CDT's Berman Opposes Online Anonymity
AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION WASHINGTON OFFICE 122 Maryland Avenue, NE November 1, 1985 Washington, DC 20002 -------------------- National Headquarters Mr. David Chaum 132 West 43rd Street Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science New York. NY 10036 P.O. Box 4079 (212) 944-9800 19O9 AB Amsterdam Norman Dorsen President Dear Mr. Chaum: Ira Glasser Executive Director Eleanor Holmes Norton CHAIR National Advisory Council Thank you for sending me a most interesting article. A society of individuals and organizations that would expend the time and resources to use a series of 'digital pseudonyms' to avoid data linkage does not in my opinion make big brother obsolete but acts on the assumption that big brother is ever present. I view your system as a form of societal paranoia. As a matter of principle, we are working to enact formal legal protections for individual privacy rather than relying on technical solutions. We want to assume a society of law which respects legal limits rather than a society that will disobey the law, requiring citizens to depend on technical solutions. e.g. require a judical warrant for government interception of data communications rather than encrypt all messages on the assumption that regardless of the lawt the government will abuse its power and invade privacy. As a matter of practicality, I do not think your system offers much hope for privacy. First, the trend toward universal identifiers is as much a movement generated by government or industry's desire to keep track of all citizens as it is by citizens seeking simplicity and convenience in all transactions. At best, your system would benefit the sophisticated and most would opt for simplicity. The poor and the undereducated would never use or benefit from it. Finally where there's a will, there's a way. If government wants to link data bases, it will, by law, require the disclosure of various individual pseudonyms used by citizens or prohibit it for data bases which the government wants to link. Since corporations make money by trading commercial lists with one another, they will never adopt the system or if it is adopted, will use "fine printn contracts to permit selling various codes used by their customers to other firms. The solution remains law, policy, and consensus about limits on government or corporate intrusion into areas of individual autonomy. Technique can be used to enforce that consensus or to override it. It cannot be used as a substitute for such consensus. Sincerely Yours, /Sig/ Jerry J. Berman Chief Legislative Counsel & Direrector ACLU Privacy Technology Project cc: John Shattuck
At 9:48 AM -0700 7/21/97, Anonymous wrote:
AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION
WASHINGTON OFFICE
122 Maryland Avenue, NE November 1, 1985 Washington, DC 20002
... In fairness to Berman, in 1985 very few people were thinking seriously about these issues, and Chaum's paper (presumably the one published that year in "Communicatons of the ACM") was probably seen as far-off technology then. I'd be more interested to see Berman's more recent views on online anonymity. It might well be that in 1985 he saw little hope for technological solutions, and understandably placed more faith in legislative solutions. Now that the technology for anonymity is widely deployed, this situation has changed. If Berman or any of the other "cyber rights" groups were to call for bans on anonymity, this would be news indeed. (And I don't expect them to. The Supreme Court rulings on anonymous leafletting and speech were pretty clearcut.) --Tim May There's something wrong when I'm a felon under an increasing number of laws. Only one response to the key grabbers is warranted: "Death to Tyrants!" ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1398269 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."
----- Forwarded message from Jerry Berman ----- As you probably noticed, this letter was written in 1985 and represented the position of the ACLU at that time. Times, and organizations, and technology have changed dramatically in the last 12 years, and so has my view on this issue. I strongly believe both legal *and* technical protections are essential to guarantee privacy rights (including the right to anonymity) and have worked, with my associates at CDT and others on the Net, to promote the use of strong ecnryption as a way to protect privacy. I also continue to work for legal restrictions on electronic surveillance. Please post this wherever you think this might clarify my position and the debate. Thanks, Jerry Berman ----- End of forwarded message from Jerry Berman -----
As far as I can tell, law, custom, and technology are the three ways we have to protect our privacy. Cypherpunks are well aware of the technological options, so I won't discuss them further except to note that they probably are not, by themselves, enough. Law has also been discussed, including the European privacy laws and similar laws which have been proposed for the US. One good thing about the European mindset on privacy is that it seems to include resistance to legal suppression of privacy technology. The last is custom. This approach appears in cypherpunk discussions as an emphasis on contractual relations between people and the organizations receiving data. It is this area I would like to discuss. What makes a good privacy contract? What should you expect when you buy something? What is the standard contract? What exceptions must be clearly noted? How does society decide these cultural issues? I strongly believe in standard contracts because they greatly reduce transaction costs. Where the parties need different terms, they can negotiate exceptions. However, we do not have standard privacy contracts which match our new communication and database technologies. We don't even have a good public debate on the issues involved. Unfortunately, it seems that the only way to raise these issues to the radar scope of the news media/public is to have some congresscritter propose a law. Even more unfortunately, said law usually preempts people's right to contract with each other, rather than just setting a framework for the contract negotiations. There must be a better way. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bill Frantz | The Internet was designed | Periwinkle -- Consulting (408)356-8506 | to protect the free world | 16345 Englewood Ave. frantz@netcom.com | from hostile governments. | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA
On Tue, 22 Jul 1997, Bill Frantz wrote:
As far as I can tell, law, custom, and technology are the three ways we have to protect our privacy. Cypherpunks are well aware of the technological options, so I won't discuss them further except to note that they probably are not, by themselves, enough. ... The last is custom. This approach appears in cypherpunk discussions as an emphasis on contractual relations between people and the organizations receiving data. It is this area I would like to discuss. ... What makes a good privacy contract? What should you expect when you buy something? What is the standard contract? What exceptions must be clearly noted? How does society decide these cultural issues?
