She didn't comment horrible things on his website, only a critique of an article. He took offense to that, de-anonymized her by abusing the moderation system and looked for distasteful comments elsewhere.

I won't speak to the legality of it because I'm not qualified, but it's morally reprehensible.

That is not necessarily the order these things happened in.

He could have

1. Taken offense to this comment/taken interest in what else this user comments (which you can do without any admin tools)

2. Seen the islamophobic/xenophobic comment

3. De-anonymized the user

In this version the de-anonymization is related to the more repugnant comments, not the initial critique.

How is it different? It’s a misuse of the information he had access to. He was within his rights to ban her but not to dox her (and Disqus should not have exposed email addresses to site admins).

How is it a misuse? If you had a blog with a comment system and someone wrote horrible things, it's well within your rights to see who they are based on their registration and publish a post naming and shaming them. These are all 1st amendment protected activities. Free speech in the US is an extraordinarily broad right for very good reason. She's claiming defamation (which is one of the limits on free speech) but it's very likely bullshit given she admitted to writing the rest of the posts, just not the overtly racist ones all showing up under her account.

Take the internet away and it's even more obviously protected. If you ran a newspaper and occasionally published letters from readers, and if a racist letter showed up with a vaguely obfuscated address that was easily traceable, it would be well within your rights to write an article about the person in a position of power who sent your newspaper racist rantings.

The journalist likely violated Disqus's terms of service but in no way does that give the professor grounds to sue him.

>If you had a blog with a comment system and someone wrote horrible things, it's well within your rights to see who they are based on their registration and publish a post naming and shaming them.

I've been surfing everything from Usenet to webboards and other internet comment facilities for 25 years, how come I've never seen it? Typically the routine goes: cosmetic blocking (hiding, disemvoweling), account block, email block, ip block, then whack-a-mole for the truly persistently annoying.

Have you, and can you link to it if so?

Personally, I find it in very bad taste.

In the abstract sure, but say you're the journalist in question and you discover that a professor at a major university thinks all "muslims are scum" -- is it worse taste to say "too bad about that" and do nothing or take just the barest of steps to ID her and make sure she doesn't have authority over any muslim students without them knowing about her mindset?

It's the manner of discovery that's in bad taste, abusing your position that comes with back-end disqus access.

There's a reason certain forms of evidence are inadmissible in court.

(The professor's also at fault for not anonymizing herself better, of course.)