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Senior Homeland Security Official Says Internet Anonymity Should Be Outlawed (dailydot.com)
Patrick O'Neill writes: A senior Homeland Security official recently argued that Internet anonymity should outlawed in the same way that driving a car without a license plate is against the law. "When a person drives a car on a highway, he or she agrees to display a license plate," Erik Barnett, an assistant deputy director at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and attache to the European Union at the Department of Homeland Security, wrote. "The license plate's identifiers are ignored most of the time by law enforcement. Law enforcement will use the identifiers, though, to determine the driver's identity if the car is involved in a legal infraction or otherwise becomes a matter of public interest. Similarly, should not every individual be required to display a 'license plate' on the digital super-highway?"
Because of the First Amendment, including the right to say things anonymously which has been upheld by the courts numerous times,
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Is against making it any more difficult to spy on people. You shouldn't be surprised by this. Also, he should get fucked. We have freedoms, and it's not our patriotic duty to help anyone take them.
It's really no different than the way you are required to wear visible identification when walking on the sidewalk, or how you are legally obligated to put a return address label on all correspondence that passes through the postal system. Oh, wait...
You see? I can select my analogies to support my viewpoint too.
Sincerely,
Anonymous Coward
With the rise of social networks and federated authentication, I don't think we are that far off from this.
I think it is only a matter of time before we all have a private key bound to an identification card or something similar.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
Bad car analogy guy works for the DHS
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
They've finally decided to fall in line with China's views on internet policy. Pretty soon all the major world governments will look pretty much the same.
MAC address is hardly a personal identifier.... at best it identifies hardware... but it would still need to be proved that you were using that hardware.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
The only way to have truly free speech is to speak anonymously. Otherwise, you have "free speech" but there will be "consequences". Like how in Soviet Russia you were "free" to say anything you liked, but there might be "consequences" like getting sent to Siberia.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
License plates don't even identify the driver of the vehicle. Think about it for 5 minutes.
Sort of like a license plate identifies the car (most of the time), not the driver.
Lets just lock everyone up in cells, its much easier that way.
Super-highway? Wasn't this Bill Gates' vision of a Microsoft-controlled alternative to the Internet? I haven't heard of it since playing Space Quest 6.
So go ahead. But get away from the Internet.
or a license, or a registered vehicle, unless I am driving on public roads. I used to work on a farm, and the 12 year old son would drive the rusted out jeep around the property all the time.
Did anybody see this DHS guy? Was he by any chance a 63 y.o. short, bold, Russian speaking guy, likes to take topless pictures riding horses? Because that guy just said something very similar the other day? Or does DHS always take cues from foreign dictators?
You can't handle the truth.
This person is wrong.
Because the car has a plate (the same as the Internet has the MAC address for their users), but nobody has a microphone "inside" every car to check if the driver has good or bad intentions. Even it is unknown who actually is driving the car only checking the plate.
The cars are, in fact, anonymous. What the governments are trying to obtain is a method to check every possible car driver and to record for their sake any possible conversation inside these cars. What is the next step? To put plates on the pedestrian and to read their minds?
Given how law enforcement can't tell the fucking difference between a clock and a bomb, I wouldn't trust them to know the difference between opinion and a terrorist act. Maybe if they demonstrate they're not incompetent. But we know that will be never.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
Worst analogy...ever. Just because I have a license plate it doesn't mean I can be tracked everywhere I go.
But a MAC address goes no further than the first L3 device. It's trivial to change and randomized by default on a VM. It's closer tot he VIN number on your car.
No sir I dont like it.
The Department of Homeland Security should be outlawed
"The license plate's identifiers are ignored most of the time by law enforcement."
Are automated plate scanners implemented/common yet? When they are, ALL visible plates will be queried.
"When a person drives a car on a highway, he or she agrees to display a license plate,"
That's because cars maim and kill thousands upon thousands a year.
