Exhibit A against hosting comments

[sigma7]

A local judge, the district attorney and the Kansas University police department are being roundly criticized by First Amendment advocates for a search warrant that sought access to online subscriber files of the Journal-World.

On Dec. 10, an investigator with KU’s Office of Public Safety delivered a search warrant to the Journal-World demanding access to the newspaper’s computer servers. The search warrant — applied for by the office of public safety, reviewed by the Douglas County district attorney’s office, and issued by Douglas County District Judge Stephen Six — was seeking information about the identity of an individual who had posted anonymous comments on ljworld.com, the newspaper’s Web site.

Investigators were seeking the identity of a poster with the screen name a2thek, who had posted comments related to articles about a Kansas University student who was found dead in an Oliver Hall dorm room. The poster had made comments indicating the death was heroin-related.

Anyone else disheartened by the fact that the police are now putting this much effort into investigating anonymous online comments? This tells me either they have nothing else to go on, or that they just have no idea of the mass of babbling brook of the Internet...

Comments

[motteditor.livejournal.com]

Wow. That's kind of sad, if only because I know how quickly potentially libelous comments go up on mcall.com the second an article is posted. Granted, I didn't look at the comment, but if that's all the police have to go on...

[jerrygarciuh.livejournal.com]

If the person indicated they had first hand knowledge bearing on a homicide investigation I say they did the right thing.

[taelech.livejournal.com]

Is speech more protected because it is on the internet? No, it is not. If I post under some nom-de-guerre that someone was killed and I mentioned a fact that only the police and someone involved know, yeah I expect the police to use all of thier authority to find out who I am. That is thier job. As long as the warrant was specific as to what they were searching for and where they could search, there is no violation of privacy. Saying that they are "putting this much effort into investigating anonymous online comments" is like calling a hit-and-run homocide investigation a waste of resources trying to catch a speeder.

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

Eh. I've waded through seas of online comments on news stories, and I can count the number of meaningful comments on one hand. If I thought there were any signal in the noise, I could understand asking the newspaper to cooperate (which the J-W has, in the past), but I just invariably expect these blatherings to be all mouth and trousers.