Tor breach shows there's no such thing as Internet anonymity
A whole bunch of Internet crooks were rounded up last week
in an operation that literally spanned the globe. Wired's Andy Greenberg
catalogs the arrestees in a November
7, 2014, article. Some people are speculating that the FBI and other
law-enforcement agencies took advantage of a hole in the Tor anonymizing
service. Forbes' Kashmir Hill connects some of the dots in another November
7, 2014, article.
The folks behind the Tor service acknowledged in a July 30, 2014, post that they detected an attempt to de-anonymize some users. It's anybody's guess whether law enforcement's take-down of Silk Road 2.0 and other illegal operations was the result of some hole in Tor's security. What's certain is that there is no such thing as Internet anonymity. Nothing that exists on the Internet is truly private, although some things can be made more private than others.
Anonymity is a double-edged sword
Early next year, the Virginia Supreme Court is expected to rule on whether the Yelp customer-review site has to reveal the identities of seven people who wrote negative reviews of a carpet-cleaning service, which is suing the seven for defamation. JD Supra's Malorie Alverson describes the case in a November 5, 2014, article.
The carpet-cleaning service claims the reviewers were not customers. Yelp refuses to disclose their identities and invokes their First Amendment right to free speech. Is "free speech" synonymous with "anonymous speech"? The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that it is -- at least to an extent. (McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Comm'n, 514 U.S. 334, 1995) Thomas Paine and other American Revolutionaries relied on anonymity in their inciteful and insightful pamphlets.
Democracy relies on anonymity to defend against tyranny. Yet online anonymity also abets illegal activities, and it tends to encourage incivility. That is why we have a group of Silicon Valley techies working to make anonymizing tools easier for everyone to use, and at the same time we have law enforcement officials in Canada calling for an end to Internet anonymity.
You can operate pretty darned anonymously with some effort. Wired's Greenberg describes several anonymizing products and services in a June 17, 2014, article. But you can never be absolutely, positively sure nobody can tie your Internet activities to you personally, as ProPublica's Julie Angwin explains in a February 24, 2014, article.
So we can still be anonymous -- just not on the Internet? Or while carrying a mobile phone? Or anywhere under video surveillance, considering the growing use of facial-recognition software? Or anywhere we drive, considering license-plate readers, GPS devices, and other vehicle data collectors? If a stranger with the right resources chose to make the effort, they could find out more about us than we know about ourselves.
We might be better off hiding in plain sight. Create a false persona to throw the trackers off track. Throw up some white noise as a kind of online veil. But even that sounds like a lot of work. Personally, I choose to discourage trackers by leading an incredibly boring life. (Well, boring for anyone else -- for me, it's perfect!)
Yet I still disable third-party cookies, block ads in my browser, and take other steps to limit how much I'm tracked -- and I recommend that you do likewise.
Also this week:
Hackers owned Home Depot's networks for five months
Another call for a nationwide breach-notification law
The folks behind the Tor service acknowledged in a July 30, 2014, post that they detected an attempt to de-anonymize some users. It's anybody's guess whether law enforcement's take-down of Silk Road 2.0 and other illegal operations was the result of some hole in Tor's security. What's certain is that there is no such thing as Internet anonymity. Nothing that exists on the Internet is truly private, although some things can be made more private than others.
Anonymity is a double-edged sword
Early next year, the Virginia Supreme Court is expected to rule on whether the Yelp customer-review site has to reveal the identities of seven people who wrote negative reviews of a carpet-cleaning service, which is suing the seven for defamation. JD Supra's Malorie Alverson describes the case in a November 5, 2014, article.
The carpet-cleaning service claims the reviewers were not customers. Yelp refuses to disclose their identities and invokes their First Amendment right to free speech. Is "free speech" synonymous with "anonymous speech"? The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that it is -- at least to an extent. (McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Comm'n, 514 U.S. 334, 1995) Thomas Paine and other American Revolutionaries relied on anonymity in their inciteful and insightful pamphlets.
Democracy relies on anonymity to defend against tyranny. Yet online anonymity also abets illegal activities, and it tends to encourage incivility. That is why we have a group of Silicon Valley techies working to make anonymizing tools easier for everyone to use, and at the same time we have law enforcement officials in Canada calling for an end to Internet anonymity.
You can operate pretty darned anonymously with some effort. Wired's Greenberg describes several anonymizing products and services in a June 17, 2014, article. But you can never be absolutely, positively sure nobody can tie your Internet activities to you personally, as ProPublica's Julie Angwin explains in a February 24, 2014, article.
So we can still be anonymous -- just not on the Internet? Or while carrying a mobile phone? Or anywhere under video surveillance, considering the growing use of facial-recognition software? Or anywhere we drive, considering license-plate readers, GPS devices, and other vehicle data collectors? If a stranger with the right resources chose to make the effort, they could find out more about us than we know about ourselves.
We might be better off hiding in plain sight. Create a false persona to throw the trackers off track. Throw up some white noise as a kind of online veil. But even that sounds like a lot of work. Personally, I choose to discourage trackers by leading an incredibly boring life. (Well, boring for anyone else -- for me, it's perfect!)
Yet I still disable third-party cookies, block ads in my browser, and take other steps to limit how much I'm tracked -- and I recommend that you do likewise.
Also this week:
Hackers owned Home Depot's networks for five months
Another call for a nationwide breach-notification law
