From: IN%"liberty@gate.net" "Jim Ray" 17-SEP-1996 02:14:28.24 To: IN%"cypherpunks@toad.com" CC: Subj: Judge Kozinski Responds
The statement about anonymous remailers was largely accurate. I'm not sure that the fact that you (or some of your associates) are willing to block people from getting anonymous mail is a sufficient safeguard. Some may not be, and it only takes one or two who do not adhere to the code to make life miserable for the rest of us.
We agree about the need for privacy, but I'm not at all sure why the right to send messages anonymously trumps the recipient's right to know who's addressing him. Getting an anonymous message--even one that is not harassing or threatening--is an invasion of my privacy. As for
The essential problem with this viewpoint is that the right the receiver has is to ignore the message. If he doesn't want to receive anonymous messages, he should set up a mail filtration program that will do a good enough job of filtering them out. Spammed messages can be countered with Internet charging (neccessary anyway for the long-term health of the Net), as can mailbombing. That leaves individual messages that may be offensive (including, apparantly in his case, offensive by virtue of being anonymous), but if offensiveness meant someone should have the right to stop the emission of speech, that would mean the Christian Coalition would have the right to stop speech on evolution, the PC types would have the right to stop speech on genetic differences in intelligence (see Stephen Jay Gould for them on this issue - even leaving aside racial questions which are separate from the individual ones), etcetera. -Allen