Our elected officials should have power over technology, not the other way around

First, we should clear something up. When you wrote, “The person you talk to online could be down the street or halfway across the world. How do you grant a country jurisdiction over something that doesn't belong to any one country. [sic] If people from all over the world participate in a forum where even criminal activity occurs, whose job is it to prosecute. [sic] Although we in the US often like to think we police the world, that is really neither our right nor our job, so how should one go about dealing with the Internet?” I at first thought you were arguing that we shouldn't try to regulate the Internet. Reading it again, however, and taking into consideration your more recent post, I see that you do agree we should regulate and are more worried with how and how much.

I'll stop here for a moment to draw out a short roadmap. First, I will describe why I still believe perfect anonymity is a bad thing. Then, since we agree that education will be an important part of improving the Internet in the years to come, I will briefly propose a way to spread such education. Finally, I'll talk a little about privacy concerns.

Against perfect anonymity
Even if the government still has the power, legally, to punish those who commit crimes online, sometimes legal means aren't enough. This is why we have quite a number of unenforced laws in this country. For example, due to difficulty, it is extremely unlikely that you will be fined for not filling out your 2010 census, even though you can legally be fined something in the order of thousands of dollars. This has led to a number of people to urge citizens to not fill out the census, due to the fear that the Socialist/Fascist/Nazi/Communist/Marxist/Antichrist (apparently these terms are thought to be interchangeable) Obama Administration will use the information to round up civilians like the government did to the Japanese after Pearl Harbor, back when that was legal. They are choosing their fear of the government over their own welfare. Census results are used to divvy up electoral votes and money given to states, so they're giving themselves less of a voice and less money (not that I will tell them that. GOGO 60 Electoral Votes for California!). Likewise, allowing a system to arise in which it is easy to obtain perfect anonymity would render the government powerless on the Internet.

The solutions you propose—education and self-regulation—work fine when we're dealing with anonymous speech and harassment. Yet my concerns with absolute anonymity and a lack of government power over what people due with or on the Internet lies elsewhere. In fact, I believe that in such a future, speech, harassment, and people's feelings will be the least of our problems. Blacker crimes would have the opportunity to flourish than defamation. The crimes I worry about are far more serious, such as viruses, hacking, DDOS attacks, and fraud. At the very least, enabling risk-free pursuit of these crimes would lead to an security arms race—a race severely disadvantageous to the “good guys.” So much financial information is online these days, with more and more banking and retail occurring through use of the Internet, that just a single negligent business or site that failed to keep up with security would cause a nasty leak of sensitive information. In short, I realize that there are a lot of good people who have made and will continue to try to make lawful, civil parts of the Internet, but if the government ever cedes or loses its ability to enforce laws, I don't think any amount of goodwill can stop viruses, attacks, and identity theft from occurring on an even greater scale. Businesses will suffer not from their customers who enter credit card numbers and other information you mentioned, but from people stealing this information and/or attacking their sites.

Regarding child pornography, you said that 1) kidnapping was a traceable crime and that 2) criminals might freely give identifying information to anonymous authorities. Regarding the first point, according to a study in three states, 96% of rape victims under the age of 12 knew their attackers. 50% of the offenders were friends or acquaintances (horrifyingly, the other 46% of offenders were relatives or parents). Kidnapping may be a traceable crime, but that relies on it kidnapping occurring in the first place. Regarding 2), without any kind of evidence other than what the criminal himself told the authorities, there is no way evidence would be strong enough to convict anyone. It would be (and kind of is already) tremendously easy, for example, for me to log on and start telling everyone, “hi2u, my name is Gabrielle Ehrlich. Here's some CP I made, lol.” Once again, it is easy for a careful criminal to avoid detection. It seems like you would trust pedophiles and other criminals to be careless more than you would trust the government to not abuse its ability to fight crime, which seems off to me.

