By Tony Wright
You're safe on the internet, right? Got yourself signed up to a few forums and social networking sites, given yourself anonymity behind a cool pseudonym or two and you're ready to go. Free speech. Pour out your anguish, your anger, your righteous fury at the injustices of the world. Blurt out anything that comes to mind. There's been no freedom like it in history. No one need know who you are. Anything goes.
The internet is a complex creature that evolves at a rate so far ahead of governments, the courts and often what used to be called common decency that it hardly seems possible that it can ever be wrestled into submission.
It's a dreadful illusion. In a giant, multimillion-dollar air-conditioned room in Perth, a man named Martin Eade sits with his own bank of computers. About 50 of them. The computers are sifting through the stentorian squawk of the planet's cyber-chat rooms and websites and isolating words and images that concern him and the company for which he is chief technical officer. His computers never rest. Twenty-four hours of every day, they trawl.
When his computers tell him that someone anywhere has mentioned anything that might interest him, he can find who has tapped it into their keyboards. Pseudonyms? Haw.
Eade is among an army of such technically minded private detectives peeking into the recesses of the blogosphere, a lot of them doing vastly more sophisticated work than even him. Want to win an election, launch a new product, find out what the anonymous are secretly thinking? Better talk to a talented nerd with a battery of computers.
In Australia, Eade is the man behind a sweat-inducing dread gripping those who wish to indulge in what they imagined was the divine liberty granted by the internet: unfettered freedom of speech.
With a few strokes of his keyboard, the employment of secret software and an adroitness born of years of experience - his exploration of the internet goes back to the dark ages - he proved it was possible not simply to track down the owners of web-entangled pseudonyms, but to haul their owners before the courts and prosecute them for defamation.
Eade works for a Perth-based software security company, Datamotion Asia Pacific. He and his computers had been tracking for months increasingly uncomplimentary comments concerning the company and its chairman and managing director, Ronald Moir, posted on a number of sites, principally one called HotCopper. HotCopper hosts a wildly fractious investor forum. A lot of these gamblers have plonked their money and their faith in small listed companies, and plenty of them regularly get extremely hot under the collar when the companies on which they have pinned their hopes don't perform the way they would like.
Many of these companies don't have the market capitalisation that attracts much official scrutiny, and those who pour their thoughts into the ether via HotCopper see themselves as the virtuous, holding to account businesses that fly under the radar. Often they appear to be channelling Peter Finch in the movie Network, sliding open the window to the universe and hollering: ''I'm mad as hell and I'm not taking this any more!'' Once you're as mad as hell, it's not a large step to making accusations that if published on paper would attract a blizzard of legal suits alleging libel.
You can't defame anyone on the internet, though, can you? You're safe behind your pseudonym and your internet service provider, your words nothing but phantom eddies in a planetary storm, aren't you?
''What a lot of people don't realise is that staying anonymous on the internet is almost impossible,'' Eade told The Age yesterday. ''The internet is not a safe place for the uninitiated.''
He proved it over the past few months when someone calling themselves ''witch'' posted comments on HotCopper that got Datamotion and its chief, Moir, fairly fuming.
A Perth defamation lawyer, Martin Bennett, was called to the fray. And Eade got his computers humming. He needed to find the real identity of ''witch''.
A reluctant HotCopper was forced by the courts to hand over its files, but ''witch'' had laid a false trail that ended at a Geelong escort agency. No problem for Eade's computers.
''If you've ever entered your email address anywhere, its indexed or cross-referenced somewhere,'' he said.
''I've been at this business for a long time, and I've learnt where information is likely to be. There's a hell of a lot of noise out there. You just have to know how to make your way through it and where to look.''
And, of course, as The Age reported this week, ''witch'' was found to be a fellow named Graeme Gladman from Colac. We can't reprint what Gladman said about Datamotion and its chairman because it turned out to be defamatory, costing him $30,000 in damages and costs, an apology and a promise not to reoffend.
It was the first successful defamation case in Australia involving a blogger using a pseudonym. Almost as alarming to those who thought they were safe was that a company, and not simply an individual, had sued successfully. Turns out a company with less than 10 employees can be defamed.
Eade has been watching the shockwaves ripple across his screens as the story was picked up and passed on at warp speed by the stunned.
''Where's our freedom of speech? What are we allowed to say now?'' pseudonymous posters cried.
A smattering of knowledge about defamation law and the ability to think before hitting the keyboard might help.
Dangerous place, the internet.
Tony Wright is national affairs editor.