> 100 years of anonymous phone calls and blackmail and ransom notes via snail mail didn't ruin the planet either.
The Homeland Security position, as a car analogy:
If digital privacy was an electric car, Homeland Security would disallow privately charging it. Instead, they'd make it mandatory to charge all electric cars from licensed diesel generators in the designated 'charge-up' stations. These generators would suffer from frequent fuel shortages.
Horses did not require a licence plate to use public roadways.
No sir I dont like it.
Correct. But an IP address uniquely identifies you and can't be spoofed as easily as a MAC. But like a license plate it identifies the car (most of the time), not the driver.
The Fourth Amendment should already be telling the "track everyone" guys to fuck off unless they have a warrant.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/co...
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
How about as an official at ICE you do something more productive like bust some people employing illegal immigrants. You know, what your day job ordinarily entails, not pontificating about the Internet.
>> Erik Barnett, an assistant deputy director at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement: "...should not every individual be required to display a 'license plate' on the digital super-highway?"
While you're at it, why not just add a little yellow badge icon to every Jew on the Internet. No harm there, right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Its perfectly legal to drive around without a license plate. Just not on the public roadways. You can drive all over your farm in that old unlicensed pickup, or a brand new one for that matter!
Virtually none of the internet infrastructure in the US is public road way. The telco's own all of it. The government can make whatever rules they want for accessing .gov systems but they haven't any right to tell AT&T if they must or must not allow anonymous traffic to flow over their network. Well no right unless you except the stupidly radical interpretations of the Commerce Clause the SCOTUS, which constitutional hasn't itself any right to say what is and isn't constitutional does.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
When they outlaw freedom, only criminals will have freedom.
That America is beginning to forget the historical reasons why anonymous speech is a protected class of speech is scary. That America has pretty much decided all other freedoms are options is utterly terrifying.
All of these new school fascists who think the only way to protect liberty is to take away liberty, and the only way to defend your rights is to curtail them ... these asses need to be hung for treason.
That oath you took to defend and uphold the Constitution from enemies foreign and domestic? That means defending the rights enumerated in it.
The problem is the people who claim to be defending it are wiping their asses with it.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I may not agree with the frostiness of your piss, but I will defend to the death your right to stream it!
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
Nobody is anonymous on the internet. Ok, maybe I should say most are not anonymous. The reason? Everyone has a MAC address. While it can be changed, and probably is when someone is acting nefariously, most people have no idea what it is. So, like outlawing firearms, making a law to ban "anonymous Internet access" would only hurt law abiding citizens. I will certainly add more complexity to ISPs and that will trickle down to users in some way that probably won't be pleasant.
Your MAC address never goes beyond the first router.
And they keep saying the same thing about firearms......
(((dB)))
Except it isn't. All those LPRs (license plate readers) is logged, by both public and private firms and stored for god knows how long. Then the data is used to create temporal databases to know where your car goes and when, extrapolates your patterns.
Currently, the only uses of the private LPR database that I know of are for either reposessions or serving court documents, but I could clearly see private detectives finding the data useful for a multitude of other uses.
Similarly, the state (as in government) can use the traffic camera video feeds networks to identify vehicles in real-time, and find out when the last encounter was and where. The difference here is no warrant is needed, they already have the data, and they can retroactively search their database (which potentially is every second of every traffic camera feed anywhere).
The fact that data may be discarded is a fleeting one, as storage prices come down, and processing power and resolution increases, it will be considered an intelligence "failure" not to have every moment captured, recorded, stored forever, and searchable.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Why do we continue to put up with this from our Governments? There are a great many of us that see the harm that these types of laws cause our freedoms, but the unwashed masses don't. How do you wake these people up that their security does not have to come at the cost of freedom. They still think they are free and I'm sure the Germans thought they where free during WW2 just as long as you didn't disagree or say anything against the Government. They also call people who can and do voice their concerns on this slow decent to fascism, alarmists or anarchists. Most of those that I work with just don't care about these types of laws. All they care about is whats on TV tonight and make sure they can download their music and TV. After that they just don't care. It's just to much work to have to think. Maybe this is why my blood pressure is to high. I should stop caring also.
