Morozov falls into the trap almost everyone else is also in: duality. The reality is that you can almost always be anonymous or pseudonymous (in many cases unlinkably pseudonymous) - and at the SAME TIME, you can almost always be identified. It takes very little effort to set up a pseudonym and do a few simple things to obscure your "real" identity (whatever that might mean; the Platonists have deluded us into thinking a "true identity" exists...). It takes a LOT of effort to identify an individual who has carefully obscured his identity. But identification can almost always be done if the money and effort are invested. Both of these are good things; it's good to let people be anonymous or pseudonymous, and it's good that the police can find malefactors if they try hard enough. It is not the goal of a civilized society to spend a lot of money or effort making things easy for the police. -- bob BOB BLAKLEY Vice President & Distinguished Analyst, Gartner ITP Identity & Privacy bob.blakley@gartner.com | +1 (512) 657-0768 http://www.gartner.com | http://blogs.gartner.com/bob-blakley/ On 2/Aug/11 7:50 AM, "Tony Rutkowski" <trutkowski@netmagic.com> wrote:
Suggested reading in this forum should be Eugeny Morozov's The Net Delusion. It explains techno-political reality to the cyber utopians of the world.
That reality includes the ability of almost every government to circumvent anonymous capabilities. Conversely, if mandated by national law, those mandates impose significant costs on everyone in an unrealistic attempt to protect the paranoia of the few. Those costs include major distortions in national trade in services (effectively moving the services offshore), and diminishing innovation in provisioning new services. In addition, the attempts of most nations to instantiate cybersecurity infrastructure protection capabilities combined with enforcing IPR protection and protection of children online, is a losing battle.
--tony
On 8/1/2011 8:08 PM, Stephen Wilson wrote:
risks to many of the dispossessed or disadvantaged in the world. Why should people have to go hide offline to enjoy privacy of their communications?
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