Official Anonymizing

[Greg Broiles]

At 09:40 AM 9/5/2001 -0700, A. Melon wrote:
>Here is an example of the principle put into practice, from the
>anonymous web proxy service at http://proxy.magusnet.com/proxy.html:
>
>: If you are accessing this proxy from a *.mil or *.gov address
>: it will not work. As a taxpaying United States Citizen[TM],
>: Business Owner, and Desert Storm Veteran, I do not want my
>: tax dollars being used by agencies I pay for to gawk(1)
>: at WWW pages and hide your origination point at my expense.
>: Now, get back to work!

Sure, that's an understandable sentiment, but isn't this also isolating the 
good (or teachable) people inside government who might be open-minded about 
freedom or crypto or whatever, such that they can't learn from us, and such 
that (in the case of anonymizing tools) they can't leak information?

I think there's an argument that it's useful to provide pipes into 
secretive organizations which allow insiders to release information with 
reduced fear of internal retaliation - sure, they may be used for 
provocation and disinformation, but they also may be used for and by decent 
people.

(Like, for example, Fred Whitehurst, a supervisory special agent in the 
FBI's crime lab, who revealed systematic dishonesty, incompetence, perjury, 
and contamination in the agency's high-profile analytic & forensic 
operations - see <http://www.cnn.com/US/9703/22/okc.fbi.report/> or 
<http://www.usdoj.gov/oig/fbilab1/fbil1toc.htm>.)

I don't think this question is as easy as it sounds at first.


--
Greg Broiles
gbroiles at well.com
"We have found and closed the thing you watch us with." -- New Delhi street kids