I can't wait to steal your car and take a joy ride around the internet.
I am going to do doughnuts on the RIAA's lawn!
"Senior Homeland Security Official Says Internet Anonymity Should Be Outlawed"
Well, of course, did you really expect him to say anything different?
It's about as shocking a headline as, "Convicted Pedophile Says All Children Should Be Prohibited From Wearing Clothes", or "Wal-Mart Exec Says People Should Buy More Stuff From Wal-Mart."
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Police officers and others in most jurisdictions openly identify themselves when working. They have uniforms, badge numbers, easy-to-recognize motor vehicles, etc.
When they work covertly, they have warrants for the precise task and duration.
So if this idea has wings at all, let's start with all legal monitoring - the equivalent of road blocks and license checks. All should be completely open and visible to the users of the highway.
No, NAT devices are extremely common and most users have their traffic pass through at least one before it reaches the Internet. As a result, a single IP address could belong to hundreds or thousands of users and most definitely cannot be used to positively identify a single user unless you can prove that the traffic didn't pass through any NAT layers.
I didn't say an IP address identified a person. In fact I said the opposite: like a license plate it identifies the car, not the driver.
Nobody is anonymous on the internet. Ok, maybe I should say most are not anonymous. The reason? Everyone has a MAC address. While it can be changed, and probably is when someone is acting nefariously, most people have no idea what it is. So, like outlawing firearms, making a law to ban "anonymous Internet access" would only hurt law abiding citizens. I will certainly add more complexity to ISPs and that will trickle down to users in some way that probably won't be pleasant.
Your MAC address goes no further than your NAT router.
No, that isn't how NAT works. Your provider (ISP) knows your IP address of your access point. You can be NATd beyond that, but you can also use the access point to identify individual machines on the network depending on how far you go. If you don't think that is possible, then think about how your machine received traffic sent to/from it. For the purposes we are talking about here, your IP address is known by your ISP and identifies your household.
Correct. But an IP address uniquely identifies you and can't be spoofed as easily as a MAC. But like a license plate it identifies the car (most of the time), not the driver.
Unless you go through a VPN
Let's outlaw stupidity in public office too.
Anonymity on the internet is the only thing that lets me make comments at all. If my ID, who I am, what I do, who I work for, preceded any comment I make, then that attribution would reflect on my employer and the government. My opinions expressed on the internet about technology and tech policy would have to comply with relevant company and government policy, and generally conform to the opinions of those for whom I work. To quote Brent Spiner from Independence Day movie "As you might imagine, they don't let us out much". I get to really wring out a lot of really cool tech, in a lot of unique ways, and if I had to show my badge every time I posted a comment, I doubt I'd be able to post anything at all...
It's really no different than the way you are required to wear visible identification when walking on the sidewalk, or how you are legally obligated to put a return address label on all correspondence that passes through the postal system.
You can make fun of the situation, but I was arrested last year for not having ID while hiking in the woods. The cop clearly stated why I was being arrested, he said in so many words that it was illegal not to carry an ID.
The police have always crossed "just a little bit" over the line, but with the situation as it is now, "just a little bit" means our rights are completely and totally gone.
My IP address is 192.168.1.1 Come and get me.
Have gnu, will travel.
Why don't they just inject subcutaneous GPS trackers in all of us at birth and be done with it?
You only have to display a license plate on public roads. If I'm on private property (like the vast majority of websites out there), I'm under no obligation to do so. You could argue that any time you're on a .gov website, you shouldn't be anonymous, but on private ones? No, if they're okay with me being anonymous, you don't get to tell them otherwise.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
Even if you are going through a VPN your provider knows your true IP. It has to, that is how the packets arrive it your device.
I think Homeland Security should be disbanded. and the rights of the american people restored.
