Brought to you by individual courage, the First Amendment, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and an honest judge: DaTruthSquad, still by anonymous.

In a civil society it is sometimes easy to forget that our freedom is often as fragile as our willingness to stand our ground, our success in finding help when we lack the resources to do so alone, and the integrity of the courts.

Here we see that lesson written in the course of events themselves. One flinch by anyone on the side of free speech and the blog could either have been silenced, or the author forcibly unmasked.

Nor are the courage and resources required to successfully stand our ground when we are right enough in themselves, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation makes abundantly clear.

To blog with safe anonymity when one is at risk because of a lack of self-protective power, one first be careful.

Read Ethan Zuckerman's Technical Guide to Anonymous Blogging.

As I advise client bloggers, attend to the social engineering details by (for example) choosing both a user name and a blog name which say nothing about your identity.

Attend to the high-tech details by (for example) using an anonymising server to access your blog, using a ping server to promote it and a anonymizing remailer to handle email service (and that's not all).

Close all of the holes so that you can blog well and in peace, because DaTruthSquad isn't just an anonymously penned blog with has a high impact somewhere in New Jersey. DaTruthSquad is anyone who says things power does not want to hear.

Like public officials everywhere, those who set out to unmask the author knew quite well that success would shut him up, just as other forms of unrestrained official harassment can be applied to close almost anyone down.

They failed after strenuous and costly effort.

They showed us again that freedom of speech is ours, only as long as we continue to find ways to keep it.