As Friday's indictment of the vice president's top aide rocked Washington, it also stirred debate well beyond the Beltway on the curious power of anonymity to compel riveting disclosures from those with the loftiest and lowliest of motives.

The cover of anonymity apparently emboldened I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby to have what the indictment describes as conversations with reporters in 2003 on the identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame. Widely seen as political payback against Ms. Plame's husband, former ambassador and Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson, these conversations now raise questions about the costs and benefits of letting someone with a story to tell remain unnamed.

Did the anonymity offered to Mr. Libby by reporters serve the public good? Or did it merely create a vehicle for political foul play? Answers could have implications for the way anonymity is managed in the future, both in journalism and elsewhere.

"The whole evolution of anonymous sources has spun wildly out of control," says Kelly McBride, ethics group leader at the Poynter Institute, a training center for professional journalists in St. Petersburg, Fla. "The reason journalists need the tool of anonymity is so that ... people who stand to lose important things - their lives, their livelihoods, their ability to live in a community - [can speak when their] motive is truly to expose wrongdoing. But what's happened is that bureaucrats at all levels ... use anonymity to release information for a variety of motives."

Libby's case shines a spotlight on the darkness of anonymity at a time when the convention of concealed identity is proliferating far beyond the worlds of government and news gathering.

Cyberspace, for instance, now provides a venue for countless anonymous postings for those who lacked such a public platform just a decade ago. Twelve-step recovery groups continue to attract thousands of members with assurances of anonymity for participants. Large corporations increasingly rely on hotlines to let low- and mid-level workers file anonymous reports of wrongdoing from the front lines.

All this anonymity creates opportunities for abuse, especially on the Internet where no one is responsible to verify information offered directly to the public, says Daniel Terris, director of the International Center for Ethics, Justice, and Public Life at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass.

Yet on balance, he says, the pros of expanding anonymity outweigh the cons.

"In general, processes that encourage the freer flow of information, even when they entail certain kinds of ethical risks and dangers, tend to be more productive for society than things that shut down the freer flow of information," Mr. Terris says. "So on this issue of anonymity, I would be more inclined to err on the side of permitting more of it than less. I worry that an overreaction to the harms involved is going to ultimately do more harm than the cases in which scurrilous charges make things difficult for individuals."

Others raise a point of concern: Anonymous speech is often harsh, even libelous.

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