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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Most of the Founders published under pseudonyms, even after the Revolution. Hamilton, Madison, Jay, Franklin - all had pseudonyms for their political writings. The Federalist papers were signed "Publius". What Franklin did was in no way unusual for that group.

In the US, anonymous speech is considered a core part of free expression, and is treated as a First Amendment right. That's a US perspective, stemming from US history. EU rights as to anonymous speech are weaker, and UK rights are weaker still. China has no right to anonymous speech at all.

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> That's a US perspective, stemming from US history. EU rights as to anonymous speech are weaker,

It's interesting that on one hand you're right, in the US, anonymous speech receives near-absolute protection. In the EU, it's more of a "qualified right" than so absolute. But, on the other hand, in our modern age, EU seems better at defending against mandating backdoors or weakening end-to-end encryption violates the right to privacy (2024 Podchasov v. Russia), while the US is seemingly going the other way of adding more backdoors and weakening E2E encryption.

So yes, on paper it seems like the US likes anonymous speech more than the EU, but in practice, it seems like the US is doing less to actually protect anonymous speech than the EU.

US free speech is qualified too - just in different ways.

And even when free speech is protected, it doesn’t stop you receiving the consequences log being arrested or losing your job and home.

I feel like we're talking about different things here. I understand "free speech does not mean free of consequence", so if your employer doesn't like your opinions, you can get fired, that's all fine and dandy.

But why you add that someone could be arrested for free speech? The whole point of free speech, at least for me, is that the government cannot arrest you for that, even if all the people around you see you as despicable or whatever. What is "free speech" for you actually?

People get arrested and fined for speech quite a lot in the US. I guess that’s just a consequence

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2026/03/23/supre...

https://english.elpais.com/usa/2025-03-17/arrest-of-pro-pale...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/feb/...

Indeed, that's why people sometimes say the US doesn't have free speech. But when people say that, they often get attacked, because duh, it says right there in the first amendment that it does! That's why they would instead say things like "the US has exceptions to free speech" or "the US doesn't have unqualified free speech" even though the truth is "the US doesn't have free speech"

Could you give examples of the US adding backdoors and weakening end-to-end encryption? I'll give you the almost-certain weakening of proposed crypto standards, and Clinton-era export controls, but I don't think I've seen any movement in that direction recently. The most successful attempts statutorily seem to be in the UK and the US.

Also: the European Court of Human Rights, as a non-EU institution, doesn't have an enforcement mechanism, so I'm not sure it's a good example to give in defending against such proposals. For instance, Russia declined to respect that decision, and I don't think it's had much effect on the UK's backdoor regime.

> Could you give examples of the US adding backdoors and weakening end-to-end encryption?

Do you really need examples of this? There are countless of them, some programs you cannot have missed are PRISM, STATEROOM and BULLRUN but there are more of them too.

I must say I find it interesting you say "cannot have missed" as I never heard of stateroom or bullrun before

I guess not everyone read through the Snowden "revelations" back in 2013: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_disclosures

> PRISM is a code name for a program under which the United States National Security Agency (NSA) collects internet communications from various U.S. internet companies - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM

> STATEROOM is the code name of a highly secretive signals intelligence collection program involving the interception of international radio, telecommunications and Internet traffic - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stateroom_(surveillance_progra...

> Bullrun (stylized BULLRUN) is a clandestine, highly classified program to crack encryption of online communications and data - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullrun_(decryption_program)

Thanks, I did read articles about it back then, but while PRISM was mentioned always and everywhere, none of those I read mentioned the other ones, or if they did, just as an aside.

So none of these are mandated backdoors, or weakening end-to-end encryption. They're examples of the intelligence services pursuing signals collection. Mandated backdoors would be something like the the United States' (as far as we know) failed attempts to compel companies to insert code to allow third parties to enter and read their communications, or the UK's (as far as we know) long-postponed attempts to add ghost devices to Apple and Meta's e2e communication systems.

I'm not so much asking as a gotcha, as modern examples of this kind of backdoor (or published encryption weaknesses) would be a big deal. I realise that there are many other tactics that states, especially the US, pursue that undermine privacy online. These just seemed weirdly specific to projects that the US has, in fact, failed to pull off for years: compelled insertion of code, and deliberately weakened encryption.

