{"id":504273,"date":"2010-04-01T23:59:00","date_gmt":"2010-04-02T03:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techdirt.com\/articles\/20100329\/0145518759.shtml"},"modified":"2010-04-01T23:59:00","modified_gmt":"2010-04-02T03:59:00","slug":"israeli-supreme-court-says-there-is-no-legal-way-to-reveal-anonymous-commenters-online","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/504273","title":{"rendered":"Israeli Supreme Court Says There Is No Legal Way To Reveal Anonymous Commenters Online"},"content":{"rendered":"

Earlier this year, we wrote about a ruling in Israel that protected the anonymity<\/a> of an online commenter on free speech grounds, with the judge noting:<\/p>\n


\n“The good of online anonymity outweighs the bad, and it must be seen as a byproduct of freedom of speech and the right to privacy.”
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Michael Scott<\/a> now points us to another ruling in Israel, this time in the country’s Supreme Court that appears to go further (unless I’m misunderstanding Israeli law — which is entirely possible) in saying that there isn’t even a legal procedure to unveil anonymous commenters<\/a>:<\/p>\n


\nHon. Justice Eliezer Rivlin dismissed Mor’s petition and analysed the procedure to reveal anonymous posters. According to his ruling “it is an attempt to harness, prior to a legal proceeding, the justice system and a third party in order to conduct an inquiry which will lead to the revealing of a person committing a tort so that a civil suit could be filed against him. It is, de facto, an investigative-like procedure that the court is drafted to in a preliminary procedure in this way or another. This procedure is not trivial, it involves policy consideration and requires legislative regulation”. His decision rules, actually, that until a procedure will be legislated, petitions to reveal anonymous users may not be granted (and according to estimations, there is at least one daily request per ISP).
\n<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As the analysis at the link above suggests, this likely means that politicians will quickly draft legislation to create a procedure for unveiling anonymous commenters, but the court did warn that any such procedure should tread carefully:<\/p>\n


\nShattering the ‘illusion of anonymity’, in a reality where a user’s privacy feeling is a myth, may raise associations of a “big brother”. Such violation of privacy should be minimized. In adequate boundaries the anonymity shelters should be preserved as a part of the Internet Culture. You may say that anonymity makes the internet what it is, and without it the virtual freedom may be reduced.
\n<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Earlier this year, we wrote about a ruling in Israel that protected the anonymity of an online commenter on free speech grounds, with the judge noting: “The good of online anonymity outweighs the bad, and it must be seen as a byproduct of freedom of speech and the right to privacy.” Michael Scott now points […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-504273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=504273"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504273\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=504273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=504273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=504273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}