Comment by krapp
1 year ago
There is no right to anonymously express political opinions.
There is a right to express political opinions, but anonymity is a privilege, not a right.
1 year ago
There is no right to anonymously express political opinions.
There is a right to express political opinions, but anonymity is a privilege, not a right.
Then how do you explain these?
https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/anony...
I see controversy and a lot of dissent among Justices, but no decisions that explicitly declare a Constitutional right to anonymity.
And the modern Court explicitly declared that a Constitutional right to privacy does not exist, and one cannot have anonymity without privacy, so no.
> I see controversy and a lot of dissent among Justices,
Precedent is set by the majority, not the dissent.
> but no decisions that explicitly declare a Constitutional right to anonymity.
Weird then that there are several decisions striking down laws that violate the right to anonymous speech?
> And the modern Court explicitly declared that a Constitutional right to privacy does not exist, and one cannot have anonymity without privacy
One cannot refuse to turn over one's papers and effects in the absence of probable cause without privacy either.
Consider the possibility that there could be a right to anonymous speech without a right to anonymous practice of medicine. A universal right to privacy would require both. Just because it isn't both doesn't mean it's neither.
2 replies →
The converse would have to be true then, that the government has the legitimate power to intimidate people to not express their opinion. This does not seem like a legitimate power for government to have, but now I need to be careful whether I express it at all.
Laws against slander, libel, intimidation, conspiracy, perjury, etc are based upon the government's power to intimidate people from expressing opinions. It is a felony in the US to express the opinion that the President should be killed. Speech in the US has never been a free for all.
Those are not opinions, they're provably false statements or threats. Conspiracy is essentially committing a crime as a group rather than an individual, and the statements are the evidence of the crime rather than the crime in itself.
The closest the government comes to prohibiting an opinion is copyright, but even then you can restate the opinion in your own words, and when an exact quote is necessary to make your point it's fair use specifically because it would otherwise violate free speech.