple rule: If pressured by the feds, expect the guardian of your anonymity to cave.
Many people and organizations fear anonymity, governments in particular. For the same reasons that we discussed when talking about encryption, governments are afraid that people will use the opportunity to be anonymous to commit crimes.
So could the government ban anonymity? It seems clear that the U.S. government could not generally ban anonymity. We will discuss this more when we discuss the first amendment, but the bottom line is that there is a free speech right to speak anonymously, at least in some contexts.
But it might be a different question whether the government could require traceability. While the government may not be allowed to stop all anonymous speech, it may be able to require that there be some way, at least given proper judicial authorization, to trace a message back to the sender (or at least to the machine that sent it).
authors:
| Larry Lessig | David Post | Eugene Volokh |
Copyright © 1999 Social Science Electronic Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved