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.