The Right to Anonymity
Eric Norlin notices my casual mention of “our right to maximum anonymity” and writes to ask where exactly this right comes from.
Unfair! If I had known someone was going to take what I wrote seriously, I wouldn’t have written it. Nevertheless, here’s a rearguard attempt to justify, explain or evade what I meant:
I’m not claiming that the right to anonymity is a legal right. As far as I know, no court has recognized such a right. But not all rights come from law. For example, most of us feel comfortable saying that Afghan women under the Taliban had a right to be educated even though they had no such legal right. The Right to Lifers assert a right for fetuses that the legal system hasn’t recognized. And the parents of the American Revolution certainly were asserting rights not recognized by law.
But what is a right? It’s the other side of a duty. If I have a right to not be X’ed, you have a duty not to X me. Rights generally are not absolute if only because they sometimes conflict. For example, your right to privacy (a legal right in the US) can be overridden if the police have reason to investigate you, or if John Ashcroft doesn’t like the way you look.
Rights only emerge when we need others to perform duties. For example, we may have always had a right to clean air, but it only emerged as a right worth mentioning once our air got fouled. The emergence of a right can make explicit what had been an inconspicuous, default state.
That’s how I see the right to anonymity. It’s been the default on the Internet. A world in which that default is maintained is a better world than one in which our every click is tracked, our every purchase becomes a datum to be turned against us, our every download is assumed to be shoplifting. The putative right to anonymity is based (very loosely) on a facet of social life: we are an individualistic society that has to give me a reason before it can demand anything of me, including knowledge about me. Anonymity has been and should be the default.
Constitutional Amendment anyone?
Categories: Uncategorized dw
I think…nice condensation of the LawMeme analysis of the Garrett quandary –
Will anonymity evolve to be a core social norm on the ‘Net ? Will this then trivialize everything we may read, because we might not be certain about where it came from ?
What will we lose from the context we have had before – how does this impinge on our fascination with celebrity (the opposite of anonymity), for example, and the ways our society uses celebrity to keep reality at bay ?
I didn’t make myself clear. I hate when I do that.
The sort of anonymity I’m talking about is the type we already have: You know the author of Joho the Blog as D. Weinberger because I let you. I didn’t have to. You don’t know — and can’t know — that this is the very same person who also writes “The Chocolate Frog Blog” and chats on “Bottomless Chaps” as “HotHunk97.” That sort of anonymity is already the norm on the Net.
Not being an American, I’m not sure about this, but does the “right to remain silent” imply the right to be alone? You don’t have to say anything to anybody. Does it also mean that no one can compel you to speak, whether that speech is actual words or whether it is marking your identity another way?
Chris, How dare you not be American!
But, to answer your question: In American law, the right to remain silent is applicable only within the context of a criminal investigation. It derives from the US Constitution’s right not to incriminate oneself. If the police are interrogating you, you have the right not to say anything at all. Unfortunately, I don’t see how it could be extended into a right to anonymity on the Web.
Dave,
If you look at anonymity historically, it seems to go along with use rights resources such as the commons in England and analogous use rights phenomena in France and Germany. The crowds that congregated to resist their infringement benefited from their cloak of anonymity and, to a great extent, the emerging states were required to devise ways to “see through” that cloak in order to sustain the rise of new economic relationships, i.e., capitalism. The Internet is probably the last commons we will ever see.
Regards,
Larry Irons
Hi there.
I wrote an article a little while ago on the ‘Right to anonymity’. I hadn’t found anything like this on the web at that time. The articles can be found on http://getyourgo.ie/, or specifically, http://getyourgo.ie/articles/righttoanonymity_1.htm
I intend to write two followup articles on the same subject.
Interesting topic people!