I'm not recommending German or Chinese systems as a solution. What I believe is that tossing around insults, defamation, etc. anonymously is cowardly and should not be tolerated by our society. Make people stand behind their words. I think you can tackle one problem without creating the other.
So how do you solve the problem the parent mentioned? What stops an extremist organisation from suing to get the identity (legally), accidentally slip it and let others smash his windows? It's not a theoretical point of view, this happened in many times and many countries.
Anonymous insults and defamation don't have nearly as much power as the scenario above.
I live in a country where a government meeting transcripts were leaked, and on their way passed through a regular joe. He got detained, his computer confiscated, and most scary, two years after the incident I still couldn't find the transcripts online. The incident was widely publicized - but the files were still gone. (I'm from Romania btw, an ex-communist country. You'd think we'd know better.)
And more to the point, wikileaks would be impossible.
You stop it by compelling (as they did in this case) proof of a libelous claim. Anonymous speech, as long as it doesn't cross the line into destruction of reputation based on false statements is still protected.
Mm. This works on paper, true. But in the real world the proof necessary to get the identity is much lower then the one needed to actually convict. Add to this the fact that libelous claims are in good part a subjective matter. Nope, proof of a libelous claim would merely make the above scenario somewhat more difficult, but far from improbable. It would simply require better lawyers.
So now we need to solve a problem in the legal system?
Doesn't it get to a point where you can't solve any problems because of the other systems they're tied to?
How about we just agree from a moral perspective that:
1. Anonymous defamation etc. is cowardly and should be persecuted appropriately.
2. Maintaining reasonable privacy is something we should strive for, and that it should be just as important as #1.
3. A legal system needs to be in place that we can trust to maintain both #1 and #2.
Those are our requirements. Now I'm not saying we're going to solve it right here and now, but thinking about it this way, as a problem requiring a solution and not a big wall we can't get past, definitely isn't going to hurt.
