more ideas on anonymity

[Perry E. Metzger]

> From: Theodore Ts'o <tytso at athena.mit.edu>
> 
>    Date: Mon, 1 Mar 93 13:27:24 EST
>    From: pmetzger at shearson.com (Perry E. Metzger)
> 
>    Now, on the issue of slander, the notion of anonymity
>    is largely unimportant. If I had walked into the middle of the street and
>    ranted for an hour saying that GM trucks are unsafe, that would be largely
>    ignored, as most anonymous denunciations likely are. The issue is if a
>    non-anonymous individual or entity with credibility, like NBC, says
>    something that is false.
> 
> I don't know about that.  It is certainly true that non-anonymous
> individual or entity with credibility, like NBC, can do the most amount
> of damage when they slander someone.
> 
> But what about someone who sends 20 different mail messages, each
> through a different remailer path so they have different reply
> addresses, all of them detailing some similar (but false) story about
> how some GM truck went up in flames aftering being hit lightly by a Geo
> Metro?  Or suppose someone sends 20 messages (all different) about how
> Perry Metzger stiffed him/her out of some amount of digital cash?  I'd
> suspect you could do some real damage that way.  Not as much, perhaps,
> as something like a faked demonstration tape broadcast on prime-time
> evening news, but damange nevertheless.

I doubt it. As people get more and more used to the capacity to do
such things, its likely that such anonymous accounts will be more and
more untrusted.

Perry