CDR: Re: Reputation, Identity, and Belief

[David Honig]

At 01:06 PM 10/18/00 -0400, Tim May wrote:
>At 12:31 PM -0400 10/18/00, David Honig wrote:
>>I suggest Reputation Hijacking, but don't expect the lexicon to change.
>
>And I think all of these examples/phrases miss the essential point.
...
>Alice does not own her reputation.
>Alice does not own her identity.
>Alice does not own the trust others have in her various credentials.
...
>Crypto and related tools offer Alice and others the means to make 
>such casual "thefts" (aspersions, etc.) harder to do. Alice can 
>digitally sign to "prove" mathematically she is the  holder of 
>certain credentials. And so on, for the obvious extensions to webs of 
>trust, webs of doubt, webs of gossip, etc.
>
>Any talk of "theft" or "misappropriation" misses this key point.

Good point.  Perhaps 'fraud by impersonation' is better.

...
>"Where do I go to get my reputation back?" Think about it.

I suppose a chick with a sullied reputation has to go to a different social
clique where they haven't heard of her, won't recognize her, and don't
communicate with the clique that implements the first reputation.  You'll
note I've phrased it so that the reputation is *distributed* amongst the
former clique, which I think is your point: reputation (and the
polymoderators thereof) is a private, nongovernmental matter.  If you want
to believe the council of rabbis or the better business bureau or the
FTC its your choice.

Of course, the maligned chick should have been using crypto to protect
herself.  Still, I'm aware of no protocol that will prevent malicious
collaborators from claiming wrong things about her, e.g., if they restrict
their libel to her and otherwise maintain trustworthy.  PK sigs don't help.

ALSO, infosec is a *system* property, and you may have to trust others
that you don't control.  E.G., your (nominally private and typically
authenticating) SSID was leaked to the public; this could be used
to harass you.  Similarly with digitized fingerprints that the DMV owns a
copy of, etc.  Which reminds me that you can't change those; meatspace
'identity' has a problem in that fingers will be used as authenticators, so
meat-identity can't be as... parallel... as fully informational identities,
like nyms.

Anyway, I don't think I ever claimed I "owned" my reputation (in the
sense of being able to get the govt to coerce you to act that way).  But I
am bound to (I was going to write, "own") my 'responsibility to creditors',
abuse of which by forging my meatspace-id is fraud, which the govt
is reasonable in using violence to prevent.  I suspect that you regard
such impersonation-fraud as theft, as I do.  I suspect we also both
regard any violence-based (ie, govt) rules wrt linking meat to
bits as unconstitional limits on freedom of speech.  Both points
need to be communicated to Joe Sixpack, Joeseph Merlot, and Johannes
Bourbon III.

dh