The South Dakota blogosphere is all a-twitter over two new bills introduced past the last minute by Rep. Noel Hamiel and Sen. Nancy Turbak Berry.

First, general comments on the broader issue: I'm not a fan of anonymity. While certain fields of journalism (security, certain intense areas of national politics) use (or abuse) anonymous sources, in our articles at the Capital Journal we never do. It'd certainly make my life easier — I run into people all the time who have strong opinions but don't want to have their name in the paper expressing those opinions. I tell them if they want me to quote them I have to use their name, and if they won't do it, then I thank them for their time and move on to the next person.

Our company has a different policy than that for our website; we allow anonymous comments there that we'd never include in the paper. The general tradeoff is you get higher page views (and thus ad revenue and exposure) in exchange for a general lowering of the level of discourse. We police all comments before they go in, and delete the openly libelous ones before they see the light of day. Despite that, you can attack someone all you like in our comments (and oh, people do) as long as you don't use profanity or libel someone or cross various other lines.

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That, too, causes me as a reporter problems. I've had multiple sources — including even an elected official or two — refuse to be interviewed principally because they've been ripped too much by anonymous web commenters. A lot of people assume that we write controversial things in the paper simply to stir people up and get them going in our comments, which isn't true in the slightest.

As a journalist, I'm in a unique situation vis-a-vis privacy. My job involves writing public things about people, and not infrequently I'm writing about things that those people would prefer to remain private. When I take photos of someone's car crash or write about someone's appearance in court or report on some scandal, I'm wading into the realm of controversy. I don't doubt that I'm justified in doing it, because when I write a story like that it's because it's somehow in the public sphere. People's private lives aren't generally my concern unless A) they invite me to write about them (like a lot of feature stories), B) they are a public figure and their private actions are relevant to their public persona, or C) the action in question occurs in a public space. (I'm sure there's other exceptions, but those are the ones that immediately come to mind.)

Nonetheless, hypocrisy is always at the forefront of my mind. It would not be ethical for me to expect my behavior to remain private when I would gladly expose the same behavior if someone else did it. As a rule of thumb, I don't feel right doing something if I wouldn't feel comfortable with everyone knowing about it. (Obviously, like all moral standards, I don't live up to this all the time. But it's my general guideline.)

There are some cases where I accept anonymity. One example is tips — I'd prefer if a tip about a news story was on-the-record from someone I could interview about it, but I see nothing wrong with acting on a suggestions from someone anonymous. This is especially so when someone's being a whistleblower about something they could get in trouble doing.

Likewise I have a hard time criticizing the use of anonymity by, say, dissidents in authoritarian countries. I'm sure they'd prefer to use their names, too, but when you face severe danger for speaking politial opinions I won't suggest you're wrong for speaking out under a false name.

Finally, there's an important distinction between anonymity and pseudonymity. If someone writes under a nom-de-plume — but writes under the same nom-de-plume every time, that's an entirely different world from someone who shifts identities every time they want to comment.

True anonymity engenders a certain type of recklessness. People will insult someone in terms they'd never say to their face. People lie knowing they won't face any consequences if they get caught. People advance crackpot theories safe that their own reputation won't suffer from other people's judgments.

In contrast, if you're tied to an identity — even if it's not your real name — there's a certain accountability that's admirable even if it falls short of using your actual name.

Anyway, with that preamble out of the way, my thoughts on the actual bills.

Like Todd Epp, I think HB1277 is less objectionable than its companion, HB1278. He's right that there isn't a universal right to libel someone and not suffer consequences from it, and legally having a structure for someone who has been libeled to seek remedy is a good thing. As someone who publishes thousands of words each week under my own byline, I don't have a lot of sympathy for someone who wants to make unfounded or ad hominem accusations against someone else and expect to get off scot-free, when I'm standing behind the truth of every word I write.

Is the mechanism that HB1277 provides the best way to go about that? I'm not sure, not being a lawyer. Maybe it needs to be improved. But the fact that you've got a mechanism for someone who has been libeled to see redress of grievances is not automatically cause for alarm, in my mind.

HB1278 is a bit of a different animal. Here I'll differentiate between how this would affect me as a journalist and blogger and its broader impact.

Personally, I would not be affected much by the bill's first section. At the Capital Journal we already track IP addresses for every single commenter. (We make use of them, too — frequently someone will try to post a bunch of comments in a row agreeing with themselves under different pseudonyms. What overlook is the fact that the person approving those comments can see that they all came from the same IP address.) So this isn't imposing any burden on me or my paper because we already are in compliance.

Outside of work, I don't have an active blog, but if I did it would probably be on my own domain. Because I own my own domain and pay for hosting I can log the IP addresses of visitors, and do.

Not being a lawyer I don't know whether the four standards for compelling the release of IP data constitute chilling or not. I can see a media lawyer objecting to that. I'll withhold judgment.

More generally, there are some real practical concerns with this bill. Many tools for blogging and otherwise on the Internet don't offer IP tracking. (Google Analytics, in fact, specifically disallows giving users this information, although they track it themselves to give you a map of where your visitors are from.) And publishing content on the web is not just the domain of a few top-tier political commentators. It's a mass societal hobby. Millions of Americans blog, tweet and comment on message boards about subjects ranging from inane to offensive. Requiring little kids who, in Pat Powers' example, want to start a blog to write about somethign they're a fan of, to track IP addresses in case someone leaves a libelous comment seems a bit ridiculous.

Beyond that, the measure strikes me as ineffective due to the nature of the internet. What if you want to make libelous comments about, say, Sen. John Thune — and you log onto dailykos.com to do it? That site's not based in South Dakota. How is South Dakota law going to compel an out-of-state online forum to comply with this law? Won't someone who wants to write something and maintain their anonymity just take advantage of this? You get a friend in Minnesota to start up a blog, and then post on it. You're not "allowing" internet posts by operating the site, your Minnesotan friend is. You're not breaking the law and he's not subject to it.

In short, I wish more people would have the courage of their convictions to put their names behind their comments, whether online or off. But I'm not sure if these bills are the best way to do that.