In other words, I really, really don't think designing the network to support easy, perfect anonymity is a good idea. A very large degree of anonymity is certainly something of value, as we have agreed, but we should be weary of going too far. It's just like how some universities fought the RIAA lawsuits by redesigning their networks to forget any identifying information. While fighting the unreasonable and unfair RIAA lawsuits is certainly good, I don't think making it impossible to catch people stealing music from artists who legitimately deserve to be paid is a very good long-term solution. Anonymity is good, but perfect anonymity isn't. Rather than use technological “advances” to force the government to not regulate the Internet, I think we should use the law. While it would take longer to develop and pass, it is at least something that we can conceivably alter in the future, unlike widely-adopted technology.

Brief thoughts on education
I agree that education is a very good way to combat the problems of hateful speech and defamation online. I myself was shocked to learn that law firms around the country had decided to give trolls and flamers import by letting what they said affect their decision calculus. By educating people and teaching them to turn a blind eye/ear to what they read online, we disarm such trolls. I do have qualms with the idea that the best way to fix the Internet is to, by default, not take it seriously. I think it's a bit sad that it has come to this. Still, I believe that some degree of education would be helpful in any case. The best way I can see it is to include it as part of education standards. Of course, I don't believe this is possible on a federal level, and must be done state-by-state. I imagine most non-Amish schools these days already include some form of technology training; my elementary school taught typing and Internet/web design basics. It wouldn't be too difficult to add a few lessons about how to react and treat messages on the Internet. Another good way would be to encourage browsers to include links for first time Internet users on their default home pages. This way, older people who are using the Internet for the first time can get the information despite not being taught in school.

Protecting privacy
I think we agree for the most part that the government should be involved somewhat in making sure companies don't start abusing the (quite extensive) knowledge they have of us. You wrote, “By using Google, people are saying I want better service, and I'm willing to give up a little bit of privacy for it.” I don't think this is true for everyone, though. We are both knowledgeable enough about the technology to know the risks we are taking with our information, but most people are probably unaware. Certainly word is spreading more quickly about privacy concerns these days, but I think the risks aren't clear enough to people in general. Part of this, again, could be solved through education, and the companies technically do provide privacy policies in writing, but no average user ever reads them. In short, I agree that we should try as best we can not to harm any company's competitiveness, but we still need to either define/change what corporations can do with our information or at least make it more obvious.

The Problems Exist, but How Do We Want To Deal With Them

While I definitely understand your concerns with anonymity, I don't feel like it's the main problem with the internet. Maybe I'm a little bit paranoid, but after reading Little Brother by Cory Doctorow, I wouldn't want the government regulating anonymity. While I agree they should have some way to track and stop criminal activities like child pornography and such, I don't really want the government watching my every move. I don't feel like it is the right of the government to read my emails just because their worried I might be a terrorist. I don't want the government using its extensive powers to pry into the lives of everyday people. We have a constitution and a bill of rights for a reason.

Just for a little context, Little Brother takes place in the not to distant future after a terrorist attack significantly worse than 9/11 takes place in San Fransico. The government essentially declares martial law and 4 children who stayed on the surface rather than going into the subways and bomb shelters get picked up as suspected terrorists and are treated as such. Although, It's hopefully something that won't ever happen, there are a lot of things that seem like they could be just around the corner. People freak when the subject of terrorists comes up and they are willing to let the government take more power than we've ever let it take before. Take the patriot act, for example.

While the entirely lawless internet you describe would definitely be a bad thing, I completely disagree that that is the direction anonymity will take us. There are so many thriving businesses online, there is no chance that they would let anonymity stop them. First of all, you can't be anonymous if you want to use an online business because you need a credit card, and the credit card company actually checks if your name is wrong. Secondly, there are still many havens of culture and decency on the internet, and If the internet were to spiral into chaos, I feel like decent people would start creating more such places rather than just abandoning the internet.

