Tim May wrote:

Nathan Zook wrote:

...

I believe, therefore, that both the court and the dissent bode poorly for anonymous encrypted mail.

But anonymous handbills are quite common, posted all over the place here in my home town, and the Supreme Court ruled quite properly that identities are not required for speech.

I too was concerned by the strong dissent in the anonymous handbill case posted to the net, largely because I live in a country where we have inherited the odious British practice of requiring newspapers and other published material (such as handbills) to carry the name of the printer and the sponsoring organisation (or sumpin' like that...). Its contemporary significance is supposed to be as a control for defamation (yes, we still have strong defamation laws -- good thing too, IMHO, and something cryto/ anonymity may or may not render moot): which is to say turning every publisher and printer into a censor. [Even more bizarrely, the law requires newspaper proprietors and editors to swear certain documents and deliver them to the High Court every year...] Of course, I have never heard of this particular piece of legislation being invoked to prosecute someone who hasn't complied, and I've never heard of anyone complying. Nevertheless, it is on the books. It seems to me that it would only take a minor amendment to the US law on the identification of periodicals that are posted (notice the colophons [?] in all those newspapers and magazines) to apply to all publications... A couple of extra words in the definition section and away we go. (It's not a freedom of speech issue, it's an environmental issue -- all those handbills cluttering up the landfills... And it would only be fair to treat the denizens of the information superhypeway equally...). Things ain't half as safe as you might think. D.