See also: http://politechbot.com/pipermail/politech/2003-December/000268.html ---
Date: Fri, 05 Dec 2003 09:12:16 -0500 To: politech@politechbot.com From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> Subject: Larry Lessig replies to Politech over limiting anonymity [fs][priv]
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[Why do I get the feeling that Larry Lessig doesn't like "absolute" anonymity much at all? Systems for building and defending "absolute" anonymity already exist in the form of anonymous remailers and Freenet, among others. It would be foolish to follow Larry's advice and concede too quickly that such technologies have so few legitimate uses that they cannot be reasonably defended. Even the oft-benighted Eurocrats have recognized this: a 1997 EC directive encourages anonymity, as does a German federal law (http://www.iid.de/rahmen/iukdgebt.html). In the U.S., since the Federalist Papers were published with effectively "absolute" pseudonymity, surely the framers of the U.S. Constitution had them in mind when crafting the Bill of Rights. Justice Thomas lists more contemporaneous examples in his McIntyre concurrence (http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/93-986.ZC1.html). Saying anonymous technologies are indefensible concedes a crucial point: that the government's power is so sweeping that police have the right to learn our identity in all cases. So much for whistleblowing and anonymous reports of public brutality.
Perhaps more to the point, the twin privacy-encroaching technologies of automated electronic surveillance and efficient large-scale databases did not exist decades or centuries ago. "Absolute" anonymity lets us reclaim some of that lost zone of privacy. Lastly, trying to remove "absolute" anonymity from the Internet (banning strong encryption and computers that can be programmed not to keep logs) would be far more disruptive, destructive, and harmful than proposals like Hollings' CBDTPA that Larry has rightly opposed. --Declan]
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From: Lawrence Lessig <lessig@pobox.com> Cc: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> Subject: Re: [Politech] Economist, Lessig want to preserve freedom by ending anonymity [fs][priv] Date: Fri, 5 Dec 2003 10:16:31 +0900 To: Aaron Swartz <me@aaronsw.com>
It's not an inaccurate quote, but it is taken out of context.
What I said was that the trend in our laws was to destroy any privacy at all -- that the idiocy of Patriot Acts, etc., was effectively eliminating any form of privacy. There are two kinds of responses to this -- one to try to defend and build a system protecting absolute anonymity; the second is to build effective protections for pseudonymous life, which is shorthand for traceable transactions, but where the permission to trace is protected by something like a warrant requirement. I'm not saying the government should build these systems, but that they should be permitted and indeed encouraged.
In my view, we will make no progress following path one, but that we would strongly advance privacy if we could advance path two. A strong ethic and architecture of pseudonymous identity, properly protected, would give us more privacy than we have today.
Of course, it is possible (and probably likely) that such an architecture would not properly protect the link between a transaction and the privacy of a person. Government officials, for example, upon mere suspicion would be able to break the link, etc. That of course is not what I am promoting. I would promote a regime where the gov't required a very strong warrant-like reason before it could break the code that makes the link. But I will not that the baseline from which we're starting is a world where no real showing is necessary for this sort of surveillance.
On Dec 4, 2003, at 9:26 AM, Aaron Swartz wrote:
To preserve freedom further, suggests Mr Lessig, anonymity could be replaced by [warrant-traceable] pseudonymity.
Can you explain this? The Economist article seemed to be total nonsense, but I'm surprised they paraphrase you as saying something like this. In general, for eliminating anonymity to make sense you need to answer three questions:
1. Is anonymity the problem? Between DMCA subpoenas and national security letters, it seems that very few people on the Internet have even limited anonymity.
2. Will the people who are anonymous evade things? The people who _are_ anonymous, of course, are people like crackers. If you outlaw anonymity, crackers will likely find security holes that let them hide their identity and pass their actions off as those of others (e.g. using the WiFi network of some squeaky-clean grandma to launch the attacks).
3. Is it worth the cost? Even if you can answer the above questions, it'll be difficult to do without knocking large groups of people off the Internet. (If the digital divide is bad now, imagine what it'll be like when you need a credit card to get on the Net.)
Were you misquoted? If not, can you answer these questions? Or is this more blind optimism? -- Aaron Swartz: http://www.aaronsw.com/
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