A contract is something within law and enforcable by courts, so you aren't really talking "custom". And even with private contracts, not everything is enforcable. Other times something like a contract (IANAL) is created such as when I buy a product unless it says "as-is" it has some implicit warranties under the universal commercial code. Contracts are good things, but they are cumbersome because they have to be negotiated on the spot [like the man at computer city who wrote on the back of his check for their "club" membership - acceptance of this ... says you won't send me junkmail; They deposited the check and he sued and won]. On a web page, I usually cannot send an E-NDA in the form they want me to fill out (so I often leave spaces blank or with obviously bad numbers and some comment to contact me). This is usually less efficient than phoning. This leaves Custom as such, a social instead of a legal contract. The net has been good at policing its own. Web pages asking for email addresses aren't supposed to forward them to spambots. They now often state this explicitly. If someone says something wrong in a discussion group, they get flamed, and if they do it enough, they are placed in everyone's kill file. The problem is that culture takes a while to learn, and with everyone with different customs comes to the net, they may not see anything wrong with doing something they are used to (for a physical world example: some local immigrants from an area where barter was the custom tried haggling on price-tagged items until they figured out what was going on). Custom is determined by evolution, not by specification. And that cannot be accelerated, and will be a problem until everyone has been on the net long enough to establish a common set of manners. How much information does someone retain? Enough so that a web page presents your desired configuration without having to retype it? Should they pass this on to a sister site? A different company? The worst thing that can happen is to codify custom. I can see that as the reason to avoid "Voluntary Ratings", because as soon as a misrated (who determines?) page comes up, it becomes cause for a legal action, and then everyone will want it to be manditory and enforced. So a measure of politeness (indicating what the content might be so it can be filtered) becomes a political battle, almost as if I don't go out and say something offensive in public every day then I am not defending my first ammendment rights - which is only slightly less bizzarre than some of the judicial decisions. --- reply to tzeruch - at - ceddec - dot - com ---
At 12:22 AM -0700 7/23/97, Bill Frantz wrote:
I'm not sure I agree that the evolution of custom can not be accelerated. If we actively discuss the proper limits to use of private information, are we not accelerating the development of consensus about what are reasonable policies. It is precisely the lack of such discussion, and the lack of trust that accompanies it that leaves us in the situation we find ourselves in; between the well defined Netiquette of the ARPANET days, and whatever our commercial net will evolve.
There are a lot of choices. For example:
(1) Don't remember anything about me as an individual. (2) Don't share any individual data. (3) Feel free to share, but leave my name off. (4) Sell the data, but give me a piece of the action.
I can imagine that any of these will be acceptable to some people.
But these "agreements" have two sides. None of the four choices you list are of any interest to me, for example, and whether you find them acceptable is of no interest to me. (I am not trying to be rude to Bill, just making the point forcefully that I don't particularly care that these four choices are acceptable to "some people.") I of course remember _lots_ of things about people, I share those memories on occasion (without requesting permission), I mention names, and I certainly don't recall every giving one of the subjects of my memories a cut of the action. In a free society, it is not possible or acceptable to control what others remember or gossip about. Or even sell commercially. "Custom" only applies to those who adopt the custom--the "law" is for everyone else. The question is: do we have a law demanding that people not remember certain things, or not gossip about what they've observed? I think even a totalitarian society will have well-known problems enforcing such laws. I'd've thought this obvious, but Bill's post makes me wonder. --Tim May There's something wrong when I'm a felon under an increasing number of laws. Only one response to the key grabbers is warranted: "Death to Tyrants!" ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1398269 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."
