A 1998 memorandum sent to United States attorneys advised them that the statute should be applied only to obscene communications. Chris Hansen, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union who specializes in Internet speech, said that he had qualms about the apparent rebirth of the online speech law and its use as a means to unmask an anonymous speaker. If you reject the district court's view and take a more expansive view, an awful lot of people could be rushing into federal court to stop all kinds of speech they find annoying. But non-obscene, disturbing or annoying speech is protected by the Constitution, he said. Many suits of this type are filed by corporations alleging defamation against unknown speakers on financial bulletin boards.
Many people act with impunity on the Internet because they are able to do so pseudonymously.
Once they are unmasked and identified they tend to back down. Ballon acknowledges that one possible problem with these unmasking efforts is that the legal basis for the underlying lawsuit may never be challenged, because in many cases the unknown defendant is not notified of the suit. Subpoenas will be issued by the lawyers, subpoenas will be served on ISPs, and many ISPs will disclose a subscriber's identity without giving notice to the subscriber that they are doing so. For these reasons, Hansen of the ACLU said that his organization favors two protections for anonymous chatters. Any complaint filed in court against an unknown Internet defendant should include specifics of the allegedly objectionable postings, he said.