Anonymity, accountability & John Doe
Proceedings of the 1st annual conference on Information security curriculum development
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The rise of the Internet has created the opportunity for individuals inexpensively to publish their views on various issues to a wide audience. While this new avenue for expression is usually used for legitimate ends, it is also frequently used by individuals to disseminate defamatory or otherwise actionable statements under cover of anonymity. As a result, there has been in recent years a great deal of litigation brought by victims of such anonymous statements against the individuals responsible for those statements. A common theme in these so-called "John Doe cases" is that the plaintiff seeks to learn through discovery the identity of the anonymous defendant --- without which the plaintiff is effectively precluded from serving process or asserting its rights.This category of cases has attracted enormous public attention in both general interest and legal publications, substantial litigation resources from public-interest groups such as Public Citizen and the American Civil Liberties Union, and considerable academic, journalistic, and governmental interest. When these suits first became common in the late 1990s, internet service providers routinely identified defendants in response even to non-judicial subpoenas, often without giving the defendant an opportunity to oppose the discovery; even when courts received an opposition, the discovery was almost always granted, usually with little in the way of reasoned analysis. In the past approximately two years, however, opposition has mounted on First Amendment grounds and there has been a substantial shift to the other extreme, with courts erecting walls against disclosure, often in derogation of other core rights.While John Doe cases have thus suddenly become relatively common and have attracted considerable public interest, there has to date been little analysis at the appellate level of the appropriate legal standards to be applied. The first appellate court seriously to attempt to conduct such an analysis was the New Jersey Appellate Division, which on July 11, 2001, issued its decision in Dendrite International, Inc. v. John Doe, along with a companion decision in Immunomedics, Inc. v. Jean Doe. These decisions, which are likely to provide the starting point for much future John Doe analysis, are discussed in the following section.