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Kaspersky CEO Wants End To Online Anonymity
Andorin writes "Eugene Kaspersky, CEO of well-known computer security company Kaspersky Labs, is calling for an end to the anonymity of the Internet, and for the creation of mandatory 'Internet passports' for anyone who wishes to browse the Web. Says Kaspersky, 'Everyone should and must have an identification, or internet passport ... the internet was designed not for public use, but for American scientists and the US military. Then it was introduced to the public, and it was wrong ... to introduce it in the same way.' He calls anonymity 'the Internet's biggest security vulnerability' and thinks any country that doesn't follow this regime should be 'cut off.' The EFF objects, and it's likely that they won't be the only ones."
Yes, because requiring passports to entry countries stops all terrorism and crime.
Then he can just start his own network and only let people use it if they identify themselves.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
when I have to log on using my biometrical passport. And every web page owner will know exactly who I am and what I do online.
Sir, we have a special offer JUST for you.
Good times are ahead.
Oh, and the other way also "sorry, this part of the internet is JUST for women in Southern Italy aged 40-44. NO ACCESS."
Dear Eugene,
Go fuck yourself.
Sincerely,
Anonymous.
This guy apparently doesn't understand that for many, anonymity is a security feature.
Anonymity is prone to abuse, sure, but it is vital for free exchange of ideas. People who are identifiable are less likely to make risky statements, and this is detrimental to culture. Repression and oppression should not be the goal of Security.
Beyond that, not everything on the internet is a person.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I'm pretty sure this would be a huge blow to the adult website industry. How many people would willingly visit those sites if they knew their name and identification was being taken down every time? It wouldn't eliminate every visitor, obviously, since a lot of people pay for those things with credit cards, but it would be enough to cause some serious damage.
But most of the people it is a threat to, frankly deserve to live with being threatened.
Anonymity can enable online bullying or petty fraud, but those are nuisances on the grand scale of things. The people for whom anonymity is an actual threat are governments who want to monitor and control their citizens, unsavory groups such as the church of Scientology who want to harass their critics, and businesses that want to force consumption of their products in the way they demand they are consumed.
Let them be threatened. They deserve to live in fear.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Around where i live, a drivers license just says you have paid your tax ( ok, and taken the 'competency test'.. but that's a different discussion ) and gives you the right to drive around at will, anonymously. We don't have checkpoints where we have to produce ID.
Perhaps its different where he lives, which is a shame.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The guy obviously never lived under the Stasi but instead, wants to become one
Considering the amount of computer-based identity fraud in the world, all this would accomplish is to get millions of people unjustly pegged for crimes they didn't commit. Suppose that identity is conferred via X.509 certificates. What is to stop a garden-variety rootkit/botnet from using these certificates for their own purposes? My spam trap is filled with hundreds of messages each day from unsuspecting victims; why would it make a difference if these messages were digitally signed?
The problems are
"Imaginary solutions to real problems."
Indeed, this could be a serious PR blunder for Kaspersky. His statements single-handedly changed my perception of the brand "Kaspersky" from "respected maker of Windows antivirus software" to "worse than Microsoft AIDS" (a hypothetical product with the combined potential of causing sever harm to both your computer and your own personal well-being).
Then again, I wasn't really in his potential customer pool to begin with, so it might not matter.
Absolutely! Nothing important was ever published anonymously before the Internet! Anonymity is a brand new thing that only exists on the Internet and is clearly not important there because it's not important anywhere else.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You say that like it was easier to achieve than anonymity.
People like this need to understand who is actually making the purchasing decisions for software such as what Kaspersky makes.
It's people like us. And we tend to be very libertarian when it comes to free speech and anonymity. The guys in the suits who sign the PO's don't make these kinds of decisions in reality because they don't want to get the blame for a bad decision made out of ignorance.
