Slashdot Mirror
Michigan May Outlaw Anonymity Online
John Q .Public writes "The Detroit Free press is reporting in this article attempts by Law enforcement in Wayne County and the Michigan State Legislature to require ISP's doing business there to verify all e-mail addresses with valid phone numbers or credit cards. One free ISP already is willing to log all phone numbers for access by the police." That free ISP is K-Mart's BlueLight.com, which is just, in their words, "being a good corporate citizen." I'm sure they'll be very successful at identifying everyone except the criminals.
I wonder... is this really that much different from someone using an anonymous postal dropbox, and paying cash for it? If the MI police force gets their way, where will it end? I'm simply at a loss for words.
The Misanthropic Bitch has an interesting essay about why laws against child pornography are exactly like 1984 . Unfortunately, I feel that it's nearly impossible to have a civilized discussion about child pornography since emotions tend to run so high on this issue. "We have to do this for the children! Save the children! Won't somebody please think about the children?"
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We have fought the AC's, and they have won.
What we need is something that I've only seen mentioned about other countries a couple of times (mostly in connection with one of the infamous virus writers) is pre-payed ineternet cards, similar to pre-payed phone cards. You go to the local K-Mart (oops, make that Walmart) and pick up a card good for 100 hours of Internet time. You're given a dialup number, a username and a password... all good for 100 hours. After that time you buy another card.
Thegreat thing about this is, no names. They don't have your name, they don't have your credit card number, they don't have your address, they don't have you SS#; they don't have anything. The only problem with it is that they can still, if they want to, track your phone number using caller ID. I suppose a legal solution to this (assuming we're not into Blue Boxes here) is to simply call the phone company and ask for that twenty dollars a month (or whatever the fee is) service which blocks caller ID from identifying your phone. Or, if you want, you can do it for free by dialing *67. And hell, since it's your computer dialing every time, not you, you can simply add it the beginning of the dialup number the first time and forget it.
Instant quasi anonymous internet usage. The flaw is that the ISPs could, if they wanted, not accept phone calls from blocked customers... but why would they bother?
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RumorsDaily
There's a bluelight special on identity rape. Bring your credit cards and phone numbers to ailse nine. Ash, you're needed in housewares.
BlueLight is out of that business and others are dying off or starting to charge. The fact is, free ISPs are learning what a lot of free web sites are learning. They are learning that it is tough to get all the revenue you need from internet advertising. Unless you are really big (CNN, Yahoo) you can't charge enough. Without the expensive software, services, and ad network that somone like RealMedia's OpenAdStream or DoubleClick provide it is difficult to make money selling internet ads. Your only hope is to have a great programming staff and ad sales people. Most companies are unable to create these necessities due to stupidity or lack of funds or both. This throws you back into the arms of Internet advertising companies. If you finally don't have money for them, you are screwed.
I think that the free internet will explode again when consumer bandwidth increases. When the average user has a 500Kb/s connection, the possiblities open up. This includes the advertising possiblities. I think that large interactive ads will be thrown in the way of the information the user wants, forcing them to sit through it. No ignoring the banners. More sites will use in house based ad servers to work around ad blocking software (block the ad, block the story). Articles will be unreachable without going through the ads. This type of advertising will bring success rates closer to television ads and thus raise rates and bring back the financial feasiblity of free internet businesses.
-- soldack
In other anti-liberal alarmist news: Ban streets! They're used, every day, by child pornographers to seek out underage prostitutes. Even now, as I write this, at least two child prostitutes are being abused via the medium of the public roadway, where they sell their service. Since the new "road" technology was introduced, a couple millennia ago, pedophelia has boomed, adopting the (not particularly informational) "superhighway" as its home. Unless we eliminate all roadways and sidewalks, there'll be no way to stop pedophiles from seeking out new victims. Advocation of free, anonymous access to roads is advocation of pedophelia, itself. Road and Sidewalk licenses will make America a happier, safer society. When the police take your mugshot, finger prints and name every time you walk outside your house, you'll know that your safe from the scourge of pedophelia, that public walkways so readily propagate.
> "These free services can be a haven for child pornographers."
I'm bad at math. Can someone please help me? Have I transcribed a digit wrong in the following equation:
Free e-mail = child pornography
I've done some simple regression analysis based on the above and have derived some more formulas that may be of interest to the population at large. They include:
cars = drunk driving
parents = child abuse
video games = 13-year-old killing machines
Please, spread the word. The math just works!.
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If you read the article, you'll see that the legislation is proposed. The title of the slashdot story implicates that the law has already been passed, and there is no time to avoid it. ;)
If you are not happy with this, don't just rant on a discussion board - write your congresspeople - state and national - and let them know your feelings. If you don't want to support "the man" with a 34-cent stamp, they all have email addresses, linked from the US Congress page.
A little more discretion in the story titles could save a lot of hot, uninformed comments. (For those who don't bother to read the article, that is!
