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Feb
25
Two stories to note:
1) I’ve been following a story about someone who is trying to force Google to provide information that will unveil an anonymous blogger, Orthomom, because the person seeking the information feels that she’s been defamed by comments on that blog. Because I stumbled upon this lawsuit, I’ve had a hard time getting caught up. But after Jack’s Shack left a comment on this post, I delved into Jack and that brought me to Jameel’s blog and this summary post about the lawsuit (if you want to know more about Jameel – who isn’t really named Jameel, you can go here to learn more about that).
The situation involves a Long Island (Lawrence) school board member who has sued this well-known but anonymous Orthodox Jewish blogger for a comment left on the blogger’s blog, though very obviously not written by the blogger. It’s a circuitous story which, for newcomers, Jameel makes understandable.
How well-known can an Orthodox Jewish anonymous blogger be? The New York Times referenced Orthomom as a news source in September 2006 (Times Select but you can get a preview free if you go to NYT’s search) for its story about tensions in Orthomom’s community on Long Island due to the increase in Orthodox families in the five towns area.
Here’s a recent local (to Long Island) MSM news story that also describes what’s going on. From it:
Hofstra University Law Professor Eric M. Freedman said Greenbaum’s action of seeking Orthomom’s identify has little to no chance of moving forward since derogatory language against a public official like a school board member is protected under the first amendment. Professor Freedman, an expert on the First Amendment and other civil liberty issues, said in order to seek the identity to pursue a lawsuit there needs to be a chance that the grievance would be successful which is not the case in Greenbaum’s action.
“If the courts are behaving appropriately this filing will go absolutely nowhere,” said Professor Freedman. “If she knew who Orthomom was and sued her directly it would be thrown out.”
It could happen here, that’s all I’m saying. Although the main issue of the lawsuit has to do with the plaintiff Pamela Greenbaum’s desire to unveil the anonymous Orthomom, it also has to do with people speaking out for and against public funds being used for private schools. Free speech. Is a school board member enough of a public figure to allow people to besmirch them anonymously when blog debates over how to use public funds for schools occur?
These issues are only going to multiply. So we need to watch and see what’s happening. And it involves big kahunas like Google who hold our identities.
2) I can’t believe that not a single blog I follow has written about the 22 year old Egyptian law student who was sentenced by an Egyptian court to four years in prison because his writings are interpreted by the court as insults to Hosni Mubarak and Islam. Maybe I’m not following the right blogs, or I missed it.
More from The Guardian here.
What’s most interesting to me is the following:
Two US congressmen have previously expressed deep concern about the arrest of Nabil and called for the charges to be dropped.
“The Egyptian government’s arrest of Mr Amer simply for displeasure over writings on the personal weblog raises serious concern about the level of respect for freedoms in Egypt,” representatives Trent Franks and Barney Frank, said in a joint letter to Egypt’s ambassador to the US, Nabil Fahmy.
The Bush administration has not commented on Nabil’s trial, despite its past criticism of the arrests of Egyptian rights activists.
Guess our government doesn’t want to increase its appearance as hypocritical beyond where it already is, hoping to preserve the possibility that it may one day want to do the same thing to American bloggers?
Amnesty International has started a campaign called Irrepressible.info. Go take a look and think about how you can contribute. This is a nonpartisan issue when it comes to blogs.
By Jill Miller Zimon at 4:55 pm February 25th, 2007 in Politics
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15 Responses to “Bloggers, commenters in trouble – but could easily be you or me”
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It’ll be interesting to see how this case pans out.
Maybe I should hunt down the person who commented that I’m a “stupid nigger” today on one of my posts.
Nah…I’ll just let God take care of him!
Happy Day,
Paula
I hear you – I do. I’ve left up anti-Semitic comments too, as much as I hate to do it. I won’t tolerate them however if they’re totally off-topic. That gets a warning that I’ll remove them and then if they come back with the same crap, I do remove them.
Free speech sucks sometimes but it’s what holds us together too I think.
Shalom Jill,
You know, I was going to write about the Egyptian blogger, but didn’t because it was all over the big blogs and I just didn’t feel that I had anything new to add to the converasation.
B’shalom,
Jeff
Ah! More evidence that when I say I don’t read big box blogs, you can know I really don’t.
I was wanting to post about it but just didn’t get to it until I finally got to this Pam Greenbaum-Orthomom suit thing. Seemed like a good two-fer.
Who’s behind the mask? Enquiring minds want to know. The Lone Ranger had the same problem.
There are too many politicians who feel certain kinds of speech shouldn’t be protected. No wonder — it’s a threat to their powerbase. Mubarak is a classic example. So is Saudi Arabia’s Royal Family.
Thanks for the mention. This happens to be an incredibly frustrating situation to be in, because even though the comments were left by an anonymous commenter, and even though the comment (calling the public official in question a bigot for various views she expressed) was a matter of opinion, and thus protected speech, I still have to spend time and money to defend myself and my commenters in court.
Regarding Google, they actually (as I was surprised to discover) have a policy of not contesting these types of suits or motions at all. They would have handed any info as to my identity over without even examining the case on merit (it has just about none) had I myself not chose to fight the Order to Show Cause.