I, too, will make sure his product doesn't grace the door where I work. And we, in fact, just happen to be looking for a new Corporate antivirus/spyware/spam suite now that our McAfee contract has (thank God) ended. They were on our list to evaluate. They won't be on Monday when I get to work.
As others have said, physical passports in the REAL world did nothing to stop terrorists from coming in. They also do nothing to stop millions of Mexican peasants who can't even speak English from crossing the border, getting driver's licenses, and getting jobs despite the fact that all THAT is supposed to require passports and documentation.
Considering how much easier it is to forge stuff that is in 1's and 0's than paper, do the math. All this "Internet Passport" idea is going to do is make it easy for oppressive countries like China, Russia, and yes, add the United States to that list too with that wannabe Hugo Chavez in the white house. His people also want to regulate speech on the internet and have a goon in the FCC already proposing it. This will only punish the honest, criminals will never submit to it. Suggesting that ending anonymity for web surfing is going to end whatever problem he is proposing it as a solution for is going to be as effective as gun bans have been at ending crime. Zip, Zero, Nada effect.
Fact of the matter is, the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. The only way to change that is to tear it down and redesign it from scratch to be the KGB controlled streets of the Soviet Union. Thank God it was designed in the 1970's in this case.
Corporatism != Free Market
The little (and often incorrect) information that we provide companies on the internet is already sold and distributed widely. Lets have some proof of trust before we suddenly start verifying our identities on the internet. What Eugene actually wants is to remove the uncertainty for when stealing identities or sending UCE.
Uh, OK. How do you propose to bring about a society in which everyone respects the free exchange of ideas, and a government that can perfectly protect everyone who expresses an unpopular opinion?
The First Amendment's free speech clause is very misunderstood these days, thanks to decades of piss poor civics and history education in the government schools. Thankfully I wasn't mis-educated in one of them.
The First Amendment isn't in there to protect popular speech. It's in there to protect UNPOPULAR speech, so that people who say something that the government or even a large majority of the people CAN say it without being thrown in jail.
Does anyone want to live in a society where I can't say "Bush was an idiot and Barak Obama is too" without being thrown in the gulag? Well, that day is coming. They already want to restrict blogs.
Corporatism != Free Market
If he believes this then what privacy violations will he do to users of his software. I can be certain that his software is now blacklisted from my company network. Who knows what self righteous use he might make of being behind my firewalls?
Just this one thing and now I really don't like the guy.
Certainly there is a lot of fraud and theft on the Internet, and people who do bad things. But the anonymity aspect to the Internet is one of its greatest assets. I prefer my identity to not be known when I post, read news stories, research things, and known only to those where I buy things.
As it is, if someone really wants to know who I am, they can find out. Link up IP address with logs from my ISP and I'm no longer anonymous.
Already, and it is just the nature of the beast, everything people do online can be sifted, sorted, mined, etc. People can be identified by their browsing habits. They can be profiled by their search histories. Governments everywhere have their unblinking robot minions scanning for any key words and actions that might indicate someone is a malcontent and worthy of monitoring more closely. There is no need to make it any easier to monitor people or to allow others to join in the fun.
Ah well. We were going to buy an enterprise licence for his product (Been evaluating for a few months). Not now. With renewals it would have been a nice chunk of change. To stop idiots such as this, we need to vote with our pockets.
On a larger scale, without internet anonymity, we wouldn't have wikileaks. We wouldn't have free and open speach. We can and do critize bad laws, bad companies.
It wouldn't be lonf until its a "pay to play" scenario.
http://www.writeitfor.us - Writing IT for the IT generation.
There are two parts to free speech. First is the ability to speak without any explicit or implicit restrictions. Explicit restrictions are outright bans or legal restraints. Implicit restrictions are what they call "chilling effect". Intimidation in the form of threats or simply having a law enforcement official standing nearby while you are speaking.
The second is the ability to listen without any explicit or implicit restrictions. It does you no good to speak if nobody feels free to listen to what you're saying. If the cost of me hearing someone speak on some topic is being identified, I'm probably not going to do it thereby denying the speakers free speech right.
