The international press freedom group Reporters Without Borders published a handbook today entitled “The Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents”, describing in detail how to remain anonymous while publishing online. This is a wonderful resource for activists all over the world, especially in countries were dissent is not tolerated. Now, I’m not generally in favor of anonymity in a free speech environment, because I think that a person to whom an opinion is communicated has a right to know the context in which the opinion is held, because otherwise there’s no way to analyze the opinion’s truth. That said, I think that the right to express the opinion takes precedence over the obligation to contextualize it, and in cases where contextualization would lead to persecution, expression becomes a subversive act that requires anonymity to succeed (and, hopefully, lead towards the ideal situation in which contextualization would be safe).

See the press release.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 22nd, 2005 at 3:27 pm and is filed under Reasonable. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.