This seems, to me, an utterly malignant attack on anonymity, which is a protected constitutional right. It's the idea that every internet packet needs to be tied back to some verified identity. We're in frog-boiling territory with this garbage.
(The courts have "recognized relatively strong First Amendment presumptions on behalf of purveyors of anonymous speech, especially for those that are statements of opinions rather than obvious falsehoods, while recognizing that government sometimes has the right to identify such speakers when they have used their platforms to harass, engage in slander or sexual predation, make true threats, or allow foreign governments to influence U.S. elections")
There is a right to express political opinions, but anonymity is a privilege, not a right.
https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/anony...
And the modern Court explicitly declared that a Constitutional right to privacy does not exist, and one cannot have anonymity without privacy, so no.
Precedent is set by the majority, not the dissent.
> but no decisions that explicitly declare a Constitutional right to anonymity.
Weird then that there are several decisions striking down laws that violate the right to anonymous speech?
> And the modern Court explicitly declared that a Constitutional right to privacy does not exist, and one cannot have anonymity without privacy
One cannot refuse to turn over one's papers and effects in the absence of probable cause without privacy either.
Consider the possibility that there could be a right to anonymous speech without a right to anonymous practice of medicine. A universal right to privacy would require both. Just because it isn't both doesn't mean it's neither.
Yes. I believe a right to privacy once existed, but it was nullified as it formed the basis of the case for Roe V. Wade. As a result even the Fourth Amendment is weakened because it must be interpreted in the light of a right to privacy no longer existing.
What I'm trying to put forth is that the assumptions you're working under are no longer valid and we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater.
It was kind of the other way around. There is clearly no explicit right to abortion in the constitution, so to find one it would have to be implicit, but the Court in Roe wanted to find one, so they made one up. The reasoning was something like, the constitution implies there is a general right to privacy and laws against abortion violate it. The people who liked the result were then stuck trying to defend its inconsistent reasoning for 50 years, because the same logic would cause all kinds of other laws to be a violation of the same right. Obvious example would be drug prohibition; government invading your privacy by trying to control what you put into your own body. Same logic as Roe.
But Roe was never actually extended to any of that stuff, so overturning it didn't re-enable drug prohibition after it was struck down, since it was (inconsistently) never struck down to begin with.
The cases having to do with anonymous speech are independent and use entirely different logic. The general idea is that people are deterred from speaking (chilling effects) if people can associate what they have to say with a physical person who can then be harassed for expressing an unpopular opinion. It doesn't have any of the same problems because there is no First Amendment right to morphine, which they could ban outright under the same justification as they ban heroin, so having to show your ID to get morphine isn't deterring you from exercising your right to free speech.
The closest the government comes to prohibiting an opinion is copyright, but even then you can restate the opinion in your own words, and when an exact quote is necessary to make your point it's fair use specifically because it would otherwise violate free speech.
There's been multiple attempts to do this. Via KOSA and a few others lately in our Congress. PR friendly candidates like Duckworth have been trying to walk this through the system.