Daily Civil Liberties News From DDF/BORDC

Are you following InTheNews from the Defending Dissent Foundation — Bill of Rights Defense Committee? No? You could be a better informed patriot, Fourth of July or any other day, if you did!

I Missed This When It Happened...

... but D-Day (David Dayen, often at FDL) is retiring. I shall miss him... a lot. He had all the ingredients of a fine journalist, and a willingness to do the work it took to integrate them into a superb finished product... every day. Every damned day! Do you have any idea the strength of purpose that must take? Do you understand why he needs some time off?

Thanks, D-Day; you've done well by all of us. We miss you already.

Blogs And 'Professional' News Organizations

Among the MSM org's that reported early on the Affordable Care Act decision, CNN fucked it, Fox fucked it, and MSNBC got it right. That's one of three who reported quickly who also got it right... not a very good record.

On the other hand, SCOTUSblog got it right.

The next time some aged, alcohol-and-tobacco-pickled mainstream media reporter goes on a rant about how awful blogs are, quietly remind them of this fact. Next time, I... on my lowly blog, having no primary sources at my disposal... I shall go with SCOTUSblog.

In NY, Speech Is Free, But You Pay For Anonymity

H/T Bryan for pointing us to this post by Matt Peckham in Time's Techland blog:

Watching faceless online passerby troll bloggers or mock fellow scribblers can be a drag, but what if legislators’ answer to online ne’er-do-wells was to ban anonymous comments from websites entirely? That’s what the state of New York is planning to do in identical bills — S.6779 and A.8688 – proposed by the New York State Assembly that would “amend the civil rights law” in order to “[protect] a person’s right to know who is behind an anonymous internet posting.”

The bill would require a web administrator to “upon request remove any comments posted on his or her web site by an anonymous poster unless such 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.” By “web site,” the bill means just what it seems to: Any New York-based website, including “social networks, blogs forums, message boards or any other discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages.”

...

That sound was, of course, the noise of a few of our nation's founders turning in their graves. For example, the various pseudonymous authors of the Federalist Papers are surely rotating rapidly.

I have published under my real name (well, OK, my real nickname) for decades. But faced with such a law I would make up a pseudonym just to defy it. Anonymous or pseudonymous speech emphatically does have a place in the discourse of a free society. And it is protected under the First Amendment, as our nation's founders understood without having to have it explained to them in words of one syllable.

Based on the proposed law, I have to assume that New York wants its residents to abandon altogether the web hosting business. That suits me, or as Texans say, it's no skin off my back. When I had self-hosted business and personal sites (as opposed to Blogger-hosted or WordPress-hosted), my host was about 30 miles north of me, and they placed as few restrictions as possible on what I posted. That's how it's supposed to be in America.

TPM Engages In Antisocial Networking

TPM has a new system in which, in order to post a comment, one must have an account with Facebook, Yahoo, AOL or Hotmail. I have none of those, and at the moment I have no intention of getting any of those. I might consider Twitter, but that's not among the options.

I have been responsible for a good deal of publicity in the form of links to TPM articles. But being cut off arbitrarily from the commenting system annoys me enough that there probably will not be many links from here to there in the future.