quick blogging on anomynity

There has been some chat on the faculty listserv here at SLU about whether the anonymous bloggers who have been attacking SLU faculty and administrators (and are now being sued by the university) are acting decently by hiding their names.

I, as I have said previously, have no opinion on local politics. But I do want to remind you, the internet, of the value of anonymous speech and the need to protect anonymity.

First of all, we should remember that whistle blowing is an important check on institutional power, and would not be possible without protections on anonymity. We should all be thankful that Woodward and Bernstein protected deep throat, that Dan Shor protected his sources for information on CIA human rights violations, and that Seymore Hersh is protecting his Abu Ghraib sources.

What, you say that leaks to the press are different than blogs? The bloggers who blow whistles are only cutting out the middle man. And we now know that bloggers can uncover important information, such as the fact that the White House planted a shill in the press corps to pitch softball questions at press conferences, and more entertainingly, that the shill was not just a media whore, but an honest to god prostitute.

More broadly, anonymous is necessary in a pluralist society for the same reason that privacy in general is necessary. In a pluralistic society, there are going to be actions and lifestyles which are not illegal but which are frowned on by the majority. This is simply a consequence of people living together who have different conceptions of the good life. If people are to pursue their unusual conceptions of the good life (have sex in clown make up, say) they need a private space to do it in. Similarly, if people are going to be able to talk about ideas that are protected by the freedom of thought, but still frowned on by most of the community, they need to be able to speak anonymously. Indeed, the motivation for privacy and the motivation for anonymous speech intersect in the right of people to publish anonymously about unusual aspects of their private lives, say an open marriage.

I do not know if TBOC has done anything wrong, buy anonymity is not among their crimes.