The prosecution is trying to make themselves look a little better by saying that they don’t actually demand the password, only that the accused type it in. By my reckoning, demanding that someone unencrypt their computer for you is certainly just as much self-incrimination as having them tell you their password. We’ll see how this case shakes down.
I’ve changed my mind. **The kind of naming policy that Facebook and Google Plus have is actually a radical departure from the way identity and speech interact in the real world. **They attach identity more strongly to every act of online speech than almost any real world situation does.
I want to walk you through how I’ve come to this understanding. Because I’ve been obsessively listening to Philosophy Bites podcasts, I’m going to use a thought experiment.
Imagine you’re walking down the street and you say out loud, “Down with the government!” For all non-megastars, the vast majority of people within earshot will have no idea who you are. They won’t have access to your employment history or your social network or any of the other things that a Google search allows one to find. The only information they really have about you is your physical characteristics and mode of dress, which are data-rich but which cannot be directly or easily connected to your actual identity. In my case, bystanders would know that a 5’9”, 165 pound probably Caucasian male with half a beard said, “Down with the government!” Neither my speech or the context in which it occurred is preserved. And as soon as I leave the immediate vicinity, no one can definitively prove that I said, “Down with the government!”
In your head, adjust the settings for this thought experiment (you say it at work or your hometown or on television) or what you say (something racist, something intensely valuable, something criminal) or who you are (child, celebrity, politician) or who is listening (reporters, no one, coworkers, family). What I think you’ll find is that we have different expectations for the publicness and persistence of a statement depending on a variety of factors. There is a continuum of publicness and persistence and anonymity. But in real life, we expect very few statements to be public, persistent, and attached to your real identity. Basically, only people talking on television or to the media can expect such treatment. And even then, the vast majority of their statements don’t become part of the searchable Internet.
This is a really smart observation! I have a lot to say about this whole “real name” thing, but this is a very good start!
Mug-Shot Industry Will Dig Up Your Past, Charge You to Bury It Again | Threat Level | Wired.com.
There’s so much that is fascinating about this story. On the one hand, yeah, this is a really shady practice: scraping mugshots and names from a non-Google-able website and posting them on a Google-able one, then charging the subjects to remove those mugshots. Yes. Very bad.
But it also highlights something interesting about what constitutes public posting on the internet. The original websites that hosted the mugshots were public, in that anyone who went to the sites could see them, but you could arguably say they were NOT public, since Google couldn’t see them. So what determines the definition of “public:” literally being able to publicly access something, or being able to find it on Google? More to the point: which is the official repository of “public” sites: the internet itself, or only Google’s version of the internet?
Matt Blaze: Wiretapping and Cryptography Today.
A great article about the interplay between government wiretapping and cryptography. The basic leaping off point here is that, despite fears by the government, the widespread availability of encryption has not negatively impacted law enforcement’s ability to get the job done. I love a story that encourages skepticism for claims about how some technology or another is ruining society. Technology has always been developing, and every generation thinks that theirs will be the one in which our technology finally destroys us.
Chin up: claims like that have been wrong 100% of the time before.
Maybe it is. Maybe the loss of privacy is the thing that makes the internet work the way we want it to work. Worth thinking about…
(Source: Flickr / lee20sk)
There’s been some use of this kind of scheme before, but a law like this one (cleverly disguised, as the post notes, as a child pronography law) would streamline this little process.
EFF rounds up some really interesting stories.
http://lulzsecurity.com/releases/senate.gov.txt.
I wrote a post not too long ago about what WikiLeaks meant, what the organization’s goals are, and why I have some problems with how they are achieving them. All of that applies to LulzSec. Still very ambivalent!
Andrew Breitbart and the unwilling suspension of disbelief.
It’s interesting that, while he’s careful to mitigate against this somewhat in the post, this chart would suggest that anonymous speech is generally on the negative end of trustworthiness. And I think that makes sense. But doesn’t it depend on how we thing about anonymity?
As an example, a person calling out bad practices at Wal-Mart, for instance, need not give out any of the classical information that makes up “personal identifiers” as long as she can give out the kind of information that validates her as a Wal-Mart employee. So maybe the discussion of anonymity is a mislead, and we should really be talking about verifiability? (Again, the article mostly IS about verifiability and trustworthiness, not anonymity, but why bring anonymity into the discussion?)
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