What we really need is a change in the way the internet is viewed. The problem is there is currently no accepted social code, or limitations on what people should do. Another problem is that people tend to take everything on the internet personally or take it as fact if their a third party. People should have realized by now, that the great and terrible thing about the internet is that it allows people to say whatever they want, but it is very unlikely that all of it is true, and none of it should be taken personally. People still have expectations that don't mesh with the online community. If people had realized that the autoadmit boards were just havens for people flaming and harassing others, maybe Heller and Iravani, wouldn't have been haunted by this random group of people over which they had no control, and the whole thing wouldn't have been an issue.

Also, there are many sites where content is regulated and offensive comments are removed or at least marked as such. This is a viable alternative against your wild west. If people choose to enter a site with a sheriff its because their tired of dealing with what comes from complete freedom, so their choosing to find a place where someone actually regulates content. If the internet were to suddenly go insane as a result of anonymity (which I highly doubt) people could simply flock to more regulated sites. As to the potential surge in criminal activity, law enforcement can be just as anonymous as anyone else. If people were willing to communicate criminal content with anyone they would have no guarantee that the person on the other end wasn't law enforcement and you can find out a lot about people by what they will just tell people freely. Also in child pornography cases, I doubt their would be a huge surge in a way that would be more dangerous to children then it is now, because kidnapping children is still a traceable crime. It's true it's definitely not the easiest thing to find, but anonymity on the internet won't lead to a surge in that sort of criminal behavior.

I agree that some regulation of the internet to control what businesses can do with your information is definitely a good thing, but I'm definitely worried about what the government might do if they had exercised too much control over the internet. I understand your worries about Google's growing collection of data and it's ability to sort out what one person does. A little bit of government regulation is probably the right way to go with that issue, but at the same time the reason that Google is doing so well is because their products are better, more useful, and there isn't anything that's as good competing with them. If people are really worried about Google's domination of the internet, they can switch to different companies. Data storage is just another feature of the product, so if you don't want Google to store all your searches, use Yahoo! or Bing. By using Google, people are saying I want better service, and I'm willing to give up a little bit of privacy for it. At the same time, Google should definitely realize that people don't really want all this information stored about them, and for a company whose motto is “Don't Be Evil,” they could work a little harder to make sure that impression remains.

I'm not saying that the internet shouldn't be regulated at all, I just think we should be very careful about what we let the government regulate. There is a vibrant and positive culture that exists on the internet, and letting the government destroy that is just as bad as letting criminals get away.

Perfect anonymity is still a concern

Unlike Gabrielle, I think anonymity is still an issue we should concern ourselves with. The Onion Router (also known as Tor) is being pushed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation as a way to achieve anonymous Internet communication by using technology. Onion routing uses multi-layered cryptology to ensure secrecy for the routers which your data is being bounced across. Thankfully, the US Government can still monitor both ends of the communication if both the sender (user) and the receiver are located in the US. People are also, however, working toward “better” systems. The Phantom Anonymity Protocol, designed in 2008 by Magnus Brading and unveiled at DEFCON 16, was created with the goal of extremely secure anonymity for every user. Its highly decentralized design makes it a much better candidate for allowing users to accomplish perfect or near-perfect anonymity, without the weaknesses and lack of adaptation that plagues Tor.

Regardless of whether these attempts meet success, the truth is that people are striving to make perfect anonymity very real and very easy achieve. Before one of them succeeds, we should consider whether we really want that. Gabrielle described the work of Latanya Sweeney, who could identify unique people using a very small number of traits, and said that we could still link people to their posts using such a method. Yet the technique requires a birthday, zipcode, and gender, and there is little preventing users from entering false information. There have been many times when I set my birthday as “January 1, 19xx” just because choosing not to change the month and day saved me four clicks.

As another example of how difficult it is to be truly anonymous, Gabrielle mentioned the article in Wired about the author who tried to disappear. He was eventually found despite going to great lengths to hide. Yet in the story, search parties had help—they knew what the author looked like. In a world where perfect anonymity exists, it would be impossible to find out anything about where communication originated from, much less about the person responsible.

