Let me try to restate John's proposal, which has some very attractive qualities. There are a few questions, it seems to me: 1. Should we require by law that government employees never act under cover of anonymity? (In practice, what does that mean? Does that mean they can't lie about their truename, or does it mean that they have to affirmatively volunteer their employment status?) 2. Since the people enforcing this hypothetical law are the same people with the greatest incentives to violate it, what makes a disinterested observer believe that it will be effective? If we're not interested in effectiveness, why don't we just pass a law saying "no more police brutality" or "no cop shall violate someone's civil liberties?" 3. Since the people regulated by this hypothetical law who would object to it have innumerable allies in the legislatures of this fair nation, what makes a disinterested observer believe that this proposal could ever be anything more than a thought experiment? 4. Should privacy-providing companies pledge to disclose the identities of their .gov purchasers? Do we think that .govs will follow this rule, or use cutouts? Will it be effective when the tools can be freely downloaded or bought at CompUSA? Me, I tend to think that federal agents shouldn't be infiltrating U.S. political parties, that the extent of undercover police work could be profitably scaled back quite a bit, that the IRS has few if any reasons to send its agents undercover, and that intelligence agencies have no business running operations domestically. Contrary to what John says, I'm happy to look critically at "homeland defense plans" -- what I've said is simply that this HD campaign has not yet eroded our civil libertes to the point where we have none. Be concerned, but not terrified. I think John has a valid point when he says that we should look askance at anonymity firms that help government spy on us. Companies would be well-advised to make their practices (we sell to Feds, we refuse to sell to Feds) public. But the market being what it is, the tools so well-discussed in so many circles, and the switch from .mil or .gov to .org or .com so easy, that I suspect such promises might give us only a false sense of security. -Declan At 04:33 PM 9/4/01 -0700, John Young wrote:
I try to abide the principle that if one gets anonymized all should. However, there is a disparity in who gets to leverage that anonymity -- from the citizen to the empowered official.
We have now more privilege of conealment on the official side, and that needs redress, constant redress a rebel might yell.
Not much of my proposal is radical: there is a long tradition for officials to own up to what they do in their official roles. The uniformed police, the uniformed military services. That is far less done in the case of the spooks and, increasingly lately, law enforcement and the military as the latter adopt the practices and more importantly the technology of spooks -- and the spooks' lack of public accountability (those oversight committees are a fraud).
The culture of secrecy is vastly overweighted in favor of government, and much of that derives from hoary claims of national security. Undercover and covert operations have become far more pervasive in the US government and military than ever, and constitute a privileged elite in mil/gov, and often law enforcement, moving from the federal agencies into state and locals -- and contractors and suppliers for all these. And all are bound by a complicitous and luxurious veil of secrecy.
It is fairly common for goodhearts to question government but not when national security, and more recently, domestic security, is bruited. But that is due to a well-crafted educational campaign to raise national security to a theological level, and its rational is itself cloaked in secrecy. A similar theologizing is underway, methinks despite Declan's unreflective demurral, in the campaign for combatting domestic terrorism, the Homeland Defense demonolgy.
Having learned much here about the futility of trying to determine who gets privacy technology and who does not, it remains true that for most of us access to this technology is very recent and we know not what lies outside our knowledge.
I am not as sanguine about government as I was before being semi-educated by this list about what technology is in covert use.
And I am not as sanguine about the wisdom of providing technology to government on the same footing as the citizen. There is more than a bit of marketing opportunism is this view -- and government knows very well what power the purse has to seduce young firms into the world of secrecy.
So I say again, that despite it being economic foolhardiness, indeed because it is that, there needs to be a code of practice for anonimyzer developers to state their policy of helping governments snoop on us without us knowing. Agnosticism in this matter is complicity when such a stance cloaks government intrusiveness.
Look, I'll accept that we will all succumb to the power of the market, so limit my proposal for full disclosure to those over 30. After that age one should know there is no way to be truly open-minded.