As you noted, Jill, it could happen to any of us. I have actually received a few e-mails from anonymous bloggers in the past week, informing me that this situation I am in has already changed the way they blog – and I am not talking about bloggers who make it their business to defame others. They feel that the specter of Google rolling over on them the minute a motion is filed to be very chilling of their free speech.
Yankee – thanks for reading and commenting. Fear of the unknown and an inability to trust (due to being burned by people we thought we could distrust) are a bigger danger to making this world a nice place to live than pretty much anything else I can think of. Sadly, the current U.S. administration thrives on making us feel as though we cannot trust one another and should not trust one another, when so many times, it turns out to be them we cannot trust. It’s a terrible, terrible cycle.
Thanks for reading and commenting, Orthomom. I’m actually fascinated by the underlying issues but that’s for another day, or email to you.
I’ve been badmouthing, I mean, blogging about Google and its policies about handing over info for a while – the first time perhaps when they rolled over in China. Am I still using Google? Yeah, I am. That’s not very consistent, I know. I’m not sure what our choices are.
But at a minimum, we can be raising these issues about their conduct.
On another “another” note, I know you haven’t read my blog much (I assume) but those who have know that there’s not much love lost between me and anonymous commenters because I’ve got issues with their coming and going when it’s all nasty ad hominem contributing nothing to the dialogue kind of stuff.
I understand the need to allow it, but I don’t particularly like it when the ability to be anonymous is misused. Renegade Rebbetzin has always been a blog I’ve pointed to as an example of why someone would be anonymous. I would say that your blog is another example.
Ms. Greenbaum is wrong on this – no matter how angry and upset and humiliated and frankly sad she may even be over it. I can empathize with all those feelings.
But a lawsuit is wrong, it’s just wrong.
Good luck to you. As a lawyer, I’m sorry that there even is a lawyer taking Greenbaum’s case.
OK, I’m going to assume that HaloScan once again ate one of my comments and assume that Jill didn’t moderate me out of existence.
My point about the OrthoMom case was that the discovery rules are pretty broad. The basic inquiry is whether the evidence sought might ultimately lead to admissible evidence. If I were representing the Plaintiff, I would argue that OrthoMom might know the identity or identifying information (like the source URL) of the anonymouse at issue, so I should be allowed to depose her.
Certainly the identity of Anon is admissible and is in fact indispensable for the plaintiff’s case. Since this is discovery from a third party (w/r/t Google, discovery from one third party against another) there is generally some balancing of the third party’s interest vs. that of the litigant.
And by the way, issues of privilege, opinion, the status of the plaintiff as a public figure and absence or presence of malice tend to be very fact specific. Which is to say that the judge will be loath to decide against discovery unless it is overwhelmingly, beyond a doubt clear that the plaintiff could not prevail no matter what evidence is discovered.
A new thought I had since attempting to post the above: If I were representing OrthoMom I would do the following. I would write up an agreement for a protective order keeping her identity under wraps in exchange for allowing a deposition. I would offer to the plaintiff (through plaintiff’s counsel) allowing the deposition in exchange for signing off on the order. She gets deposed, tells what she does or doesn’t know about Anon and goes on with her pseudonymous life.
From her comment above it sound like OrthoMom would rather fight it out on priciple, which is unfortunate. I’d have to do a lot of legal research to judge the likelihood of prevailing, but I’d hate to have a lot riding on a favorable outcome to her. Courts generally want litigation to be decided on facts and are quite generous with discovery requests. Right now she has a strong bargaining power, but once a judge rules that her interest in being anonymous doesn’t outweigh the plaintiff’s right to discovery, she loses much of her ability to control the outcome.
Hey Scott – NO idea where your first one went – Bloggerland.
Interesting perspective. Hmm. Did you read the complaint? I actually haven’t. If discovery were to go as you say it might, why couldn’t the plaintiff just get the info from Google – I would think since blogger is a Google tool, wouldn’t Google be able to reveal who wrote the anonymous commment as easily if not more easily than Orthomom? Not to mention, Orthomom isn’t the offending party to the plaintiff – the plaintiff is pissed off at the commenter (or feels defamed by the commenter).
So I would think that if there were other mechanisms through which plaintiff could uncover the ID of the commenter, then there would be no need to ID Orthomom.
As far as the depo suggestion, not bad – could it be just done through an interogatory, that would prevent revealing Orthomom’s ID? Again – if the issue is with the commenter, there have got to be ways to ID the commenter without IDing Orthomom – don’t you think??
Another thought (and hopefully the comment I just posted survived.) Another advantage of negotiating a deposition with a protection order is that if the suit is just a pretext to reveal OrthoMom’s secret identity, it will help smoke that out. If Greenbaum digs her heels in and insists that nothing short of the right to trumpet OM’s name to the world will suffice, the judge is going to look askance at the whole thing.
I think I just lost a comment to bloggerland as well. To recap:
I can clear the question up right here. Blogger does not provide me with any information regarding anonymous commenters. Any info that might exist as to their identities resides in Google’s files.
Hi Jill – Thanks for the visit (and link). I will have to catch up on your blog…
Regards from Muqataland (in the hills of the Shomron)
–Jameel
Thanks back for the visit, Jameel and be safe.
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