Of course problems with jurisdiction would arise. I am not suggesting that American officials police everything—I said the proper authorities should be involved. At the very least, we should be able to determine which country the communication originated from and proceed from there. I understand, however, that this only works well in a country with a government I can trust to not abuse the power. I would be content with such identifying ability in the United States, but if the ability were available to the Iranian government, many of the demonstrators might be in very serious trouble.

Still, choosing to not even try governing the Internet because it is not the property of any individual country would lead to a truly lawless Internet, and I don't believe that is good for anyone who isn't a criminal. People have often argued that the Internet is like the Wild West, somehow with the idea that that is a good thing. Despite what quaint memories of spaghetti Western films might tell you, however, the Wild West was not a good place to live, and there's a reason it doesn't exist anymore.

Mixing a truly lawless Internet with the ability to achieve perfect anonymity is a very, very dangerous game. FBI agents have on occasion managed to nail people guilty of spreading worms and other malicious code. In a lawless, anonymous Internet, not only would they not have been able to track down the source of the virus, they wouldn't have even tried. After we decide not to regulate the Internet, I give it a few weeks before the culture of business, collaboration, and discussion we have worked hard to build for more than a decade is destroyed. Child pornography would also boom, and needless to say children will be hurt in the process. I guess it would solve the problem of harassment and cyber-bullying, though—few people will risk their computers' welfare to visit an Internet businesses have abandoned. Maybe this is an exaggeration, but the point is that the harms of a lawless Internet are far too great for us to be lazy about sorting out issues of international law and jurisdiction.

Gabrielle mentioned privacy issues, and I agree that they are a serious concern we should have with the Internet today. I don't agree that the privacy we should be concerned with is related to forums, though. I think the bigger problem is with corporations. As I type this, I realize that Blogger is a tool controlled by Google. Among Google services, I also use Analytics, Calendar, Docs, Gmail, Book Search, Maps, Wave, YouTube, and Voice. With all the information from these various services, Google has a fairly thorough grasp of my entire life. We should be worried about the abuse of this information. In class we discussed ways in which this problem might be solved. Part of it is the amount of legalese that leads to a total lack of understanding held by most people of what various companies can do with our information. I believe the government should be able to punish companies for abusing our information, just as in Europe. Though it often happens after the fact, when it is too late to prevent the information from being shared, so is all prosecution. It's would be a start, at least.

The Loss of Social Order and Problems with Privacy

Anonymity is definitely one of the most important aspects of the internet. It is what allows anyone to share their ideas without fear of being silenced by the majority or worry of harassment for their opinions. It allows people to be who they want to be on the internet, rather than the person society tells them to be. For young people who are questioning their religious beliefs, their sexuality, or anything else, it allows then to reach out to others in similar situations for support and guidance without the fear of anyone finding out. Some of the most engaging and intuitive dialogue comes from people who under the protection of anonymity are no longer afraid to voice their ideas. This has allowed people all over the world to connect and exchange ideas in ways people even twenty years ago could never have imagined.

At the same time, you discussed the problems that come with anonymity and there are definitely many. Many communities on the internet have become cesspools of bigotry, discrimination, and even sometimes violent or dangerous speech. Just because someone has access to a world of information and differing opinions doesn't mean they have to seek them out. Most people would rather have their own ideas enforced by like minded individuals, then seek out people of differing opinions who might make them question their beliefs and opinions. As a result, people tend to clump together on the internet, and when people agree with racist or derogatory statements, people are more willing to suggest even more repulsive speech. As we read in the case of autoadmit, when people started to post nasty rumors about Brittan Heller and Heide Iravani, hundreds of people jumped on the bandwagon. People didn't just stop at agreeing with other posters, they made up nastier and more disturbing lies to fuel the fire. Why? Because they thought it was funny and their was no one to hold them accountable.

All over the internet people have suffered at the hands of mobs. People who they've never met, never done anything to, choose to defame and discredit them simply because others are doing it too. People are now willing to flame and spew filth at random people in ways they would never do in person. because along with anonymity, the internet removes any sense of personal connection to the victim. This XKCD comic illustrates the issue of the internet quite nicely. When people on the internet forget that there are people at the other end of “the series of tubes” they lose all social boundaries, which is what I believe is one of the fundamental problems with the internet.

