Oh cool, as long as the government hasn't chosen to protect it, I guess free speech doesn't apply.
If so I have a tax return to sell you.
P.S. My cousin is a prince form Nigeria that might want to discuss a business opportunity with you let me know if you’re interested.
Is this really that hard? The Onion fakes documents all the time and claims to have quotes from police officers and government officials on a daily basis.
Free speech is the most essential of all freedoms, and you'd trade it away for a song and a dance out of sheer ignorance.
That said this isn't a criminal case and the state isn't prosecuting anyone. (Yet; I assume the person might be prosecuted at some point)
Free speech laws don't cover the distribution of child porn, for example. Are you saying that the government shouldn't restrict the distribution of child porn because it infringes on free speech?
I completely agree that it child porn exposes children to abuse and should be illegal, but it’s important to note how proponents of that medium argue for its legitimacy.
Distributing sexual images of someone without their consent is a clear crime against that person. Children can not consent.
This is what they always say. All of the exceptions get some reason why they don't count as free speech. Why can't this argument be used on both sides?
Are you really arguing there should never be any legs consequences for text/speech? If so, so many laws would no longer apply - fraud, harassment, false advertisement, perjury, racketeering... hell, you couldn't even convict someone of hiring a hit man to kill someone, because it was just words telling the guy to kill someone for money!
Fraud is a tort that involves several elements, with the ‘speech’ being merely one element.
Ditto with harassment.
To analogize, your comment is akin to the following:
Poster: We should have a right to use knives.
You: Murder by stabbing is not a right!
[edit] In short, you can lie all day long... it’s your right. It only becomes ‘fraud’ when (in most jurisdictions):
1. You make a misrepresentation,
2. About something material,
3. That you intended another to rely upon,
4. And which they did in fact rely upon,
5. And that reliance was reasonably justified,
6. And they suffered harm thereby,
7. And the harm was proximately caused by the statement.
If any element is missing, your free to engage in the conduct without interference by the govt.
Newspapers and Twitter users have no right to expect that anonymous statements made online or documents given to them for free are accurate or true. If they chose to publish defamatory articles based on their lack of due diligence, the civil liability rests with them.
This isn’t charging someone with lying in a tweet. This is someone who used twitter to contact people in order to commit a crime (or at least that is what is alleged in court)... they can use the law to attempt to find out who this user is.
I'll apologize if I have the details of the case wrong, but where is this supposed fraud? The only way I could see this being fraudulent is if (1) the private investigator being PAID for his investigatory services created the account and faked the document himself to continue getting paid for additional investigation or (2) the journalist being PAID for her journalistic work created fake documents so that she could publish them and accrue the financial benefits of authoring a juicy story.
But if whysprtech is anyone else on the planet—a conspiratorial kook, a troll, or even a political operative trying to embarass people—no fraud has been committed and there is no basis for unmasking him. The people responsible for the defamation aren't random anonymous internet trolls, but publishing companies who make money purporting to report the rigorously validated truth, but are actually lazy, naive, and gullible.
Your are confusing lying under oath with the crime of perjury.
The false statement, standing alone, is not actionable... it is merely one of several elements that make up the crime of perjury.
For example, 'right to a fair trial by a jury of their peers' means that judges and the rest of them must be organised, paid for, etc.
If you are willing to recognize that society has had an incorrect view of rights in the past, you must recognize that there is a standard beyond society to appeal to.
Unless you want to invoke divine will as that "standard beyond society," humanity and its arbitrary social constructs are all you have available to deal with, and some problems can't be reduced to objective and absolute terms as a result.
You could invoke "nature" but nature doesn't recognize rights. No creature has a natural right to food, safety or property. Nature engages in warfare, cruelty, violence, rape and slavery with abandon, and without even the pretext of morality. Even anarchists wouldn't want to live in a world governed entirely by natural law.
A slave will appeal to society because society has the power. But if the society does not listen to the appeals of the slave, we can still judge that the slave is correct and the society is wrong. And that judgement is not arbitrary.
The same grounds that we use to argue against slavery today. Just because the society around you doesn't believe certain rights are real doesn't mean you can't personally buy into them. "Rights are a societal construct" doesn't mean that nobody has a right to believe different things from society. It just means that our conception of rights derive from societal consensus, not a higher power or objective source, and conversely that there is no higher power or objective source we can invoke to override society's mores.
> If you are willing to recognize that society has had an incorrect view of rights in the past, you must recognize that there is a standard beyond society to appeal to.
No, you can just criticize them using the today's moral standards. You can be sufficiently committed to your moral standards to be willing to impose them on other people without simultaneously believing that those moral standards are a objective property of the natural universe.
Hume's is-ought guillotine is a thing. A normative statement does not magically become an positive fact just because that normative statement is an extremely strongly held (e.g. slavery is bad). The notion of inalienable rights is a rhetorical trick that lazily conflates the normative and the positive.
Unless society doesn't recognize your right to believe differently, no?
The is-ought problem does not rule out the existence of normative facts. It simply states that they can't be proven by positive facts. You seem to be trying to rule out the existence of normative facts by appealing to positive facts.
Having an opinion doesn't make that opinion an objective fact!