The radius protocol allows the logging of the CSID (calling station ID - your phone number) along with the IP address you are given and your username. This information is sent to the radius servers after you have been authenticated and are connected to a dialup session, and then logged. Collecting and logging this information is the default configuration for most radius servers and NAS's (network access servers - modem pools.)
It is important that most ISP's collect this information because it is the only way to track you down if you are doing something illegal or against their usage policy (such as spam.) We whine about spam enough on slashdot, but the only way for ISP's to cut off the users is to prove from these logs that they were the ones that did it. Yes, this information could be used for more sinister purposes, but so could your phone records, credit card purchases, etc.
Free ISP's have an even tougher time though because if they cut off a spammer, the spammer will just create another free account and continue with their game. The only way to stop this is to require some identifying information from the user so that it is more difficult to create multiple accounts when one is shut down. A credit card is a natural choice because it can be verified.
Once again, the potential for abuse exists, but most ISP's these days also have your credit card information (from when you paid) which they can easily match up with the other information I mentioned previously. So, in the end, is it that different than what is already going on? And what do you expect from a FREE ISP? You need to pay for it somehow, and often that is through your demographic information. If you don't like it, go to another ISP and pay cash, you have a choice.
Fundamentally, there is no requirement for anonymity on the Net, If you can guarranty three conditions:
Removing anonymity can be a large benefit to everyone (not just law enforcement), as it creates a much greater threshold of responsibility that is lacking now (and, in my opinion, is very, very bad). But before we do it, you have to guarranty that the beneficial purposes of anonymity aren't going to be lost. Until I see legal bills proposing the above, I'm not interested in people's ideas that we outlaw anonymity. It's a package deal - you want to get rid of (most) anonymity? Give me those rights. Otherwise, no deal.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
Child pornographers are known to hide their evil deeds behind locked doors. Have you ever seen child pornography happening out in public? No! That's because they're at home, safely locked behind evil, evil deadbolt locks where they do unspeakable things. It's time for law enforcement to crack down on the evil doorlock industry for supporting the child pornography industry, and the people who traffic in these tools of the child pornography trade.
What can we do?
1) Write you legislator and ask for law to outlaw the manufacture and trade in doorlocks.
2) Boycott all hardware stores where doorlocks are sold. Be nice about it. Tell them why you are boycotting them, and explain how, by trafficking in doorlocks, they are unwittingly furthering the torture of children, and the destruction of children's lives.
3) Park yourself near the checkout line of said hardware stores, and anytime you see someone headed toward the checkout with a doorlock point at them and, very loudly, shout "Child molester! Child molester! He's got a doorlock!" If they procede with their purchase, follow them into the parking lot shouting the same. Then follow them home, get their address and publish it in the local newspaper and on the web. That should stop them.
4)Start keeping list of everyone you know that uses doorlocks. Ask them what they have to hide.
5)And while we're at it, we need to do away with that Fourth Ammendment thingie, too.
Oh, BTW, while they're busy doing this, Detroit (which is within Wayne County) has not only a higher murder rate than Chicago (or NYC, or LA), but more total murders per year than the much larger Chicago.
There's no "we" in team, only "me"
ISP anonymity was a given, anyway.
Using my IP address, timestamp, and a warrant,
the Man can usually 'convince' my ISP to backtrace the IP to a name.
However, there are tools that can provide a decent level of anonymity:
Freedom - Privacy for everyone. Easy to use, relatively fast, and the Linux client is open source.
Based in Canada so Carnivore shouldn't be a problem.
SafeWeb - SSL surfing proxy, so your lan-mates/ISP can't snoop on your traffic.
Anonymous Remailers - MixMaster remailers can provide a very good level of email anonymity.
I don't have a link, but info is pretty easy to find.
There are tons more, these are just a few well-known tools.
--K
Of course this is an important issue from the standpoint of individual liberty, but that's not where this plan will fail if it goes through.
These cops are fools or totally bored if they want to become the complaint department for the Internet. Every home user who adopts a firewall for the first time and then starts going through the log files and gets all freaked out is going to start calling them and demanding to know why so and so is "hacking" me and it's your responsibility to arrest this sonofabitch.
On the other side, they'll have somebody running some little app they downloaded off a security site six months ago and totally forgot about who's gonna swear up and down they don't know what this guy is talking about becuase they really don't.
Multiply above times --oh, say ten thousand.
If these silly cops think they've got the man hours to sort that stuff out then maybe they've got too many heads on the payroll. Fact is, cops are like counselors in most situations and they always have to respond to the loudest complainer. If this goes through, they're gonna get a major earful and it's undoubtedly going to result in otherswise needless and potentially violent diputes that they are going to be essentially powerless to resolve. While not being of much assistance, the cops will be highly capable of aggravating the circumstances by bringing the image of armed officers into the fray, thus heightening the paranoia of the conflicting parties who are already feeling defensive because they don't really know the strength of their own arguments.
That's why this isn't going to be implemented for long even if it does pass through the legislature.