(ObContext: I worked at EFF during the Snowden revelations, and worked on understanding the impact of PRISM, and Bullrun specifically.)

Don't worry. They're still weakening crypto standards today, hand in hand with the UK. [0]

[0] https://blog.cr.yp.to/20251004-weakened.html

Surely everyone knows Dual_EC_DRBG, the CLOUD Act, and National Security Letters?

Europeans use American iPhones and Android bc they wouldn’t add a backdoor.

Didn’t the UK want a backdoor added?

Anybody who feels that their communications are secure on their mobile devices is deluded. There are countless access methods at many levels, even in the US.

There are laws in every country (including the US) to ensure that communications can be monitored when such monitoring is "authorized."

The US seems to generally take the approach that everything must be absolutely protected from the government, while European countries are fine with delegating things to the government and regulating things, and putting all the protections on the government itself, instead. It hasn't always worked well and may turn out to be naïve, but so has the US way.

It's a bit like spreading your eggs between many ordinary baskets, or putting them all in one basket but making that basket as strong as you can. Neither one is obviously a better approach.

In the UK you do have certain 'moral rights' with respect to a piece of writing you've made, and one of them is essentially a right to anonymity/pseudonymity for that work. Somewhat notably JK Rowling won a case about it when the books she released under a pen name were revealed to be hers.

Anonymous speech separates ideas from the reputation of the person stating them. It forces the reader to consider the ideas themselves openly, without using the heuristic of “which party does this person belong to” or “do I like this person”. There are some ideas that are not popular but need to be heard, and anonymous speech allows those ideas to be heard without the speaker being tarred and feathered for their supposed wrongthink. Anyone who seeks to erode anonymous speech is no friend of liberty.

From the UK are bill of rights from 1689 has a clause called free speech in it. When you actually look at it's free speech... for parliament and parliamentarians from the king, Citizens get no such right. We have a clause that is the right to bear arms, when you look at it predicated on being the a protestant and parliament allowing you. No one actually reads these things or the history surrounding it here because when you do you quickly realize how pathetic are 'glorious revolution' is how weak the the brave people petitioning a foreign king to come over to overthrow a king they did not like because he was a catholic and wanted more tolerance for Catholics.

Not the biggest fan of where America is at the moment but American founding fathers are some of the most impressive people and the American revolution is incredible, where as are revolution is one of the saddest affairs in human history and it's continuation is a disaster in my opinion.

I pray there will be a light at the end of the tunnel soon, but I doubt it is possible without major political change.

Not being rude just trying to understand, but when you say 'are' do you mean 'our'?

Yes I also don't like the language of my country, 'are' sounds like 'our' so I mix them up, I apologize, at least you know I am not an LLM!

No need to apologize, just wanted to clarify for understanding :)

Have there been any new laws in the UK since 1689?

Of course that is not my point. Yes we have the humans rights act Etc that provides rights, but much much later and contested. My primary point is that the bill of rights is one of the important parts of are constitution where as human rights or any other documents is not constitutional.

I also think are revolution is not particularly rousing and that freedom of speech and such is still very tenuous.

The UK doesn't have a separate constitution, just a bunch of laws, some of which grant rights.

It's more complicated then that it has written portion making up many documents going back to magna carta (in actual fact basically only 4 clauses barely survive) and the Glorious revolution is the real written document that actually supports the sovereignty of parliament, and a lot of flimflam that makes up supposed ancient rights given to parliament starting with magna carta.

I do not hold said constitution in high esteem.

The basis of the UK system is that parliament has infinite rights. It's allowed to pass a bill saying all police officers must try to murder the king, and then they must. It won't pass that because politicians won't agree to pass it, because they're scared of the extra-parliamentary consequences, but nothing in the law stops them.

The sole check against these infinite rights is not electing morons. Doesn't seem to work very well.

Yes I would disagree with your framing of you hypothetical not least because parliament did kill the king (Charles I), then once the lord protectorate was over and the restoration conspired successfully with a foreign king to over throw the current king and then wrote a document deciding who can and can not be king which has applied to all king and queens so far. Parliament wants the king as a figure head so they can hide behind something, formally it's not Parliaments government by it's self but the monarchs, though the monarch may not raise an army or really have any power outside parliament but still the monarchs government and should things go badly they may simply blame the figure head. Once you see the pattern you will see it lots of time's in are history maybe other histories ;) .

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