At 01:42 PM 9/4/01 -0700, John Young wrote:
On ZKS selling anonymizing products that are publicly available to governmental officials does raise an issue of whether officials should, or should be able to, conceal their official identities when working cyberspace in an official capacity. I think not, though it might be as impossible to get officials to comply as with terrorists so long as the technology is there.
It seems to me that John is taking the first steps toward a general argument: That police should not be allowed to do undercover work. His argument, taken to its logical conclusion, would prevent police from infiltrating criminal organizations in meatspace (let's assume, for the moment, that we're talking about serious criminal acts against property and person, not victimless crimes). I propose that all anonymizers adopt a code of practice that
any sale to officials of anonymizers or their use be disclosed to the public (I suggested this to ZKS early on when first meetings with the feds to explain the technology were being sometimes disclosed). That seems to be a reasonable response to officially-secret prowling and investigating cyberspace.
What happens when Anonymous Software Inc. sells its prepaid 300-minutes of anonymous browing kit through CompUSA and PC Warehouse? And, as others have pointed out, the people you most want to catch with this rule would have the strongest incentive to evade it. Anonymous remailers and browsing technology is user- and value-neutral. As a practical matter, it makes sense to assume that the Feds are using it. -Declan