, by Jeff Kosseff. Copyright 2022 by Cornell University. Used by permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press.That was the title of a November 1, 1998, thread on the Yahoo! Finance bulletin board dedicated to tracking the financial performance of Raytheon, the mammoth defense contractor. Like many publicly traded companies at the time, Raytheon was the subject of a Yahoo! Finance message board, where spectators commented and speculated on the company’s financial status.
The reputation-obsessed companies and executives could not use the legal system to force Yahoo! to remove posts that they believed were defamatory or contained confidential information. In February 1996, Congress passed Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which generally prevents interactive computer services—such as Yahoo!—from being “treated as the publisher or speaker” of user content.
RSCDeepThroat posted again, on January 25, 1999, in a thread with the title “98 Earnings Concern.” The poster speculated about business difficulties at Raytheon’s Sensors and Electronics Systems unit. “Word running around here is that SES took a bath on some programs that was not discovered until late in the year,” RSCDeepThroat posted. “I don’t know if the magnitude of those problems will hurt the overall Raytheon bottom line. The late news cost at least one person under Christine his job.
Raytheon’s complaint stated only that the company sought damages in excess of twenty-fi ve thousand dollars. Litigating this case might cost more than any money the company would recover in settlements or jury verdicts. The lawsuit would, however, allow Raytheon to attempt to gather information to identify the authors of the critical posts.
Traceable anonymity: “A remailer that gives the recipient no clues as to the sender’s identity but leaves this information in the hands of a single intermediary.”Untraceable pseudonymity: The message is signed with a pseudonym that cannot be traced to the original author. The author might use a digital signature “which will uniquely and unforgeably distinguish an authentic signed message from any counterfeit.