Essential Liberty
The Bob Zadek Show
The United States of Anonymous
0:00
Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -52:30
-52:30

The United States of Anonymous

In the years leading up to the American Revolution, a pseudonymous writer who called himself “Junius” came under scrutiny for his letters protesting the abuses by the Crown against his fellow Englishmen. Professor Jeff Kosseff recounts the myriad motivations Junius had for remaining anonymous (his identity is still not known to this day) in his new book The United States of Anonymous. From there, Kosseff explores “how the right to anonymity has shaped American values, politics, business, security, and discourse, particularly as technology has enabled people to separate their identities from their communications.”

Who are the Junius’s today whose anonymity requires protection?

Jeff Kosseff is an Associate Professor of Cybersecurity Law at the United States Naval Academy. He is the author of Cybersecurity Law (Wiley), the first comprehensive textbook on U.S. cybersecurity laws and regulations, and in Spring 2019 he published The Twenty-Six Words that Created the Internet (Cornell University Press), a nonfiction narrative history of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Jeff has practiced cybersecurity and privacy law, and clerked for Judge Milan D. Smith, Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and for Judge Leonie M. Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. He is a graduate of Georgetown University Law Center and the University of Michigan. Before becoming a lawyer, he was a journalist for The Oregonian and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.

Discussion about this podcast

Essential Liberty
The Bob Zadek Show
Bob talks about the issues that affect our lives on a daily basis from a purely libertarian standpoint. He believes in small government, fewer taxes, and greater personal freedom.<br /><br />America has lost its way, but it cannot and does not need to be reinvented. Our founders were correct about their approach to government, as were John Locke, Adam Smith and the other great political philosophers who influenced them. The country’s first principles are economic and social freedom, republicanism, the rule of law, and liberty. Bob believes we must take the best of our founding principles and work from them because a country without principles is just a landmass.