Anonymity at any cost, from The Netly News

Tue Nov 25 00:04:12 PST 1997

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At 12:31 PM 11/24/97 -0500, Declan McCullagh wrote:
>*********
>
>http://cgi.pathfinder.com/netly/opinion/0,1042,1594,00.html
>
>The Netly News (http://netlynews.com/)
>November 24, 1997
>
>Anonymity At Any Cost
>by Declan McCullagh (declan at well.com)

The conference must have been interesting. I wish I'd been there.
A few random thoughts:

1. The article doesn't bring this out, but Infonex hosts many/most
of the US based remailers, including the one Joey Grasty and I run
(ran, actually, as we are facing a technical problem at the moment
due to an anti-spam measure taken by Infonex). This makes Lance a
"choke point," just as Sameer was when c2 was in the ISP business.
ISPs with that "go get a warrant/court order" attitude aren't too
common. Telecommunications businesses (especially phone companies)
have historically cooperated with law enforcement.

2. I think that the courts will look at paid-for anonymity cases in
a different way from cases where anonymity is "donated" by trouble-
makers like Joey Grasty. I doubt, for example, that the feds learned
nothing in the Zimmermann case about picking defendants. My buddy
Joey - working at Motorola and living with a wife, cute kid, mother
in law, and cat - is fortunately not that defendant, IMO. A nasty-
looking Austrian Nazi, paying a US provider to break Austrian laws,
just might be. [Ironic that the anonymity which protects him would
certainly be outlawed under the very system that he advocates.]

3. I'd be interested to know the make-up of, and arguments put forth
by, the group(s) which decided the government should limit anonymity.
Obviously, they weighed the costs differently than many of us would.

4. No remailer operator that I am aware of would keep logs for Freeh,
we'd all shut down instead. Keeping records, even if not directly for
law enforcement, automatically makes you a target for them, and for
compelled disclosure by civil attorneys in discovery. "Don't do it,
mon."

If (when) a law or treaty gets passed with the effect of outlawing
anonymous browsing/remailers, it won't appear with a nice, easy to
understand preface that says: "this is an act to outlaw anonymity,
and/or require anonymous service providers to keep records for law
enforcement." It will probably look more like the recent criminal
copyright bill, and rely on hard-to-interpret words like "willful,"
which morph as they move from a civil to a criminal realm. My old
nemesis, the changing definition of the word "escrow," was merely a
warning. Future definition fudging is unlikely to be as brazen, but
will probably be just as dangerous to freedom and privacy.
JMR
[Since I'm not directly on c-punks, please cc any replies to me.]