Privacy, Anonymity, and John Q. Public

[Damian Gerow]

Thus spake coderman (coderman at gmail.com) [11/04/06 20:28]:
: i've always liked Ian Goldberg's nymity slider as a description of
: identity and how you disclose/leak/protect it.
: 
: http://www.cypherpunks.ca/~iang/thesis.html

This has been on my reading list for far too long.  Perhaps I should bump it
up to the top and start cracking on it.

: if i were in your situation i think a high level overview of identity
: and nymity (along the lines of the nymity slider) followed by specific
: privacy enhancing technologies would work well.  perhaps covering:
: - anonymous email (mixnets) and browsing/sessions (tor/onions)
: - pseudonymous communication with aliases. (Off-the-Record?  blogs?)
: - security and least privilege?

My problem is that we're talking one to two hours a week for eight weeks.
That's a whole lot of time to fill, and I'd like to avoid getting into nitty
gritty details that don't concern most people (server-side security,
database protection, etc.), and focus more on end-user technologies.

Things I'd like to cover (and this is still a work in progress):

- the concept of identity and self (as you suggested)
- anonymity, pseudonymity, and nyms (as you suggested)
- what a computer is/does
- what the Internet is/does
- data mining
- traffic analysis vs. content analysis
- cryptography, digital signatures, non-repudiation
- digital identities and how they tie to the real world

And then move in to specifics -- so things like TOR, Freenet, PGP, OTR,
cookies, etc. (Google actually provides an excellent working example that
ties a number of these things in together).

: i'd be curious to know what you put together; this would be a helpful
: resource for me and others i'm sure.

Assuming this all goes through (there's a chance it won't), I'd definitely
like to keep a record of it around somewhere.  I have a feeling it will come
in handy in the future.