But then I'm not hell bent on controlling people.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
This piece of shit is about as Un-American as you can get for saying something like that. It tramples all over the First Amendment. Anyone want to sign a petition to get this bastard fired?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
I doubt any of it will be reflected in the vote though. Eh, whatever...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Your household is not a person. Even with an ISP's help, an IP address would only identify who is paying the bill.
...look forward to the day when it is impossible to post on Slashdot anonymously.
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
As a Mexican, I take pride in being a North American.
I watched my local police slowly drive up & down the lanes of the Home Depot/Walmart parking lot - using his license plate reader to scan the cars. Given that this data is stored for "6-12 months" - what is he doing with it?
So this idea that gov't is going to ignore our plates unless we've been found to be acting unlawfully is total BS. We already know they will collect and store this data for a rainy day --- or apply "big data" and look for patterns of wrongdoing.
State Police have already used historical plate data to track and trend car traffic after a crime was committed to find "who was there." Using "medium data" to build a list of potential suspects. It is hard to argue with the method when they successfully find who raped & killed a single mother of a small child. (created a union between Plates and Possible Suspects).
But - all of us are in the net - and who knows what else is being computed?! There would need to be tight controls on this - real warrants, and not this easily obtained warrantless crap.
The problem isn't Homeland Security. There job is to find threats, and see if they can have solutions to solve them.
When you work security the tyrannical solution is often the easiest one.
You want your PC secure from hackers. Unplug it from the network, cant do that make sure your firewall has 0 outside ports and the inside ports are setup for talking to only the servers each system needs to talk to. Such IT security is hard, because the End users are rapidly changing what they want and the cost to build such a secure system isn't worth the expense.
Law enforcement and security would have an easier job without civil liberties, not because they have nefarious purposes, but because it will make their job easier.
Our jobs as citizens is to let our officials know that we value our freedoms and what we are willing to give up for security, and what security we are willing to risk not having to keep our freedoms. It isn't cut and dry but these department report to a higher political offices, who will need to take their recommendations and decide to accept or reject them. These political office need to be elected by the citizenry. If we refuse to be involved citizens then the easiest path will soon follow.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The courts have not ruled anything of the sort. Disclosure laws have in fact been upheld by the courts numerous times (including the Citizens United decision).
The only reason that "Super PACs" do not have to disclose their donors is because there is no law requiring 501(c)(4) organizations to disclose their donors. Of course, currently neither party really wants that little hole closed, so no bills requiring that have made it anywhere in congress.
-Nick
My name is Obi-Wan Kenobi. You killed my master. Prepare to die.
Let's see, in the eighties, Prodigy (which I was never on) decided to Stop Rude Talk, so they blocked a number of words... one of them was "breast", and variants. Which, of course, knocked offline breast cancer survivors, and the European port of Brest, and....
And then... so, is this idiot willing to be personally liable as an accessory to murder when, say, a child abuse survivor posts to a list on that subject, or a battered woman posts to a support group, and her scumbag abuser finds her and kills her?
mark
It's called an IP address.
It doesn't uniquely identify a person using it, but then neither does a license plate.... a license plate only at best will identify the owner of the car.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Has no life experience how it is in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Russia, Sudan, China etc... where anonymity protects one from getting prosecuted or killed.
How about researching the reasons for violence and despotism and taking active steps to eliminate those?
People in power often show traits of psychopath character behavior and cannot think in above terms to be a viable alternative.
Binary thinking seems to be the general situation where only two possibilities exist: repress/reduce or controlled allow.
I can kill someone, in fact, a lot of someones, with a car. I cannot kill anyone over the Internet. Same reason every gun has a unique serial number, but no pens, nor books require one.
It was circa 1979 when I ran head-long into the demand to remove anonymity as a system programmer for Control Data Corporation's PLATO network:
I was directed to remove the anonymous posting option of the precursor to Usenet: PLATO Notes.