None the less, whether you view anonymity there are definitely obvious benefits to anonymity, but how anonymous can we really be? The idea of absolute anonymity you discussed is an interesting one, but is it even possible online? A graduate student in computer science, Latanya Sweeney, showed you can uniquely identify people with only three pieces of information: ZIP code, birth date, and sex. When people sign up for forums they almost always provide significantly more information than that. Even if the fabricate their application, their usually include a working email address and you can follow that back to find just about anyone you want.

Even people who try to hide from the world have great difficulty doing so if people are looking for them. A journalist at wired tried to hide from a legion of online searches for just a month, yet he failed. What chance does an average person have of absolute anonymity if even those trying for it can't achieve it.

One of the things you said was that you, “believe that the proper authorities should always, without fail, have the ability to trace Internet activity to a person, or at least to a small group of people.” The problem with that is one of the best properties of the internet is that we are building a global community online. The person you talk to online could be down the street or halfway across the world. How do you grant a country jurisdiction over something that doesn't belong to any one country. If people from all over the world participate in a forum where even criminal activity occurs, whose job is it to prosecute. Although we in the US often like to think we police the world, that is really neither our right nor our job, so how should one go about dealing with the Internet?

You mentioned the “recently popularized distrust of any kind of government,” but really the people we should be more worried about are bored people with too much time and a decent knowledge of the Internet. Society seems to have decided that people's privacy no longer matters. Anyone who chooses to participate in any online forum, and even many who don't, give up all rights to protection from harassment and defamation, and right now, people don't seem to care.

People have always felt that they had a right to privacy in their own homes and in fact this is one of the principles the United States was founded on. With the explosion of the internet, this privacy may soon be, and perhaps already is, a thing of the past. I wouldn't worry too much about perfect anonymity because I doubt it is going to be achievable in the near or even distant future. The world is getting smaller and there are less places to hide. On the other hand, people's basic privacy seems to be at stake. Should we be doing more to protect people's private lives? Is it the job of the government or should we establish a different code of conduct on the internet like Viktor Mayer-Schönberger suggests in Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age?

Is perfect anonymity something to strive for?

The Supreme Court has frequently ruled that anonymous free speech is protected by the First Amendment. In McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission, a resident of Ohio was fined for distributing handbills signed “Concerned parents and tax payers” rather than with her name. The Supreme Court, in their 1995 ruling, stated, “Protections for anonymous speech are vital to democratic discourse … Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority.” Indeed, this nation's tradition of respecting anonymity has made many great causes possible.

Anonymity can be the greatest equalizer in a discussion. People participating in such discussions shed, along with their names, their race, class, gender, and more. Though these traits can always be disclosed again, doing so becomes a choice of the speaker, who is no longer burdened by inescapable expectations, stereotypes, and discriminations. Whistleblowers who call out misconduct within corporations and governments would almost never have the courage to speak up if their voices could be traced to their identities—they would be placing their livelihood (and in some cases, their lives) at serious stake. Had Deep Throat not assisted Woodward and Bernstein in their investigative journalism, the Watergate scandal and Nixon's corruption might never have been revealed. More recently, Iranians used psuedonymity on the Internet to help organize rallies and protests with Twitter, speaking out against election fraud in the supposedly landslide victory of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Yet the less noble have just as many uses for anonymity. Without the fear of being caught, anonymity allows people to freely commit wicked crimes. Distribution of computer viruses and other malicious software, reproduction of child pornography, and illegal threats are all largely risk-free if one takes the proper precautions. Fox Nation, a recently-launched opinion site, predictably has some threads that go beyond death threats to the President, suggesting forceful takeover of Washington D.C., which would be treason.

