Posts Tagged ‘anonymity’

From 1987, via @torproject, comes this emotional appeal for anonymity (and reuse):

The contemporary ego is enormous, and suits for plagiarism are not uncommon. “I wrote this,” is the accusation. “You copied it.” How times have changed! Up through Shakespeare’s day, writers were more interested in basing their thoughts on older works than in writing something totally original. School children would compress the works of the classics or elaborate on them. They learned through imitation. Instead of having to guarantee to their professors that every word they uttered and every thought they conceived was theirs alone, they were expected to show that everything they said had been said before. Even Shakespeare’s plays were developed from histories and older plays and romances and stories, the authors of which are unknown in many cases.

Read on.

Cleaning up my feeds, I came across a month old Kottke post where he muses about the broken window theory as it relates to online communities.

For those unfamiliar with it, in its most simple terms, the broken window theory postulates that if a window in a neighborhood is left unmended, other windows will soon be broken, too. More generally, it emphasizes perceived community standards as a basis for action: if I think this is a community of respect and good-nature, I am more likely to act similarly.

In a recent post, I argued that viewing anonymity as the proximate cause for negative behavior is not only false, but dangerous. However, Kottke writes,

Unchecked comment spam signals that the owner/moderator of the forum or blog isn’t paying attention, stimulating further improper conduct. Anonymity provides commenters with immunity from being associated with their speech and actions, making the whole situation worse…how does the community punish or police someone they don’t know? Very quickly, the situation is out of control and your message board is the online equivalent of South Central Los Angeles in the 1980s, inhabited by roving gangs armed with hate speech, fueled by the need for attention, making things difficult for those who wish to carry on useful conversations.

Certainly it is true that trolls benefit from anonymity, but I can think of plenty of trolls from my online experience who are happy to disrupt communties openly.

But I think Kottke misses the point of the theory. The broken window theory advocates quick post hoc reparative action. Trolls should be condemned and spam deleted, so that the next would-be troll doesn’t see the “broken window.” Online or off, would-be trolls and criminals will inhabit the community, but the broken window theory exhorts us to constantly fight against them, regardless of name or identity.

I’m cleaning out my RSS feeds and finding some great stuff I had left to look at later. One of those was a post by Erik Hersman from way back in August about anonymity and trust online. He was puzzled by some comments made by Marissa Mayer, a senior Google executive, concerning how anonymity was an enemy of trust.

Speaking at a conference, Mayer said,

“…I think it’s really important as we look at tools to think about how we can support fact checking, how can we guard against misinformation, how is there going to be established an element of authority and trustworthiness? …I grew up with the newspaper and the encyclopedia, which you could trust. And now you have blogs, which are held often as news and often aren’t factual. Or you have Wikipedia, which usually gets most things right, but there are a lot times there is vandalism or corrections that need to be made.”

“When you look at the elements of anonymity and the lack of accountability that happens on the web, it really does start to create doubt in the fibers of who can you trust… The physical world has been around a lot longer, and in the physical world you really can’t do anything anonymously. So when you look at systems online that break that paradigm where you can be completely anonymous, or be whoever you want to be, without any sense of history or of what you did last week, that’s not really reality and that breaks down the elements of trust and authority.”

I think there are a number of things wrong with these statements, including the points raised by Erick, that anonymity is an important defense against authoritarian governments. “Having these open, trusting, everyone-knows-everyone systems is all well and good when you live in the US. It’s not so good in other parts of the world.” I also think there are other problems.

The Premises are Wrong

Mayer has two premises which I think are flawed. The first is that “newspapers and the encyclopedia” are trustworthy. In my 19 years of experience though, I’ve seen that proven false time and time again. The New York Times was shown to be less than trustworthy thanks to Jayson Blair who fabricated and plagiarized stories. Broadcast news was shown to be less than trustworthy thanks to Rathergate. Even the Executive Branch of the government was proven to act and speak on falsities when Colin Powell spoke at the UN. Further, information has never been garnered solely from “trustworthy” sources; it comes from unverified and non-factchecked cocktail party conversations and grocery store gossip, too.

Secondly, the idea that you cannot be anonymous in the physical world is nonsense. It didn’t take the Internet to create anonymity. Sure, Bernstein and Woodward knew who Deepthroat was, but that is functionally no different than your ISP knowing who you are. And as for deciding “whoever you want to be, without any sense of history or what you did last week” only coming about with TCP/IP, that is innaccurate, too. Many a teenager reinvented himself at college and many an individual left town to start a new life. In fact, without pervasive communication technologies like the Internet, I think it is fair to say your history didn’t follow you as easily.