We have had anonymous speech in the United States for over 200 years. the most common form of anonymous speech prior to the electronics era has been pamphlets and posters. Law enforcement agencies have routinely violated anonymity and speech rights by photographing people in crowds and then publishing those photos trying to identify the "perpetrators"
Anonymity has nothing to do with cowardice or irresponsibility. It has everything to do with being able to speak against the more powerful foe and hopefully survive any retribution for speaking out.
anonymity can be abused by many people ranging from sociopaths, /. Users, and those in power but used appropriately, it's a wonderful tool
Yes, I know this too. The problem is that the First Amendment's scope is really only limited to the Federal government. The First Amendment doesn't protect you from being fired by your boss if your boss is a private individual who disagrees with your public acts of free speech. The First Amendment doesn't protect you from the Mafia. It doesn't protect you from a lynch mob. It doesn't protect you from the court of public opinion. It doesn't protect you from being ostracized by your peers. All it means is that the Federal government isn't supposed to pass any laws that abridge your freedom to speak your mind, and to assemble into groups, and to freely practice the religion of your choice. And by and large, State and Local levels of government tend to fall in line with this as well. Of course, the government does try to pass these sorts of laws all the time. Usually because they're "thinking of the children" or have prioritized national security over everything, including common sense. Often without recognizing that some law they're passing will have just these sorts of consequences.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
In order to actually enforce what he is suggesting you would have to effectively ban or censor all private individuals and companies from using protocols not endorsed by the government, all countries would have to agree on the bans and rules, and you would have to block traffic from non-cooperating countries.
However that is not enough, because some of the countries from which you want to allow traffic may be allowing proxies used by countries that don't cooperate. So if Switzerland were to allow the Swedish to use Swiss proxies, and if the US didn't like Sweden's way to do things, then not only would they have to refuse all traffic from Sweden, they would have to refuse all traffic from Switzerland too. And if the UK allowed the Swiss to use UK proxies, you'd have to ban the UK too.
Then there is the practical problems. How do you stop people from stealing each others "passports"?. How do you stop people peeking over each others back when they type in passwords ? How do you stop man in the middle attacks? Are you going to encrypt every single transmission ? And all countries will agree to encrypt all their traffic too? How do you manage the keys across international boundaries? What happens when I go on vacation in a country that doesn't agree with your rules ?
Now what about compromised systems? What do you do when you get packages from Russia, Nigeria and China flooding your key servers with false requests? What do you do when the attacks come from compromised systems in Australia, Norway, Israel and France? Do you block all those countries, do you disconnect all your citizens that can't access your key servers? Do you allow everybody access if the key-servers are flooded? Do you cut foreign countries off from your citizens thereby screwing over all your international trade?
Somebody didn't think this through...
Such a program would need to be administered, of course, and who's better qualified to do so than "security" companies? A billion or so Internet licenses at maybe $5/year with a buck or two in "adminstrative expenses": do we see a financial interest here? Naw. I'm sure he has only the best interests of the Internet community at heart. No CEO would ever be influenced by the prospect of increased revenue for his company.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
"the internet was designed not for public use, but for American scientists and the US military."
IMHO, the internet was not designed as someone designs a wheel or a building. The internet grew out of an idea of interconnectivity between people. As such, the internet has grown because people choose to use it. Had the internet not been anonymous, its growth and prosperity would not have necessarily been the same. In any case, the internet is not a network. The internet is people. The moment you put restrictions on the internet, you will see people stop its use. I for one welcome the return of a sneaker net.
For this individual, who happens to be from the higher class of the world economy, to feel he has the right to dictate policy on something which is everyone's business, is presumptuous at best. As most IT professionals know, the security of a system does not depend on how well the system recognizes the person, but on how secure the system itself is built. For as long as companies feel they have something to hide, people will continue trying to break down walls. Knowing the identity of those individuals will not help the cause, mostly because ghosting your identity is common practice anyways.