The reason? Legal liability suffered by CDC for libel due CDC's lack of "common carrier" status under the FCC law of the time. A common carrier could not be held accountable for the contents of the information it carried.
When CDC refused to go mass market with PLATO, I accepted a position with a newspaper chain that had conducted a market test of something like PLATO notes for a metro area and found a huge demand. Although they figured out that their business as a newspaper would be endangered by opening up their network to permit everyone to provide content, the rationalization of "no common carrier status" was trotted forth with great facility.
Nowadays, with Facebook routinely censoring politically incorrect content by its users, and Facebook becoming a kind of de facto recentralization of control of the network effect for the masses, Facebook is actively pursuing a course of action that basically _asks_ to be sued for libelous posts by its users. It isn't hard to project this to ISPs when people use their internet connections for damaging ends -- particularly when you now have ISPs routinely "cooperating" with government and its propaganda arm via copyright enforcement on behalf of mass media.
I did anticipate some of this in the aforelinked 1982 essay as follows:
Seastead this.
an IP address uniquely identifies you
You must work for the RIAA, I thought they were the only fuckwits stupid enough to believe that.
A call of "Think of the Children!" and "Terrorists!!!". No surprise here. One or both of these almost always get trotted out as the reasons why we need to give up our freedoms. And if we don't support said freedom removals, they begin asking if we're pro-child abuser or pro-terrorist.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
The license plate doesn't tell you who's driving the car. A computer's IPv4/v6 address is that computer's "License Plate", and similar to a car's license plate, it doesn't tell you who's behind the keyboard. Therefor, if what he wants is a license plate scenario, the computer's IP address is it.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... time... to... die...
He's saying LPs are ignored most of the time. They're not. ALPR systems record every plate scanned by the camera; that is, in fact, the whole point of running ALPR. The data is used to correlate movements of vehicles over a period of time. In some cases, the data is used for tax enforcement or charging of tolls. There is no requirement of an infraction for that to occur, and the storage required to track the movements of tagged vehicles is trivial. What he's asking for is a government mandated supercookie.
"Similarly, should not every individual be required to display a 'license plate' on the digital super-highway?"
No.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Why did Bush create Homeland Security? Was it to spy on us, to to stop terrorists? The first does not stop terrorists, it just takes away freedom of privacy. Go do your jobs, you lazy people at Homeland.
What you propose is preposterous, impractical and patently ridiculous. It should be blisteringly obvious that your suggestion should be amended to simply have each citizen marked with a tattoo of an identification number on the left forearm of each citizen.
Nothing fancy, but it does have the advantage of being indelible and attractive as well.
Scarce, scared, scarred, sacred... -Col. Bruce Hampton
Mow your dang lawn.
Why? It's winter in this IP address block.
Have gnu, will travel.
of thinking... For example, while there might be a license plate on vehicles, there is also a requirement for the driver to be licensed which creates the artificial structure that requires civilians to display a license plate on their vehicle as part of the complicated web of requirements the license contract includes.
But then, when you look at even something like the Australian constitution, Australians are guaranteed a right of travel, which may in itself override the requirements spelled out in the licensing documents
And all of this ignores the IP address that travel around with each computer that allows identification of the computer just like a license plate identifies a vehicle (but not necessarily the driver).
Maybe Homeland officials should be ordered never to converse with the press regarding any matter of technology on the grounds they lack the necessary technical background. Its like asking a nutritionist or a homeless person about running a reactor.
And that attitude is exactly opposite of the whole movement that created the climate that allowed the American Revolution to take place. The men who led that revolution only did so because they held the view that their rights did not come from those with the guns (King George) but that they existed because we are human. Their words were that our rights were granted to us by our creator but far too many get hung up on whether there is a God or not and the phrase loses meaning to them. All such people have to do is substitute "random chance" or "nature" or "evolution" in place of Creator (as that fits their notion of Creator) and the meaning of the phrase does not change. We have rights because we exist. That men trample our rights does not diminish the fact that we have them.
