A statement standing alone is not fraud.

Fraud is a tort that involves several elements, with the ‘speech’ being merely one element.

Ditto with harassment.

To analogize, your comment is akin to the following:

Poster: We should have a right to use knives.

You: Murder by stabbing is not a right!

[edit] In short, you can lie all day long... it’s your right. It only becomes ‘fraud’ when (in most jurisdictions):

1. You make a misrepresentation,

2. About something material,

3. That you intended another to rely upon,

4. And which they did in fact rely upon,

5. And that reliance was reasonably justified,

6. And they suffered harm thereby,

7. And the harm was proximately caused by the statement.

If any element is missing, your free to engage in the conduct without interference by the govt.

So it sounds like in this case, all 7 elements are present, which is why they are being ordered to break anonymity.

Where do all your anti-free-speechers get your identically wrong talking points? Lying on Twitter or to a newspaper ISN'T FRAUD. And if you used your half-assed definitions to write laws, you could throw authors at The Onion in jail for creating fake documents and making up fake quotes from government officials.

Newspapers and Twitter users have no right to expect that anonymous statements made online or documents given to them for free are accurate or true. If they chose to publish defamatory articles based on their lack of due diligence, the civil liability rests with them.

Of course lying on Twitter isn’t fraud, just like lying in any other medium isn’t fraud. However, if the lie on Twitter is used to commit fraud, than it is no different than getting a court order to track down someone who used a phone call to commit fraud.

This isn’t charging someone with lying in a tweet. This is someone who used twitter to contact people in order to commit a crime (or at least that is what is alleged in court)... they can use the law to attempt to find out who this user is.

> if the lie on Twitter is used to commit fraud

I'll apologize if I have the details of the case wrong, but where is this supposed fraud? The only way I could see this being fraudulent is if (1) the private investigator being PAID for his investigatory services created the account and faked the document himself to continue getting paid for additional investigation or (2) the journalist being PAID for her journalistic work created fake documents so that she could publish them and accrue the financial benefits of authoring a juicy story.

But if whysprtech is anyone else on the planet—a conspiratorial kook, a troll, or even a political operative trying to embarass people—no fraud has been committed and there is no basis for unmasking him. The people responsible for the defamation aren't random anonymous internet trolls, but publishing companies who make money purporting to report the rigorously validated truth, but are actually lazy, naive, and gullible.