In the end, nobody is any safer with the internet knowing my name or not. My ip address can be traced to my identity just as easily by "government" security agencies (since we the people should be the government, I don't necessarily deny this as a good thing for national security), which he fails to mention.
Clearly Mr Kaspersky does not understand what the internet is today. He clearly does not understand how people want to use it today.
That, in and of itself is not a bad thing. However, combine it with the fact that he wants to sell software to help internet users do so securely, and you've got a problem. I won't be using his software for two reasons:
1. I do not wish to support his viewpoint.
2. Since he clearly does not understand the internet as it stands today, I do not believe he is competent to help secure my computers.
linquendum tondere
Great. Everybody must have an Internet Passport. Just great. The spammers will have an incentive to steal those. It's bad enough now when somebody steals your identity. Takes years, sometimes, to clean up after that. Imagine what it will be like when somebody steals your Identity and the next step is for your Internet Passport to get shut off, for months, while a retrained electrician cum Internet Passport Agent from Xe (née Blackwater), Haliburton, or KBR sorts it out.
Next, some genius will get the bright idea to bring biometrics to the Internet Passport, surely *that* will stop The Bad Guys. At that point, spammers have an incentive to kill you and cut off your hand, which they'll attach to a little machine to keep it at the right temperature and perspiration level, so they can send V1@gra spam.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
In this way virus writers would be accountable for their activities and be arrested, provided that non-anonymity is enforced rigorously and the amount of work needed to bypass the system is prohibitive for someone who just wants to spread some virus. There are an outrageous number of viruses in the wild but millions of criminal programmers escape punishment.
His company is probably going to get a nice contract from Kremlin in exchange for his beautifully "patriotic" words (disclaimer: I personally consider the actions of the likes of him - the network, as you called it - as unpatriotic and harmful to the future of Russia). China is a another potential customer, which would appreciate these kinds of suppressive words. In fact, I think the target customer is quite likely China in this case.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
When anonymity is outlawed... Anonymous will be outlaws.
Not all of us see that as being a bad thing. There is a very, very ugly side to the Internet, and it is almost entirely made possible by anonymity. Having a band of invisible vigilantes around (especially given the degree of sociopathic immaturity that is generally associated with the group we're talking about here) means that they can attack whoever they want, and if they can attack whoever they want, that also potentially means you or me, as much as it means governments.
The argument that Anonymous should be allowed to continue to exist because they might potentially be able to fight governments or corporations for us, is a dangerous one. All we're really doing, potentially, is trading one tyrant for another.
The very fact that I feel at least mildly afraid while posting this, proves that to me. I've been told about what they can do to people. They *are* terrorists, in the truest sense of the word. Just because they might be on our side in one particular case, doesn't for any reason necessarily mean that they're going to be next time.
history shows that revealing identity is is a surefire way to silence or discredit a critic.
one possible tool might be the use of pseudo-anonymity. A two-way untraceable path between you and the anonymous party. think of it as a disposable identity. The trick then becomes how do I remove any association between me and the pseudo-identity so it can't be traced back to me.
The reason I suggest this tool is because true anonymity is a one-way communications path. Useful for broadcasting information but not interacting with any investigative authority. For example, I was working at a major film producer company that went bankrupt and we were working on a imaging device for nuclear medicine. since it was used a diagnostic setting, it had to pass certain FDA compliance regulations before could be used in a diagnostic setting.
They shipped beta code to sites using the image printer for diagnostics with real patients. A few people complained including not one but two FDA compliance officers within the organization. these people, including the compliance officers are either marginalized or pushed out. If I had a good anonymous channel to the FDA, I would've handed them documentation in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, this company was really good at sniffing out leaks so I didn't dare.
So for lack of true anonymity, a bunch of criminal behavior, or at least unethical behavior went unpunished.
