Defendants operate a website critical of law enforcement personnel. Their website contains not only substantive political argument but also lists of names, addresses, birthdates, telephone numbers, Social Security numbers ("SSNs") and other personal information concerning law enforcement personnel and their relatives.

Plaintiffs assert that this publication of their personal information invades their privacy interests and is causing them continuing injury. Plaintiffs have therefore asked the Court to issue preliminary and permanent injunctive relief prohibiting the publication of these lists.

In response, defendants argue that their activities are protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and therefore cannot be prohibited.

1. The Question of Privacy

As a matter of logic and common sense, the degree of an individual’s privacy is necessarily a reflection of two distinct matters: the amount of access others have to his or her personal information, and the extent to which others may be able to disseminate or otherwise act upon any information to which they do obtain access.

Both parties agree that this case is at the frontier of internet law, and that publication of private information on the internet may demand a form of analysis different from that historically applied in the United States to questions of privacy. This Court must therefore briefly examine the development of case law concerning privacy.

Our Founding Fathers appear to have given little direct thought in the writing of the Constitution to any need to take action to protect one’s privacy from other citizens. At that time, citizens were effectively required to keep their distance from each other through the basic and relatively simple laws of trespass and of libel. While neighbors may then, as now, have known all there was to know about their neighbors, scant information about the general populace was held by governmental entities. What little information the government had compiled could generally only be accessed by clerks with quill pens working their way through musty books and ledgers.

Even if private information were acquired in that day by a citizen, it could be disseminated principally by walking down the street and talking to whoever would listen, or providing the information to a printer who could only set the type letter by tedious letter. As a practical matter, therefore, real-life barriers protected personal information from being invaded or broadly published by others. Widespread dissemination to strangers would generally occur only when the matter was of public interest.

In the case of full-blown political speech, including that which might divulge personal details on a particular opponent, there were similar natural barriers to its spread. Rabble-rousing words once uttered on the corner or from the top of a soapbox disappeared on the wind, remaining only in the ears of those few who may have been inspired to action or remaining on the pages of a newspaper or pamphlet whose life-span would be directly controlled by the physical problems inherent in distribution and retention.

At that time, the theory was that there was a marketplace of ideas. Speech was to be free. Those ideas that survived would be those whose inherent worth or value were recognized and accepted by the general public. The remaining or unworthy ideas would die a natural death. This was a search for truth which rested on the premise that

(Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S