Take a look at this article in the London Times today about a court case in New York that forced Google to reveal the name of an anonymous blogger. The blogger is now suing Google for invasion of her privacy.

I'm of two minds about the whole thing. On the one hand, I believe very strongly in freedom of speech, and I believe that freedom should include some degree of freedom to be anonymous. Many things simply go unsaid because people who have a voice to say them are too frightened of the repercussions. I think of the recent upheaval in Iran in which protesters resorted to Twitter feeds to get their message out, putting themselves in real danger. If all of those folks had revealed their true identities, many more of them would be in jail than already are. Many more would have been killed.

So too in the Church do we see some of the fruits of anonymous speech. Recent scandals in the Orthodox Church in America and in the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese in North America were long addressed by anonymous writers at Orthodox Christians for Accountability before they were ever able to be addressed openly by hierarchs and other church leaders (and many kudos to Metropolitan Jonah for changing the score on that, at least for the OCA).

On the other hand, the bible says very clearly, "Let your yes be yes and your no be no" (Matthew 5:37, James 5:12). There are many people who hide behind their anonymity, using it as a smokescreen from which to launch vulgar and hurtful attacks on people. Clearly that's the situation with this woman in the New York case who was going out of her way to frivolously defame people. Reputations can be tarnished forever by such things, or worse. Having been on the receiving end of the occassional helping anonymous vitriol, I can see the need for creating recourse for victims of slander and abuse. I sometimes wonder how much calmer our debates in the Anglican Communion would be if everyone was forced to stop blogging for just a few weeks.

But is it really the government's place to be forcing companies like Google to reveal private information? Couldn't that backfire and result in people simply feeding Google with bogus information? What do you all think?