Lyrissa Barnett Lidsky

Silencing John Doe: Defamation & Discourse in Cyberspace

John Doe has become a popular defamation defendant as corporations and their officers bring defamation suits for statements made about them in Internet discussion fora. These new suits are not even arguably about recovering money damages but instead are brought for symbolic reasons — some worthy, some not so worthy. If the only consequence of these suits were that Internet users were held accountable for their speech, the suits would be an unalloyed good. However, these suits threaten to suppress legitimate criticism along with intentional and reckless falsehoods, and existing First Amendment law doctrines are not responsive to the threat these suits pose to Internet discourse. Although the constitutional privilege for opinion holds promise as a solution to this problem, the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence provides little assurance that the privilege can protect the “robust, uninhibited, and wide-open nature” of Internet discourse without giving Internet speakers free license to harm the reputation of others. Therefore, this Article attempts to articulate a theory that justifies protecting John Doe and suggests the steps courts should take to adapt the existing opinion privilege to the unique context of cyberspace.

OnionDNS: A Seizure-Resistant Top-Level Domain

The Domain Name System (DNS) provides the critical service of mapping canonical names to IP addresses. Recognizing this, a number of parties have increasingly attempted to perform “domain seizures” on targets by having them delisted from DNS. Such operations often occur without providing due process to the owners of these domains, a practice made potentially worse by recent legislative proposals. We address this problem by creating OnionDNS, an anonymous top-level domain and resolution service for the Internet. Our solution relies on the establishment of a hidden service running DNS within Tor and uses a variety of mechanisms to ensure a high-performance architecture with strong integrity guarantees for resolved records. We then present our anonymous domain registrar and detail the protocol for securely transferring the service to another party. Finally, we also conduct both performance and legal analyses to further demonstrate the robustness of this approach. In so doing, we show that the delisting of domains from DNS can be mitigated in an efficient and secure manner.