Follow the links from Electronic Frontier Foundation page on the bizarre Manalapan v. Moskovitz lawsuit to see a local government running wild against free speech. The town is suing to get the identity of — and all kinds of other information about — a critical anonymous blogger.
Anonymous speech should generally be taken less seriously than speech where the speaker stands behind his own words, and I think this is such a case. But anonymous speech is part of a long and vital tradition in America, and this is also such an example.
Someone should show these officials the Bill of Rights. Kudos to the EFF for pursuing this case.
on Dec 4th, 2007 at 12:29 pm
One of the great things about these lawsuits is that they frequently bring to our attention local blogs that we’ve missed in our attempts to build comprehensive aggregators of the best state and local focused news and politics blogs.
In this case, as soon as the city went after datruthsquad, we added them to http://www.blognetnews.com/new_jersey . Hopefully that expanded the audience for da truth and maybe will help local officials understand that these anti-speech legal expeditions have a tendency to backfire.
on Dec 4th, 2007 at 8:22 pm
Whoa– there is an enormous amount of context missing here. The only posts from “daTruthSquad” on his blog are one in August and 6 from November 16th on, discussing the discovery action against him.
He writer:
“It was da necessity in 2006 when daTruthSquad discovered and uncovered da rift between GOP’ers Andy Boy Lucas and former Committeeman Joltin Joe Locricchio.”
Huh? Where was this published? Some other blogger linked to daTurthSquad back in May, but the post he linked to has been removed. I can only guess that there may have once been some possibly identifying details of his identity from his earlier posts.
Come on, Dan, call on a journalism student somewhere to dig into this and get to the meat of the story. It’s all well and good to defend someone who wakes up and decides to be an anonymous citizen-journalist one day, but not realize that he apparently set a torch to his archives.