Fwd: [tor-talk] giving up pseudonymity after collecting experiences with pseudonymous project development

Ted Smith tedks at riseup.net
Mon Jan 20 10:09:03 PST 2014


On Mon, 2014-01-20 at 00:00 -0600, Troy Benjegerdes wrote:
> I am continually reminded why I prefer to be onymous when talking to various
> counterculture/resistance/etc movement members around the city. So many of them
> are paranoid of each other and 'the man'
> 
> So I can confirm this from direct experience. I like dealing with people with
> real names, locations, and whom I can tell them whatever I feel like is
> appropriate, without having to compartmentalize my life.

It's definitely a privilege to be able to do this. In the United States,
the animal liberation activism community (among others) is rightly
paranoid of infiltrators and state repression. There's a certain level
of paranoia that's culturally accepted as necessary "security culture".
This might involve using pseudonyms, but obviously not very secure ones,
because this organization happens primarily in meatspace.

This dovetails nicely with the somewhat nomadic lifestyles of the people
involved, and the self-determinist ethic from the punk scene that's so
wedded to this group of cultures. It's common for people to introduce
themselves with obviously psuedonymous names like "carrot" or "scout",
but these people might even use these names on a personal basis with
people who know their legal names.

This comes back to the threat model -- these activists are scared of at
most an FBI investigation, and at baseline local police keeping tabs on
them. Weak pseudonyms are expensive enough for local police to keep the
community afloat. 

Likewise, I doubt it would have been very dangerous for adrelanos'
partners or close friends to know their activities as a Whonix
maintainer. Probably a hyperinvestigation leveraging the full powers of
the surveillance states of the world would have penetrated this layer of
psuedonymity, but I doubt this would ever have happened.

It would have been interesting to see how far this could have progressed
along a spectrum from complete psuedonymity to complete ...nymity. How
long would adrelanos have been psychologically capable of keeping up the
act if a single friend had known?  

-- 
Sent from Ubuntu
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 836 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.cpunks.org/pipermail/cypherpunks/attachments/20140120/c8bdf168/attachment-0001.sig>


More information about the cypherpunks mailing list