Official Anonymizing

[John Young]

On ZKS selling anonymizing products that are publicly available 
to governmental officials does raise an issue of whether officials
should, or should be able to, conceal their official identities when 
working cyberspace in an official capacity. I think not, though
it might be as impossible to get officials to comply as with
terrorists so long as the technology is there.

Paul Sylverson, at NRL, took me to task recently for outing
officials, claiming that one of the primary purposes of onion
routing was to allow officials to conceal their actions in
cyberspace. I answered that it was my opinion that officials
had no right to conceal their identity when on the job, not
the military, not the spooks, indeed, they should be obliged
to reveal identity in cyberspace when at work, if not of the
person then of the agency.

Nobody has yet seen an fbi.gov in the logs, or nsa.mil/gov,
though a few ucia.gov and nro.gov crop up, and the ubiquitous 
nscs.mil.

That this would not apply to these officials in their private
lives, that then they deserved fullest possible privacy protection.
But none at all in their official roles.

I propose that all anonymizers adopt a code of practice that
any sale to officials of anonymizers or their use be disclosed 
to the public (I suggested this to ZKS early on when first 
meetings with the feds to explain the technology were being 
sometimes disclosed). That seems to be a reasonable response 
to officially-secret prowling and investigating cyberspace.

If officials want to do that in secret they should obtain a public
license, say to use onion, pipenet, remailers, or ZKS, Safeweb, 
and so on. That's a public license, not a government one, for
a fee to help pay for the public's use without cost.





At 12:57 PM 9/4/01 -0400, you wrote:
>On Fri, Aug 31, 2001 at 06:48:24PM -0700, Greg Broiles wrote:
>> When you talk about "collaborating" and ZKS selling beta software to the 
>> NSA, are you saying you've got information that ZKS gave the NSA access to 
>> more information than the general public got, and/or that the NSA got
their 
>> access or information meaningfully earlier than the general public?
>> 
>> If that's the case, that's interesting, but that's too serious a claim to 
>> let pass by as an unstated implication.
>> 
>> If that's not the case - and they had the same access to the Freedom beta 
>> code that the rest of us outsiders/Cypherpunks/critics/commentators did - 
>> then I don't see an issue here.
>
>Right. Selling the same products to the Feds that are available to the
>general public is not generally objectionable, and I don't see what the
>issue is with ZKS here.
>
>One might as well complain about the NSA buying symbolic debuggers.
>
>-Declan