But already, under the current financial system, people with money to hide seem to have no trouble finding others to help them. Most other abuses of online anonymity, similarly, can also be promulgated through traditional means. Death threats, for instance, can be equally hard to trace when delivered by phone or mail as when delivered by the Internet. Hate speech is facilitated by the online medium, but in most countries the hate groups operate fairly freely anyway. The public has a lot of work to do in stopping hate groups from engaging in actual physical violence, before they should worry about preventing them from spouting their beliefs online.
People sometimes fear that libelous material can be distributed anonymously, leaving no one to sue.
But such misuses are only as effective as the gullibility of recipient allows. All whistle-blowing should be checked by an authoritative expert before the public believes the charges. The use of anonymous distribution for copyright infringement particularly worries some businesses. This discouraging event led him to shut down the system on the basis that he could no longer promise anonymity. The risks of anonymity, while worth keeping in mind, should not prevent us from defending it.