According to your argument, gays fighting for their "right" to be marry was nonsensical and invalid because the "men with guns" had already said they didn't and the only valid way to gain that right was to gain it through the ballot; either by electing representatives who would alter the law or by direct ballot initiatives.
Likewise, your logic says that women do not have an unrestricted right to abortion in the US because the Supreme Court had no authority to deem the laws unconstitutional with Roe v. Wade as the Supreme Court controls no guns.
An example closer to home would be that if your neighbor can outgun you, then he gets any of your possessions he wants because he has the guns,
Just admit that your dreams of anarchy are bogus and join society already.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yes--both parties are blatantly opposed to civil liberties and in favor of online tracking. Just look at the anti-encryption stuff they've been spewing at the last few debates.
But even beyond that, the basic analogy being used here is flawed. He's describing the 1980s and earlier. Today license plates are no longer a thing that just gets checked by a cop if there's a problem--they are automatically scanned, not just by red light cameras, but by toll booths and mass license plate scanners. The data gets logged in case it is later useful for law enforcement.
Almost a decade ago it occurred to me it would only be a matter of time before we would be registering computers for "safe" surfing on the Internet. All it will take is a nasty enough cyberattack (black flag or no).
:T:R:A:N:S:
You say that like it's a bad thing.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
That's not how the internet works. The ignorance is strong with this DHS.
I don't think firing them is a bad thing. The fact that we would have to fire them (i.e. because they suck) is a bad thing. My point is that the problem is not just the current administration. Republicans are just as guilty of this.
"The license plate's identifiers are ignored most of the time by law enforcement."
Well, except when you automatically photograph them and store in a big ol' database till you need it.
If the US wants to force it's citizens to take an Internet Driving Test, fill their boots. But I wonder how they think they have jurisdiction to force the rest of the world.
which, again, is very much parallel to a license plate.
So, those who organized the American Revolution were only lying about their true beliefs? the Declaration of Independence is a clever forgery designed to hide their true intentions? What the hell are you talking about?
And, yes, I'll reiterate my point about gays appealing to the courts that their "rights" were being violated. The government had already issued its opinion about gay marriage in the form of a federal law. Many people have been killed by governments while protesting that their rights are being violated. i guess you are correct, as long as a government employee does the killing and someone in his chain of command told him to do it, then it was okay to do it,
Yes, i fully believe you are a statist and socialist (communist). An all-powerful government fully requires people to believe that they have only the rights that the government wants them to have. That way, they can all be good little sheep and enjoy the boots on their throats. If you ever get your dream all-powerful no restraints government, I hope it embodies every ideal you have because it would suck for you to get your dreamed for government only for it to outlaw talking to your neighbor about what the government might not be doing right because, you know, those in charge decided you didn't have that right.
According to your logic, if any President could convince enough of the military to back him, he could declare himself dictator for life and do away with elections and you would happily sit and enjoy being ruled by a dictator, regardless of how you were treated by his regime because, you know, you have absolutely no rights if he says so. What a miserable world-view to have.
It's time to rein-in the out of control government, and start holding the scumbags that hide behind it accountable.
Treason should be punished.
No, they need to see their court-appointed psychological technician (notice : lack of reference to a "doctor" or person who may have obligations external to the Controlling State).
You do not have permission for discontent. Licenses for discontent are available at your local tax office, starting at !00,000 of $Currency$.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Idiot! What else is there to say?
Hillary had and has numerous email identities as does POTIS.
Some are security compartments.
Some allow social interactions with friends (yoga class).
The point is we have numerous identities the most common
are "home email" and "work email".
To collapse this and reduce all purpose and office driven identities to
a single ID greatly increases risks and solves rare crimes.
Erik Barnett needs to disclose all of his electronic identities ASAP.
I fear this fix is worse than the problem it is intended to solve.
BTW: Does he understand the /. effect.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.