At 8:52 AM -0700 7/22/97, Unprivileged user wrote:
Custom is determined by evolution, not by specification. And that cannot be accelerated, and will be a problem until everyone has been on the net long enough to establish a common set of manners. How much information does someone retain? Enough so that a web page presents your desired configuration without having to retype it? Should they pass this on to a sister site? A different company?
I'm not sure I agree that the evolution of custom can not be accelerated. If we actively discuss the proper limits to use of private information, are we not accelerating the development of consensus about what are reasonable policies. It is precisely the lack of such discussion, and the lack of trust that accompanies it that leaves us in the situation we find ourselves in; between the well defined Netiquette of the ARPANET days, and whatever our commercial net will evolve. There are a lot of choices. For example: (1) Don't remember anything about me as an individual. (2) Don't share any individual data. (3) Feel free to share, but leave my name off. (4) Sell the data, but give me a piece of the action. I can imagine that any of these will be acceptable to some people. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bill Frantz | The Internet was designed | Periwinkle -- Consulting (408)356-8506 | to protect the free world | 16345 Englewood Ave. frantz@netcom.com | from hostile governments. | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA
At 12:53 AM -0700 7/23/97, Tim May wrote:
(I am not trying to be rude to Bill, just making the point forcefully that I don't particularly care that these four choices are acceptable to "some people.")
It is this kind of attitude I wish to encourage thru custom, certainly not law.
I of course remember _lots_ of things about people, I share those memories on occasion (without requesting permission), I mention names, and I certainly don't recall every giving one of the subjects of my memories a cut of the action.
In a free society, it is not possible or acceptable to control what others remember or gossip about. Or even sell commercially.
"Custom" only applies to those who adopt the custom--the "law" is for everyone else. The question is: do we have a law demanding that people not remember certain things, or not gossip about what they've observed? I think even a totalitarian society will have well-known problems enforcing such laws.
When I was in Malasia, I saw signs in many stores which said in effect, In accordance with Islamic law, we offer fair prices. My experience with prices in stores with these signs is that they were lower than in some of the other stores. A similar approach could evolve for network sites. A sign saying that we follow the US Chamber of Commerce's code on fair information practices could easily evolve. My questions are, what should that code contain? And, how many different codes do we need? ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bill Frantz | The Internet was designed | Periwinkle -- Consulting (408)356-8506 | to protect the free world | 16345 Englewood Ave. frantz@netcom.com | from hostile governments. | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA
Tim May wrote:
In fairness to Berman, in 1985 very few people were thinking seriously about these issues, and Chaum's paper (presumably the one published that year in "Communicatons of the ACM") was probably seen as far-off technology then.
I'd be more interested to see Berman's more recent views on online anonymity.
It might well be that in 1985 he saw little hope for technological solutions, and understandably placed more faith in legislative solutions.
Now that the technology for anonymity is widely deployed, this situation has changed.
I think we've all been thru this before, with the Esther Dyson flap and so on. That was then, this is now. Online anonymity was not much of a real issue ten years ago, and I doubt most readers had formed much of an opinion on it. On private BBSes it was prevelant, and on academic and corporate networks it was virtually nonexistant. As these networks began to merge, not surprisingly people came down on both sides of the issue, but their opinions were backed more by convention than by the facts of the situation. I think that as time has progessed, people have come to see the reasons behind it. Five years ago, there was considerable debate over whether anon.penet.fi should exist, today almost everyone takes for granted the right to post anonymously. For all the animosity he has caused, Spamford Wallace has shown us why you don't want people to know your email address. Some of you may remember the comments made on the list by a certain law professor, who said he wouldn't post to usenet because he didn't want to get junk mail. In hindsight we can laugh at that remark in light of the obvious solution.
participants (5)
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3umoelle＠informatik.uni-hamburg.de -
Bill Frantz -
nobody＠REPLAY.COM -
Tim May -
Unprivileged user