Aside from such flatly detested and illegal activities, gray areas such as defamation and cyber-bullying are also essentially risk-free. Without fear of any repercussions, people are emboldened and say lecherous, insulting, and/or plainly untrue things they would never otherwise dare to—not only because they wouldn't have the courage to say it to their subject's face, but because they also would have to worry about their reputation becoming that of a perver, asshat, or idiot. Last year, Korean movie star Choi Jin-sil killed herself after malicious online rumors spread. She had also been harassed repeatedly for being a single, divorced mother, and said in interviews she “dreaded” the Internet. Anonymity might allow people to escape negative judgments regarding their gender, race, and defiance of social norms, but it also allows people to mock public figures for these same traits without becoming known for ugly speech. Much of the reason parts of the Internet have become cesspools of bigotry and perversion can be attributed to anonymity. Are we okay with that?

Of course, “perfect” anonymity—in which a evidence regarding a user's identity is literally impossible to find—is extremely difficult to achieve, but (to my understanding) it is possible, especially when one controls his or her own server equipment. Should we be allowing it? Thankfully, the most severe threats of death against Presidents and the like have been made by people who do not have a perfect understanding of how to avoid discovery, but if such techniques become more widespread and, eventually, commonplace, we might not be so lucky. We should stop and think about the impact of perfect anonymity before it becomes to late.

South Korea already has thought about it, and in an extremely controversial decision decided to order popular web portals to collect identifying information linked to their posts. Now portals with over 300,000 visitors a day must require users to enter names and matching national ID numbers. The move has led opposition parties to accuse the party in power of ruling the Internet with attempting to “rule cyberspace with martial law.”

Though this might be considered a rather extreme solution (not to mention one that is unlikely to exist in the US due to our lack of a national identification system aside from the laughably easy to steal Social Security Numbers), it will be interesting to see how it plays out. South Korea is on of the countries (if not the country) with the highest percentage of citizens using the Internet—over 75% of the population is on the Internet—so they can be viewed as a example of how other countries' Internet culture might look like and behave in the years to come.

I personally believe that the proper authorities should always, without fail, have the ability to trace Internet activity to a person, or at least to a small group of people. Of course, I'm sure many people would disagree with me, especially given the recently popularized distrust in any kind of government power whatsoever. They would likely scream about abuse, and I agree that allowing the government the ability to find out such information on a whim isn't wise. I would propose some kind of warrant system, where the authorities only have the ability to find a person's identity 1) to help them prevent some urgent and dangerous act (terrorism, shooting, assassination, invasion of DC, etc.) or 2) when there is significant evidence that a serious crime (production of child pornography, harassment, etc.) has taken place.

This is getting a bit long, so I guess I'll end by pitching Gabrielle a question. Do you think absolute anonymity—in which it is basically impossible for a person's identity to be discovered—is a good thing to have?

Introduction

The internet is quickly becoming the largest forum for communication and social interactions. People from around the world have the ability to discuss and interact like never before. This incredible growth has changed the way people view the world, and has permanently altered the way people interact. The internet has provided a level playing field where anyone's ideas and opinions can be shared and where anyone can stand up and be heard regardless of their economic or social standing. Gone are the days when the media controlled what people could see or read. The internet has allowed the masses to take a stand.

This explosion of technology has not come without problems however. In a world where nothing is the same as it was rules and regulations that applied to the physical world have less meaning. Issues of speech, privacy, and anonymity are some of the most important in this day and age. Is it anyone's job to regulate the internet? And if so, Whose? Who's job is it to protect people from slander and defamation on the internet? What should people be able to keep private and what do they give up to become part of the society online? When does anonymity become a burden to society rather than a blessing. These are all highly debated and extremely important questions that will determine the future of the internet and our society.

In this blog, Michael and I hope to discuss our views on these topics and decide what we think the best course of action will be. Both of us are interested in these subjects yet have very torn opinions. Because neither of us have drawn strong conclusions about any of the topics, we feel that such a discussion would be both interesting—as both of us could easily sway back and forth when strong arguments are presented—and beneficial—as it may help us make up our minds.