Posted 02 Jan 2011
Learning how to make anonymous comments on a website is extremely important to preserving our fundamental human rights and promoting the public good. Anonymous speech is pretty important. Political critique and commentary, reporting crimes, and many other situations demand the ability to speak anonymously to preserve truth, promote safety, and protect rights. Anonymity also promotes the spread of the best ideas because the idea is not contaminated with the reputation of the speaker.
Blog comments are the new public pamphlet. Instead of publishing a piece of paper, people post articles and comments to the articles.
You might need to make a anonymous comments:
1. if you are in the military and want to leave a comment in support of Julian Assange, Wikileaks, Private Bradley Manning, or many other important topics deemed not appropriate for the military;
2. if you want to leave a comment that would be classified as a characteristic of a domestic terrorist such as citing the US Constitution;
3. if you want to make a comment criticizing Israel, criticizing US foreign policy, or supporting Saudi Arabia, Islam, Muslims, Palestinians, the Qu'ran, or Iran;
4. when making a comment contrary to the political, religious or scientific beliefs, opinions and policies of friends, family members, co-workers, employers, or others in the community;
5. when making any comment that might incriminate you in illegal activity.
It is imperative that there be a way to comment anonymously. So here is how to leave a comment anonymously.
When you leave a comment, the website administrator can usually see the IP address of the computer that left the comment. This can be used to trace the comment back to your computer unless you are using a proxy server. So anytime you want to make a truly anonymous comment, go through a trusted proxy like Witopia, Cryptohippie or Identity Cloaker.
The internet is full of pseudonyms. You can use the same pseudonym many times to build up a reputation behind the pseudonym, like Thomas Paine or Benjamin Franklin did, or you can choose a new and exciting handle every time you comment.
Some websites, like HowToVanish.com, don't make you register to comment. On these sites you can put sown any bogus email address with an "@" and a ".com". Things like "[email protected]" or "[email protected]" will work just fine.
Some sites make you register or log in before commenting. You can set up an anonymous free email account all over the place. Do that using the proxy server, use the anonymous email address, and never use it again, except maybe to comment on the same website.
Learning how to make anonymous comments on a website helps protect your privacy, fundamental rights and promotes the public good. You can find other tips for protecting the privacy of your communications in the book How To Vanish. Now that you know how to comment anonymously on websites, use your powers for good!