A False Dichotomy Between Anonymity and Trustworthiness

As for the substantive point, that anonymous discourse is inherently less trustworthy, I think it is lucky that this view isn’t true. Psuedonymity, which I view as persistent anonymity, allowed Hamilton, Madison and Jay to write the Federalist Papers under the psyedonym of “Publius.” American Revolutionary War pamphlateers were often anonymous, and countless whistleblowers, including those using WikiLeaks, have been able to inform the public via anonymous speech. As I said in a recent post, anonymity is essential for a free society.

The Supreme Court has recognized as much, saying

“Protections for anonymous speech are vital to democratic discourse. Allowing dissenters to shield their identities frees them to express critical, minority views . . . Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. . . . It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation . . . at the hand of an intolerant society.”

Anonymity can allow for even more trustworthiness, as in the case of election voting where booths and privacy increase our confidence that the voter chose without undue outside pressure.

Sure, anonymity has and continues to allow offensive, negative speech to flourish. But Mayer’s concern that anonymous online discourse drives its recipients away from engagement is less of a worry than chilling important speech by forced identity. Information, whether digital or physical and whether from anonymous or identified individuals, should always be verified and vetted. Unknown IP addresses have been wrong, but so has Dan Rather. I hope Google recognizes this and continues to allow online identities to run the spectrum of verifiability.

[CC-Licensed Photo Credit]

I stumbled upon an interview with Internet security guru Eugene Kaspersky in which he makes some troublesome statements supporting an end to online anonymity.

E.K: The Internet was never designed with security in mind. If I was God, and wanted to fix the Internet, I would start by ensuring that every user has a sort of Internet passport: basically, a means of verifying identity, just like in the real world, with driver’s licenses and passports and so on. The second problem is one of jurisdiction. The Internet has no borders, and neither do the criminals who operate on the Internet. However, law enforcement agencies have jurisdictional limits, and are unable to conduct investigations across the globe. I feel we need an international agency to combat this problem, something like an Interpol for the Internet.

PCW: Won’t your suggestion of Internet Passports remove the anonymity from online browsing, thus causing problems for people who may be operating in countries that are not friendly to their views, and so on?

E.K: There is no such thing as anonymity on the Internet, for the average user. It is relatively easy to identify the casual surfer from his IP address and the ISP’s logs. Criminals, on the other hand, are professionals who know how to hide their tracks. A passport would be beneficial to law-abiding users, and would make it that much more difficult for cyber-criminals to hide.

Admittedly, Kaspersky doesn’t have a whole lot of space to elaborate on his “Internet passport,” so I stand the chance of misunderstanding him, but as I understand it, such an idea would be dangerous and unneeded.

One of the major problems confronting cybersecurity is attribution. When Estonian websites are pounded with DDoS attacks, it is next to impossible for the sysadmins to know if the IP address attacking them is just a zombie conduit or the intentioned attacker. Therefore, it is hard to punish those responsible for cybercrime. An Internet passport would, it seems, lower this level of non-attribution and make the senders accountable for their packet-streams.

Free speech relies on anonymity – a face the Supreme Court has recognized, saying,

“Protections for anonymous speech are vital to democratic discourse. Allowing dissenters to shield their identities frees them to express critical, minority views . . . Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. . . . It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation . . . at the hand of an intolerant society.”

An “Internet passport” would not only jeopardize that, it would disproportionately affect the innocent. Curiously, Kaspersky seems to make this point, saying “there is no such thing as anonymity on the Internet, for the average users… Criminals, on the other hand, are professionals who know how to hide their tracks.” Does Kaspersky really think a criminal-proof system could be created? It seems to me that cybercriminals would simply steal, fake or cheat the Internet passport system, just as they do with our current equivalent – IP addresses and ISP logs. They have both the intent and capability to do so.

While it is true that regular users can be tracked to a certain extent in our current system, there are dozens of well-known methods available to dissidents, journalists and business people to be anonymous online. An Internet passport, by attempting to curtail the criminals’ use of anonymity would do more damage to those who rely on user-friendly, non-technical solutions like TOR. We should not walk down that path.