Crimes of Anonymity

A study released about a month ago by Israel's Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center has sparked a new round of hand-wringing about how the Web is becoming a bad neighborhood. The study claimed that four Web sites belonging to Palestinian Islamic terrorist groups were being hosted by Internet service providers in the United States. Fear-mongering and soul-searching inevitably followed, and one particularly ridiculous article in the New York Times had the reporters interviewing confused New Jersey residents about how it felt to live down the street from an ISP that had hosted a terrorist Web site. A horrified woman asked, "How could it happen here?"

The answer, you fucking antigeniuses, is that it didn't happen here. The Web sites were all in Arabic, and they were all created by people "over there," OK? When you put something on the Internet, you don't inject teeny little people into the network and let them build bunkers in your Web servers. A person in Palestine can create and manage a Web site that's broadcast remotely from a U.S. server. Plus, it's not as if these U.S.-based ISP administrators could read Arabic. How the hell were they supposed to know what was on some random Web site in a foreign language - one of thousands they hosted - and whether it was terrorist or not? Should they have just refused to host any Web sites in Arabic because everybody knows that's the language of terrorism and evil?

My favorite part of the Israeli report is a section that said terrorists prefer to host their Web sites on U.S. servers because they get great tech support and protection under the First Amendment. We like our tech support, so clearly it's time to get rid of that goddamn First Amendment. After all, four (four!) whole nasty terrorist Web sites slipped through the cracks and were able to pay for hosting from ISPs in the States. This is an epidemic of massive proportions. This incident has at last revealed the truth to everyone: free speech enables terrorism.

Luckily, U.S. legislators are already hard at work to keep our wonderful country safe from the freedoms outlined in its own Constitution. Two weeks ago the House approved a bill called the Fraudulent Online Identity Sanctions Act, which creates harsher prison sentences (up to seven years more) for people who commit fraud and other crimes using a Web site registered under a false name. The bill is also aimed at people who are committing copyright or trademark infringement: fines for each infringed work posted on a pseudonymously registered site will increase by nearly $100,000, and it'll be much harder to argue that the infringement was legal under fair-use exemptions.

It's not unlawful for people to register domains under false names (I can't tell you how many domains I've bought under the name Pseudo Nym at 69 Isfun St.), and this bill doesn't outlaw it either. Given that everyone targeted by FOISA can already be brought up on charges or sued under current law, all FOISA does is associate anonymity with punishment. This makes it far less likely that people will be willing to register sites anonymously or pseudonymously - at least, if they fear expensive court battles. FOISA is subtle poison being released into the environment for free expression.

The right to anonymous free speech, established by the First Amendment, is crucial for whistle-blowers, kids, critics of government and industry, and people who want to talk about issues (like queerness, illness, or religion) that might get them stigmatized in their community. Yet with FOISA in place, it's likely that someone who wants to host an anonymous site about personal experiences with mental illness won't do it. Why? Because he or she might inadvertently do something that infringes copyright - like, say, post an informational video about Prozac - and get slammed with huge fines. A critic of big business might have the same fear. What if Nike goes after that person for trademark infringement because he or she's criticizing the company? It's not like these things don't happen all the time.