Random Flux

On episode 70 of the Security Now podcast Steve Gibson repeats a statement that he has already made a number of times in the past: that there can be no freedom of speech without anonymity. Steve is not alone in this. The same statement is also repeated on the freenet project site (“Without anonymity there can never be true freedom of speech…”) and in many other places — it seems to be turning into a kind of modern-day axiom that nobody is really thinking about all that much.

Every time Steve makes this statement co-host Leo Laporte goes along with it as though it were a self-evident fact. This is a very odd statement coming from an American and a very odd statement for another American to agree with. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear it from a Russian, a Chinese or a North Korean, but from an American this is nothing short of bizarre.

Someone here was asleep in civics class. Does anyone seriously believe that the American founding fathers and the men who drafted the American constitution had anonymity in mind when they gave freedom of speech and freedom of the press the status of fundamental values? I don’t think so. The whole purpose of the American constitution was to create a republic that was really based on individual rights and the rule of law, a republic so just and robust that no citizen would ever need to fear to speak his or her mind openly. This is one of the main reasons why America was established in the first place, by people who were previously forced to be anonymous and who were sick and tired of it.

A society in which anonymity is a prerequisite for freedom of speech is no longer free. I don’t deny that that is now the case — that is where we are now, not only in America but in most of the countries of the world, East and West alike. This is why there is a need for anonymization services on the Internet (the subject of the podcast) and this is why almost everyone who participates in a public forum online uses a nickname instead of their real name. But instead of just accepting it as a given fact maybe we should start thinking about it, and about what it means when we think that it is normal to need to be anonymous to speak our minds — even in a republic that was founded on the principle that everyone should be able to speak their minds openly without fear of retribution.