Larry Lessig on ending anonymity through "identity escrow"

[Declan McCullagh]

See also:
http://politechbot.com/pipermail/politech/2003-December/000268.html

---

>Date: Fri, 05 Dec 2003 09:12:16 -0500
>To: politech at politechbot.com
>From: Declan McCullagh <declan at well.com>
>Subject: Larry Lessig replies to Politech over limiting anonymity [fs][priv]
>
>
>---
>
>[Why do I get the feeling that Larry Lessig doesn't like "absolute" 
>anonymity much at all? Systems for building and defending "absolute" 
>anonymity already exist in the form of anonymous remailers and Freenet, 
>among others. It would be foolish to follow Larry's advice and concede too 
>quickly that such technologies have so few legitimate uses that they 
>cannot be reasonably defended. Even the oft-benighted Eurocrats have 
>recognized this: a 1997 EC directive encourages anonymity, as does a 
>German federal law (http://www.iid.de/rahmen/iukdgebt.html). In the U.S., 
>since the Federalist Papers were published with effectively "absolute" 
>pseudonymity, surely the framers of the U.S. Constitution had them in mind 
>when crafting the Bill of Rights. Justice Thomas lists more 
>contemporaneous examples in his McIntyre concurrence 
>(http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/93-986.ZC1.html). Saying 
>anonymous technologies are indefensible concedes a crucial point: that the 
>government's power is so sweeping that police have the right to learn our 
>identity in all cases. So much for whistleblowing and anonymous reports of 
>public brutality.
>
>Perhaps more to the point, the twin privacy-encroaching technologies of 
>automated electronic surveillance and efficient large-scale databases did 
>not exist decades or centuries ago. "Absolute" anonymity lets us reclaim 
>some of that lost zone of privacy. Lastly, trying to remove "absolute" 
>anonymity from the Internet (banning strong encryption and computers that 
>can be programmed not to keep logs) would be far more disruptive, 
>destructive, and harmful than proposals like Hollings' CBDTPA that Larry 
>has rightly opposed. --Declan]
>
>---
>
>From: Lawrence Lessig <lessig at pobox.com>
>Cc: Declan McCullagh <declan at well.com>
>Subject: Re: [Politech] Economist, Lessig want to preserve freedom by 
>ending anonymity [fs][priv]
>Date: Fri, 5 Dec 2003 10:16:31 +0900
>To: Aaron Swartz <me at aaronsw.com>
>
>It's not an inaccurate quote, but it is taken out of context.
>
>What I said was that the trend in our laws was to destroy any privacy at 
>all -- that the idiocy of Patriot Acts, etc., was effectively eliminating 
>any form of privacy. There are two kinds of responses to this -- one to 
>try to defend and build a system protecting absolute anonymity; the second 
>is to build effective protections for pseudonymous life, which is 
>shorthand for traceable transactions, but where the permission to trace is 
>protected by something like a warrant requirement. I'm not saying the 
>government should build these systems, but that they should be permitted 
>and indeed encouraged.
>
>In my view, we will make no progress following path one, but that we would 
>strongly advance privacy if we could advance path two. A strong ethic and 
>architecture of pseudonymous identity, properly protected, would give us 
>more privacy than we have today.
>
>Of course, it is possible (and probably likely) that such an architecture 
>would not properly protect the link between a transaction and the privacy 
>of a person. Government officials, for example, upon mere suspicion would 
>be able to break the link, etc. That of course is not what I am promoting. 
>I would promote a regime where the gov't required a very strong 
>warrant-like reason before it could break the code that makes the link. 
>But I will not that the baseline from which we're starting is a world 
>where no real showing is necessary for this sort of surveillance.
>
>
>On Dec 4, 2003, at 9:26 AM, Aaron Swartz wrote:
>
>>>To preserve freedom further, suggests Mr Lessig, anonymity could be 
>>>replaced by [warrant-traceable] pseudonymity.
>>
>>Can you explain this? The Economist article seemed to be total nonsense, 
>>but I'm surprised they paraphrase you as saying something like this. In 
>>general, for eliminating anonymity to make sense you need to answer three 
>>questions:
>>
>>1. Is anonymity the problem? Between DMCA subpoenas and national security 
>>letters, it seems that very few people on the Internet have even limited 
>>anonymity.
>>
>>2. Will the people who are anonymous evade things? The people who _are_ 
>>anonymous, of course, are people like crackers. If you outlaw anonymity, 
>>crackers will likely find security holes that let them hide their 
>>identity and pass their actions off as those of others (e.g. using the 
>>WiFi network of some squeaky-clean grandma to launch the attacks).
>>
>>3. Is it worth the cost? Even if you can answer the above questions, 
>>it'll be difficult to do without knocking large groups of people off the 
>>Internet. (If the digital divide is bad now, imagine what it'll be like 
>>when you need a credit card to get on the Net.)
>>
>>Were you misquoted? If not, can you answer these questions? Or is this 
>>more blind optimism?
>>--
>>Aaron Swartz: http://www.aaronsw.com/
>-----
>Lessig
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