On 5 Sep 2001, at 17:26, Declan McCullagh wrote:
[I'm not saying I believe these arguments, of course.]
Since a remailer, on the other hand does not exercise any independent editorial judgment about the content of the work, the burden should properly be on you to argue that a law restricting it is unconstitutional.
This is really crappy logic. Any law that restricts speech or the press is presumably unconstitutional.
A better analogy: Remailers are like a robotic Mailboxes Etc.-type service that opens a FedEx envelope and forwards the extracted contents to you at another address via FedEx.
Actually it's a really crappy analogy. Arguing that "it's kind of like this hypothetical thing that doesn't exist and therefore ought to be treated as I imagine this hypothetical thing would probably be treated if it did exist" is an incredibly poor use of the device of analogy.
But I know of no publisher who would publish a truly anonymous letter.
You're fucking kidding, right? Do you think "Ann Landers" and her ilk actually know the "true names" of all the morons who write in to her?
Newspapers and magazine request truenames. If given someone's truename, a publisher may anonymize the letter, but a subpoena or other legal means should be able to extract the information after the fact.
That's funny, just a week or two ago you were saying any ethical person in the journalistic profession should be willing to go to jail rather than compromise the identity of his sources. Someone who writes in a ltter is precluded from being a "source"? George
-Declan