John Hawkins, like most political bloggers, is not very strong on the technology side of things:
At a minimum, it's a fair bet that at any point in time, your ISP is recording every DHCP transaction between you and their network. That means every time you get an IP address for your house to use, they record it. Many of them do similar monitoring of your HTTP traffic for a period of time as well, just in case they have the cops rush in with a warrant that they needed executed immediately.
So, to say that the Internet is anonymous is simply not true. It's also not nearly as hard as Hawkins believes for the police to trace a user from the "crime scene" back to their ISP because most criminals don't use complicated, encrypted proxies and tricks like that. Once they start getting some basic information, all they have to do is keeping file warrants for information. In the case of the guy who hacked Sarah Palin's email account, for example, all they probably had to do to get started was to do a WHOIS lookup on 4chan to start requesting information about the guy.
To "get rid of anonymity," you would have to first mandate a national data retention policy that would span several common protocols: HTTP, SMTP, IMAP, Gnutella, eDonkey, NNTP, OSCAR, XMPP and MSN Messenger. Larger ISPs would have to throw in some of the VoIP protocols to make this more effective. You would also need to ban all consumer encrypted traffic except at e-commerce sites during purchases. All of that would work only in the United States. You would need either a comprehensive global treaty or a global government to make it truly effective. It is simply not feasible to talk about "ending anonymity" without bringing a strong government role into play. Most people won't voluntarily give up what anonymity they do have, so that point is moot.
nonymity serves a useful role in allowing people to speak more freely. Some of the very vocal critics of Islam, such as Isaac Schrodinger don't post under their real names for obvious reasons. Likewise, you are never likely to see a local write frankly about the Saudi, Iranian or Chinese regimes under their real name unless they have a martyrdom complex. The fate that has befallen many an Egyptian blogger who had the temerity to modestly criticize their government is proof enough that anonymity is a double-edged sword that has a lot of good to offer society.
There are two major reasons why trolls and spammers exist the way they do: the lack of foreign government cooperation and the lack of priorities in government. These people just don't usually make it on the radar of law enforcement because they are too busy chasing people who've broken one of hundreds of federal criminal statutes, or the feds consider it a waste of time to ask the Russians, Nigerians or whoever it is they need to ask for help on a spammer or troll. Of course, if the federal government would release all non-violent drug offenders, it could spend the next 25 years cheerfully locking up spammers and trolls who go well past legal limits and never run out of room, but I'll save that for a different discussion.
Can we reverse these trends and put the genie back in the bottle? Unfortunately, curing these problems would probably take a level of government intervention that would be worse than the disease, with one exception: the end of anonymity on the Internet. Although there would be negatives to that, it would also be the key to minimizing spam, hacking, fraud, and trolling. It would also help minimize the extraordinarily rude behavior that has become the rule, not the exception on the net.The Internet is not anonymous. Get that through your head. All of you. It is very similar to real life where you are free to do whatever you want in public until you attract attention to yourself. People have records of your transactions at stores, and in some parts of the country they have records of part of your use of the roads via toll booths. The Internet is very similar. Your ISP is not monitoring most of the protocols you use, but if you do something funny that attracts their attention, such as inundating their network with SMTP packets or running a P2P application 24/7, they probably will start to monitor you. When John said that there is no real distinction between the Internet and real life, he didn't quite realize that even the "anonymity" of the Internet operates in a similar manner.
At a minimum, it's a fair bet that at any point in time, your ISP is recording every DHCP transaction between you and their network. That means every time you get an IP address for your house to use, they record it. Many of them do similar monitoring of your HTTP traffic for a period of time as well, just in case they have the cops rush in with a warrant that they needed executed immediately.
So, to say that the Internet is anonymous is simply not true. It's also not nearly as hard as Hawkins believes for the police to trace a user from the "crime scene" back to their ISP because most criminals don't use complicated, encrypted proxies and tricks like that. Once they start getting some basic information, all they have to do is keeping file warrants for information. In the case of the guy who hacked Sarah Palin's email account, for example, all they probably had to do to get started was to do a WHOIS lookup on 4chan to start requesting information about the guy.
To "get rid of anonymity," you would have to first mandate a national data retention policy that would span several common protocols: HTTP, SMTP, IMAP, Gnutella, eDonkey, NNTP, OSCAR, XMPP and MSN Messenger. Larger ISPs would have to throw in some of the VoIP protocols to make this more effective. You would also need to ban all consumer encrypted traffic except at e-commerce sites during purchases. All of that would work only in the United States. You would need either a comprehensive global treaty or a global government to make it truly effective. It is simply not feasible to talk about "ending anonymity" without bringing a strong government role into play. Most people won't voluntarily give up what anonymity they do have, so that point is moot.
nonymity serves a useful role in allowing people to speak more freely. Some of the very vocal critics of Islam, such as Isaac Schrodinger don't post under their real names for obvious reasons. Likewise, you are never likely to see a local write frankly about the Saudi, Iranian or Chinese regimes under their real name unless they have a martyrdom complex. The fate that has befallen many an Egyptian blogger who had the temerity to modestly criticize their government is proof enough that anonymity is a double-edged sword that has a lot of good to offer society.
There are two major reasons why trolls and spammers exist the way they do: the lack of foreign government cooperation and the lack of priorities in government. These people just don't usually make it on the radar of law enforcement because they are too busy chasing people who've broken one of hundreds of federal criminal statutes, or the feds consider it a waste of time to ask the Russians, Nigerians or whoever it is they need to ask for help on a spammer or troll. Of course, if the federal government would release all non-violent drug offenders, it could spend the next 25 years cheerfully locking up spammers and trolls who go well past legal limits and never run out of room, but I'll save that for a different discussion.
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