Assassination Politics

[Stephen Williams]

Anonymity is only needed if a society is intolerant, abusive to 
individuals / subcultures / ethnicities / etc., has draconian or 
overbroad laws that are applied in racist, classist, ageist, etc. ways, 
and similarly broken dynamics.  We need it less than we used to, but the 
need is uneven around the world and fluctuates.

It is of course best for society, with or without anonymity, to 
eliminate all of those society shortcomings.  And that is precisely what 
liberal & progressive politics (in most ways), social justice, civil 
rights, and other movements have been promoting & achieving.  You used 
to need anonymity if you wanted to have sex out of wedlock, gay 
anything, interracial anything, use marijuana, talk to people in certain 
parts of the world, etc.

The flip side is that many things considered, and often legally 
considered, to be bad are enabled by anonymity: fraud, abuses of various 
kinds, underage sex targeting, extremist indoctrination of those without 
sufficient mental firewalls who are weak to manipulation, conspiracies 
for terrorism / overthrowing government / murder / mayhem, etc.  Many 
people want those stopped at any cost, including deanonymising as 
needed.  A lot of old & new laws are about this.  Sometimes they seem 
fair, sometimes not.

In recent years & decades, many problematic situations have resolved, 
laws negated.  We just took a step backward, in the majority of people's 
minds, where suddenly a big category of anonymity has become important 
again.  I already had a personal rule never to discuss anyone's abortion 
with anyone but them forever for just this kind of reason.  I felt it 
was just too hot of a topic and I didn't want anyone to feel unwanted 
scrutiny or shame-based regret.  Probably it was bad that many people 
did that as people could, in their mind, build up this idea that it was 
rare, bad, abused, not a normal thing, etc. which helped boost, 
especially in immature & less thoughtful people, that it should be outlawed.

People often think that they are anonymous in various ways, when they 
are not.  People think their votes are secret, and that is true in a 
limited way, but the bar is fairly low.  I ran for city council in a 
city in Silicon Valley.  As part of that, I found that for <$100 I could 
buy a DVD with a file with all of the names, addresses, phone numbers, 
and email addresses of all registered voters in Santa Clara County, 
including how they voted in 5 races.  Anyone with a justifiable reason, 
which is a low bar I think as anyone can say they are starting a PAC 
which I think is a valid justification, can buy such a database for any 
county in the US.  (I hesitate to point this out here, but surely this 
is widely known.  Keep in mind: the GOP operatives legally have this for 
every county in the US, and that they shared it with the Russians for 
voter targeting via Facebook et al.  That seems like it should be 
illegal, but apparently was not.)

So the FBI & others have sometimes abused their powers & access in the 
past.  And they may sometimes now, although it is much more difficult 
presumably, with some kind of auditing & checks.  And certainly many 
want to avoid their scrutiny out of principle, etc.  But most people, 
when they directly or indirectly vote and otherwise insist on perfect 
security & safety from bad actors shooting up a school, poisoning a 
community, or crashing a plane, are endorsing government agencies 
deanonymising as needed.  And, given tight controls & narrow usage, with 
auditing and actual consequences for consequential abuse, I am OK with 
that.  It is OK if someone somewhere (and their AI / ML booster systems) 
see 'too much' if they never share or do anything bad with that 
information.  It has long been the case that we have to trust the IRS 
with a lot of detailed information, which even includes stating income 
from illegal activities which they are restricted by law from sharing 
with law enforcement.  Their are certain other cases where we firewall 
to gain a greater good.

And that counts for large entities with widespread access, even more so: 
I've talked to many people who are suspicious of Google, Amazon, et al 
wrt smart speakers, email, browsing data, advertisement tracking, etc.  
It always puzzled me why random people feel the details of their lives 
are so important that companies valued in the trillions would 
deliberately betray trust in any way for some hard to fathom minuscule 
benefit.  Some leaking, uncomfortable situations have happened, but they 
are often corrected or at least they are clear & normalized as necessary.

I have been wanting to create a new approach to communications, social 
networking, and general information sharing.  One problem to be solved 
is supporting encryption, identity, security, etc. while also avoiding 
things like extremist / criminal abuses, and things like the India 
Villiage Rumor Killings gossip problem.  I have some ideas for that, and 
I've been watching what WhatsApp is doing with limiting forwards.  I 
actually mentioned one of my ideas to solve this with the WhatsApp team 
when I interviewed with them a couple years ago.

Stephen

On 7/10/22 12:31 PM, Karl Semich wrote:
> Apologies that I have not been keeping up with this thread, so my 
> commentary may be disruptive. I've kind of been just using the list as 
> a notepad in spam threads, which might be disrespectful.
>
> I'm thinking of anonymity and AP.
>
> Democracies need anonymity, so if democracy sticks around, we'll need 
> to improve how information spreads from citizens, anyway.
>
> In the meantime, murder is legal in many contexts such as self defense 
> in many areas, by government workers such as law enforcement, or 
> probably with support of a major group already participating in it in 
> some way. I imagine such things have been mentioned or thought of 
> before. Seems like "legitimate" assassination fould be a way to 
> rebootstrap things in a surveilled situation.
>
> But really we need anonymity anyway. I wonder how targeted people 
> could support rebuilding common anonymity.