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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."
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!
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?
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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.