Official Anonymizing

[John Young]

I try to abide the principle that if one gets anonymized
all should. However, there is a disparity in who gets
to leverage that anonymity -- from the citizen to the
empowered official.

We have now more privilege of conealment on the official
side, and that needs redress, constant redress a rebel
might yell.

Not much of my proposal is radical: there is a long tradition
for officials to own up to what they do in their official
roles. The uniformed police, the uniformed military
services. That is far less done in the case of the spooks
and, increasingly lately, law enforcement and the military
as the latter adopt the practices and more importantly 
the technology of spooks -- and the spooks' lack of
public accountability (those oversight committees are
a fraud).

The culture of secrecy is vastly overweighted in favor of
government, and much of that derives from hoary claims
of national security. Undercover and covert operations
have become far more pervasive in the US government
and military than ever, and constitute a privileged elite in 
mil/gov, and often law enforcement, moving from the
federal agencies into state and locals -- and contractors
and suppliers for all these. And all are bound by a
complicitous and luxurious veil of secrecy.

It is fairly common for goodhearts to question government
but not when national security, and more recently, domestic
security, is bruited. But that is due to a well-crafted educational
campaign to raise national security to a theological level, and
its rational is itself cloaked in secrecy. A similar theologizing
is underway, methinks despite Declan's unreflective demurral,
in the campaign for combatting domestic terrorism, the
Homeland Defense demonolgy.

Having learned much here about the futility of trying to determine
who gets privacy technology and who does not, it remains true
that for most of us access to this technology is very recent and we
know not what lies outside our knowledge.

I am not as sanguine about government as I was before being
semi-educated by this list about what technology is in covert use.

And I am not as sanguine about the wisdom of providing technology
to government on the same footing as the citizen. There is more
than a bit of marketing opportunism is this view -- and government
knows very well what power the purse has to seduce young firms
into the world of secrecy.

So I say again, that despite it being economic foolhardiness, indeed
because it is that, there needs to be a code of practice for anonimyzer
developers to state their policy of helping governments snoop on
us without us knowing. Agnosticism in this matter is complicity
when such a stance cloaks government intrusiveness.

Look, I'll accept that we will all succumb to the power of the market,
so limit my proposal for full disclosure to those over 30. After that
age one should know there is no way to be truly open-minded.