The Anonymous Hunters: corporate critics and whistleblowers beware
Have you ever bad-mouthed a big company in an internet comments thread? If so, the Wragge and Co. law firm of Birmingham, UK may be hot on your tail (provided the comment is vitriolic enough to provoke the company to spend money, one assumes) – they’ve just announced a new legal “task force” for tracking down the identities of nefarious anonymous commenters [via TechDirt].
The Cyber Tracing team at Wragge & Co was set up to deal with what the law firm said was a rising problem with people making anonymous statements that defamed companies, and people sharing confidential information online.
And Wragge boasted the new team would ensure there was “nowhere to hide in cyberspace”.
(Yeah, right – good luck with selling that idea, guys. If it was coming from a team of Estonian teen hackers, I’d give it some credence. But from a handful of lawyers in Armani suits?)
The four-strong team at the Colmore Row firm is a combination of IT litigation and employment law specialists.
One of the members of the team said redundancies and other reorganisations caused by the recession meant the numbers of disgruntled employees looking to get their own back on employers or former employers was also on the rise.
Wonder why that might be… The article raises the United Airlines stock crash of 2001 as an example of the sort of misleading reportage that can have serious effects on a company, but it’s not exactly a logical leap to assume that whistleblowers and former employees and customers with legitimate axes to grind would be among the voices that certain corporations would very much love to sweep under the carpet, and the threat of unmasking anonymous reports might well prevent them from being made in such wide numbers. Business as usual for free speech here in the UK, then; they can’t legislate against it directly, but intimidation and ambiguity works just as well.
That said, the internet is pretty vast, and some of its denizens are smarter than others… and I suspect Wragge and Co’s fees for hunting down anonymous commenters will reflect those realities. It also remains to be seen how much they can achieve when working on sites hosted in countries where the jurisdiction isn’t so clear-cut, or sites like Wikileaks which are geared toward protecting their sources. What we can be sure of is that when lawyers can see a paycheck, there’s dirty laundry waiting to be washed… and we can expect the corporate (and political) world to wise up to the web pretty fast now that the full extent of its power is becoming apparent.
November 6th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
LOL
Free market require free information, otherwise they don’t work.
Cyber Tracing team at Wragge & Co of Birmingham, England you are total shite.
Losers.