s1018954@aix2.uottawa.ca writes:

My apologies for responding to a political post.

On Sat, 13 Jan 1996, Charlie Merritt wrote:

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I feel that public exposure is enough to put fear into these anonymous government employees. You will note that when they get the mad_bomber some FBI guy jumps right up and takes credit, live, on TV. But when the Air Force orders a $300 toilet seat NO ONE is credited.

It's interesting how we advocate anonymity for ourselves but not for our opponents. Feeling righteous?

I agree with Charlie. These government employees claim to be working for the american taxpayers, of which group I am a member. Government agents must, therefore, expect to be accountable to the citizens, while accountability in the other direction is virtually the definition of tyranny.

*Overlong and badly edited argument in underhanded support of government anonymity follows, it gets better towards the end, feel free to skim* On Mon, 15 Jan 1996, Scott Brickner wrote:

s1018954@aix2.uottawa.ca writes:

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My apologies for responding to a political post. Here I go again.

I agree with Charlie. These government employees claim to be working for the american taxpayers, of which group I am a member. Government agents must, therefore, expect to be accountable to the citizens, while accountability in the other direction is virtually the definition of tyranny.

I mostly agree with that argument on even days and mostly disagree with it on odd ones. The way I see it mostly depends on whether or not you believe in organizational thermodynamics ("the center cannot hold, entropy increases...") and positive and practical uses of absolute freedom of speech (and by extension the anonymity to keep it that way). Should government employees be "allowed" to have access to the package deal of anonymity (and money laundering) that we are pushing? First you should check whether or not they already do and in what form it comes. As we've seen in (among many other things) the persecution of Phil Z., there definitely are the proverbial nameless bureaucrats. Is this not anonymity? FOIA filings or suits cost money, time and sanity. While you can get the odd tidbit out of this method, it is not for the faint-hearted and will not get you anything that the government wants to keep classified (except in the really odd case that it was temporarily unclassified by accident). If government accountability is to be based upon this disclosure method, then it is on very shaky footing. This is anonymity, not the overt and freely usable anonymity of the cypherpunk style, but covert anonymity, that which is exists for an entrenched institution while giving the public impression of not being there and justifying inadequate measures like the FOIA. This is a form of organizational stegonography, I guess. Consider on the other hand if a large part of the govermental communications infrastructure, let's say email and groupware were conducted through a remailernet or somesuch cpunk-style anonymizing scheme. Would bureaucratic secrecy get any worse? Since I am neither an active activist nor a journalist, I cannot say. I do know that besides the natural desire of the spook agencies to work this way, many businesses have often claimed that there are pruductivity advantages to anonymous offices communications and boardroom meetings. They tend to generate creative ideas and encourage honesty and outspokenness by those lower on the pecking order. So there are legitimate business uses for it. The more legitimate the concept becomes, the more people get used to it and start thinking about the advantages and the implications of not using True Names. (I realize this has been said before, bide with me.) Think of it as grass-roots crypto vs. institutional stego. Legitimacy, publicity and widespread use are one thing, giving it to government is another. The argument is that if we legitimize privacy for the gov, that's the end of democracy. IMO, if you sell people on the illusion of fourth estate power to verify gov action and render them accountable, you are living in an even more dangerous form of self-denial and willful ignorance. So far so good, nothing new. But what if there are actual benefits to be had? If cypherpunks have some latent desire to speak freely, maybe this is a natural tendency for everyone else too. Ottawa is the bureaucratic capital of this country. In my short stay here, the most vehement opposition to the bureaucracy and red tape I have heard has been from the fed-up bureaucrats themselves. They are the poor saps who must deal with this stupidity and waste day-in day-out. I assume the military and the spooks have it the worst (and I have heard them say just that). AFAIK this is our best constituency. Notice that Tim, of all people, is from a government town. Journalists frequently get anonymous tips, the gov even occasionally pays lip-service to setting up an anonymous whistleblowers BBS. How were books like The Puzzle Palace written if not with inside help and off-the-record interviews. Need I mention the Pentagon Papers? Anonymity is something the government (the organization) craves, yet allowing its employees to use the anonymity we as cypherpunks want could be the most underhanded present possible. Not only does it entrench it (if the entire government has it, how could they ban it?) but allows individuals within it to pass on the info they please without fear of persecution. If we are ever to get, let's say, the Skipjack algorithm, this scenario is much more likely than reverse-engineering of Clipper. This has many implications. Anonymous government employees are IMHO a far more effective check on power than a disinterested easy-profit oriented mainstream press and overstretched civil liberties lobbies. Think of it as one organization with 3 million potential unions. Can anyone imagine what would have happenned if even one of the pilots during the Gulf War had been able to anonymously post a video of the carpet-bombing of Iraq or any other contradiction of official reporting? No journalist could have done this. The decentralizing, entropic power of masses of thinking individuals has more power than centralized paper-shuffling court-martialing rule. The gov is already out of control, maybe it will go out of control in a different direction once the technology of free speech permits it. There is also very little we can do to stop anyone from using it. As Louis Freeh has discovered, once the technological genie is out of the bottle, it stays out. Should I be wrong about these positive implications, once the code written, just as the inventors of nukes turned pacifist, the authors of crypto software will have no control over their creation. Giving to the public amounts to giving it to the gov. I simply prefer that it be overt rather than covert. I will not even go into the positively underhanded benefits of giving the gov anon digicash. The issues are the same, but even moreso. Three cheers for capitalism.