I am not so foolish as to extend a single case to the entire net but, it is a good example, and an extremely common example of not reporting corporate malfeasance because people are not willing to have their careers and financial well-being savaged. Good anonymity support could help that.
Free assembly today means you have the right to go stand in some official cage miles away (called the "free speech zone") from the real protest point you want to be at, and then if you decline to relocate to the "official" area or decline to provide ID or refuse to do either on demand, trying to remain both anonymous and to have your assemblage actually mean anything, you get arrested anyway, err, I mean "detained", if not also physically assaulted and punished on the spot, using a variety of blunt force trauma or chemical or electrical or sonic weapons and techniques.
The bill of rights, the alleged born with freedoms that can't be abridged, are a very nice theory, but in practice, the state and their mercenary enforcers routinely violate any and all of those rights, and have, as far back as I can remember going back to racial civil rights protest days, also including the state insisting you need their "permission", a permit of some kind, for what should clearly be a born with right..
Yeah, I could easily find several million people in the US who will agree with Mr. Kasperski. Some kind of a psychological analysis would be nice to look at. Or, the conclusions drawn by the psych people, anyway. Any takers?
I agree with what I assume to be Kasperski's motive: without anonymity, we'd know who controls all these spambots or who is involved in identity theft, or who's writing all this malware, or who writes all those racist trolls on Slashdot. The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory is undeniably true... make someone attach their name to what they write and they're more civil, more reasoned, and they generally tend to take responsibility for their words. Throw anonymity into the mix with an audience and you get a total fuckwad.
Imagine if people could drive a vehicle on the roads and be guaranteed that nobody could ever find out whose vehicle it was or who the driver was? Can you imagine the level of road rage that would result if someone pissed you off and you could simply ram them off the road with no repercussion? Today, the only anonymity we have on the roads is by walking, using a bicycle, or through a proxy such as a bus or taxi where someone else's identity is responsible for the driving.
The problem with Kasperski's approach is that it's completely impossible to retrofit the entire Internet for this kind of identification. Not only that, but there's no technical way to guarantee that it's unhackable. Your computer gets compromised somehow and now someone has the ability to do anything using your identity. And it fails to take into account a family computer, for example. Did John Smith really write that, or was it one of his kids fooling around?
So unless we want to turn the Internet into a place as highly regulated and enforced as the average Western nation's public roads, mostly anonymous it is.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
The fuckwad theory inaccurately assumes that we begin with "normal" people. I had decades of people watching behind me before the internet came along. Those "normal" people were ranting about their pet peeves way back in 19?? - before that, even. The only difference was, they couldn't be heard as far away as they are heard today. Smaller soapbox, smaller audience. But, they were just as "abnormal".
If anything, the fact that those fuckwads are on the internet is a good thing. They run at the mouth here, instead of rounding up their favorite minority victims to dump on with a lynching, or whatever. Their public ranting should also have the benefit of showing more "normal" people just how retarded their neighbors might be. All of those whackjobs come from somewhere. Do you know how many of them live within a mile of your house? You might be surprised - it pays to listen. The next time some lunkhead starts with his racial jokes, or whatever, just answer with some noncommital "hmmm" and "uh-huh". Give him some rope, let him really get going. You could uncover a freaking serial killer who has been stalking the subhumans for years. Or, a child molester, or a serial rapist, or ANYTHING!
If only .01% of the human population is a true fucktard, you can be sure that one of them lives near you.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
"He calls anonymity 'the Internet's biggest security vulnerability' and thinks any country that doesn't follow this regime should be 'cut off.'"
I view it as the opposite -- any country or locality that decides to "cut off" everyone else will simply be cutting THEMSELVES off. Everyone else will have a free, open, and vibrant internet.
That's right, I hope he really pushes his plan as far as he can.
Because I've got a shit-ton of popcorn and a lot of time to kill. This should be a really fukking entertaining train wreck to watch.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!