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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.
Bad car analogy guy works for the DHS
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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.
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.
Lets just lock everyone up in cells, its much easier that way.
And to take it even further: eventually only "approved" devices will be allowed to connect to the public Internet.
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.
"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.
Oh you can believe they're tracking you. Especially with license plate readers built into cop cars.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
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.
You can also use your computer on your LAN. Just don't connect it the "public" internet without a license plate. Get it? The telcos will fall in line with this idea. They probably suggested it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Americans are not taught real history. They are taught the sanitized, approved version. Likewise they don't really think for themselves. They usually select their opinion from a menu presented by the mass media.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
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.
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.
As a Mexican, I take pride in being a North American.
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.
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.
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.