Official Anonymizing

[Declan McCullagh]

Let me try to restate John's proposal, which has some very attractive 
qualities. There are a few questions, it seems to me:

1. Should we require by law that government employees never act under cover 
of anonymity? (In practice, what does that mean? Does that mean they can't 
lie about their truename, or does it mean that they have to affirmatively 
volunteer their employment status?)

2. Since the people enforcing this hypothetical law are the same people 
with the greatest incentives to violate it, what makes a disinterested 
observer believe that it will be effective? If we're not interested in 
effectiveness, why don't we just pass a law saying "no more police 
brutality" or "no cop shall violate someone's civil liberties?"

3. Since the people regulated by this hypothetical law who would object to 
it have innumerable allies in the legislatures of this fair nation, what 
makes a disinterested observer believe that this proposal could ever be 
anything more than a thought experiment?

4. Should privacy-providing companies pledge to disclose the identities of 
their .gov purchasers? Do we think that .govs will follow this rule, or use 
cutouts? Will it be effective when the tools can be freely downloaded or 
bought at CompUSA?

Me, I tend to think that federal agents shouldn't be infiltrating U.S. 
political parties, that the extent of undercover police work could be 
profitably scaled back quite a bit, that the IRS has few if any reasons to 
send its agents undercover, and that intelligence agencies have no business 
running operations domestically. Contrary to what John says, I'm happy to 
look critically at "homeland defense plans" -- what I've said is simply 
that this HD campaign has not yet eroded our civil libertes to the point 
where we have none. Be concerned, but not terrified.

I think John has a valid point when he says that we should look askance at 
anonymity firms that help government spy on us. Companies would be 
well-advised to make their practices (we sell to Feds, we refuse to sell to 
Feds) public. But the market being what it is, the tools so well-discussed 
in so many circles, and the switch from .mil or .gov to .org or .com so 
easy, that I suspect such promises might give us only a false sense of 
security.

-Declan

At 04:33 PM 9/4/01 -0700, John Young wrote:
>I try to abide the principle that if one gets anonymized
>all should. However, there is a disparity in who gets
>to leverage that anonymity -- from the citizen to the
>empowered official.
>
>We have now more privilege of conealment on the official
>side, and that needs redress, constant redress a rebel
>might yell.
>
>Not much of my proposal is radical: there is a long tradition
>for officials to own up to what they do in their official
>roles. The uniformed police, the uniformed military
>services. That is far less done in the case of the spooks
>and, increasingly lately, law enforcement and the military
>as the latter adopt the practices and more importantly
>the technology of spooks -- and the spooks' lack of
>public accountability (those oversight committees are
>a fraud).
>
>The culture of secrecy is vastly overweighted in favor of
>government, and much of that derives from hoary claims
>of national security. Undercover and covert operations
>have become far more pervasive in the US government
>and military than ever, and constitute a privileged elite in
>mil/gov, and often law enforcement, moving from the
>federal agencies into state and locals -- and contractors
>and suppliers for all these. And all are bound by a
>complicitous and luxurious veil of secrecy.
>
>It is fairly common for goodhearts to question government
>but not when national security, and more recently, domestic
>security, is bruited. But that is due to a well-crafted educational
>campaign to raise national security to a theological level, and
>its rational is itself cloaked in secrecy. A similar theologizing
>is underway, methinks despite Declan's unreflective demurral,
>in the campaign for combatting domestic terrorism, the
>Homeland Defense demonolgy.
>
>Having learned much here about the futility of trying to determine
>who gets privacy technology and who does not, it remains true
>that for most of us access to this technology is very recent and we
>know not what lies outside our knowledge.
>
>I am not as sanguine about government as I was before being
>semi-educated by this list about what technology is in covert use.
>
>And I am not as sanguine about the wisdom of providing technology
>to government on the same footing as the citizen. There is more
>than a bit of marketing opportunism is this view -- and government
>knows very well what power the purse has to seduce young firms
>into the world of secrecy.
>
>So I say again, that despite it being economic foolhardiness, indeed
>because it is that, there needs to be a code of practice for anonimyzer
>developers to state their policy of helping governments snoop on
>us without us knowing. Agnosticism in this matter is complicity
>when such a stance cloaks government intrusiveness.
>
>Look, I'll accept that we will all succumb to the power of the market,
>so limit my proposal for full disclosure to those over 30. After that
>age one should know there is no way to be truly open-minded.