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Wednesday, October 02, 2002

By Michael A. Fuoco, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

In a case that could have free speech ramifications for the Internet, the American Civil Liberties Union asked the Pennsylvania Supreme Court yesterday to protect the anonymity of cyberspace critics of public officials.

In a legal brief appealing an Allegheny County court ruling in a defamation case, the national and Pittsburgh offices of the ACLU asked the court to require plaintiffs in such lawsuits to prove they have suffered economic harm before they can learn the identities of their critics.

"The importance of anonymous speech can't be overstated," said Witold Walczak, Pittsburgh ACLU executive director and one of the attorneys for the defendant, who is known as "John Doe" to protect his identity. "All you need to do is look at all the important political and literary documents published pseudonymously, whether it was Thomas Paine's 'Common Sense' or 'The Federalist Papers' or Mark Twain.

"Unless the freedom to criticize anonymously is safeguarded, a vital democratizing element of the Internet will be lost."

Thousands of similar cases have been filed across the country in an effort to unmask cyber critics but the Pittsburgh-based case is the first to make it as far as a state Supreme Court.

"We're definitely on track to make law," Walczak said. "The question is whether it will be good or bad."

The case, now more than 3 years old, centers on the attempts by Pennsylvania Superior Court Judge Joan Orie Melvin to learn the identity of "GrantStreet99," a cyberspace critic of city and county officials.

Melvin sued the anonymous Web gossip after he posted a comment online alleging she had been involved in "misconduct" in lobbying then-Gov. Tom Ridge to appoint a local attorney to a county court judicial vacancy. Melvin has denied intervening with Ridge's office on behalf of anyone seeking a judicial appointment.

After the criticisms of Melvin were posted, she complained to Internet service provider America Online, which shut down the GrantStreet99 site. The author then relocated to a computer company based in Canada. Since the end of 1999, the site ceased to be updated and finally vanished from the Internet.

Melvin didn't succeed in her first attempt to unmask GrantStreet99 when a defamation lawsuit filed in AOL's home state of Virginia was dismissed with the help of the Virginia ACLU.

In November 2000, an Allegheny County Common Pleas Court judge ruled Melvin had the right to learn her critic's name. The ACLU appealed to the Pennsylvania Superior Court. That court's ruling that the order was not appealable was in turn appealed by the ACLU to the state Supreme Court, which agreed to review the case. That resulted in yesterday's filing.

Also yesterday, AOL filed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting John Doe's position. Public Citizen, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Electronic Privacy Information Center also will do the same, the ACLU said. Those three public interest groups and the ACLU are part of a coalition that provides legal representation to anonymous writers on the Internet.