Privacy, Government, Surveillance, and You.

Privacy, yes. Anonymity, no. Once you allow people to hide their identities, it becomes impossible to distinguish the activist from the criminal, the oppressed from the agitator. Those who make a true difference in the world don't hide behind TOR.

edited 27th Dec '14 4:43:19 PM by Fighteer

Your first two sentences are defensible. Your last sentence is factually inaccurate.

I think more good is accomplished by anonymity than bad. I hardly think that the sensitivities of volunteer moderators is in any way worth throwing the freedoms granted by anonymity away.

People are mean on the internet, so fucking what? That is such an inconsequential thing to throw other peoples freedoms away for, and I say other people, because whenever you feel like giving up your own anonymity, you can go right ahead and make a new TV Tropes account with your IRL name. Personally, I think some of the negative fallout that comes from things like Tor keeps things interesting. I like knowing that when I use it, I'm very likely not being logged or tracked on which sites I go on. I like being able to pirate stuff without worrying about nasty letters in the mail, and I really like that I was able to freely browse whatever I wanted on several deployments to countries with rather draconian censorship policies for the internet in southeast asia. I wouldn't have been able to even use facebook without Tor while I was deployed, or TV Tropes.

What type of limp wristed over-sensitive tard would give all that up because people are mean on the internet? If you can't handle people calling you names online, click the big red X in the corner of your screen, because it isn't going to change.

Indeed, it's not. Good to see you again, Barkey. What I'm going to say next is not directed at you, btw. Just a continuation of my previous points.

Really, this debate is utterly meaningless because anonymity is largely irrelevant to internet harrassment.

Like I said a page ago, most people who use the internet to harrass, bully, and express bigotry are not doing this anonymously.

How can this be, one might ask? How come they don't face judgment in their social circles? Well... same reason people who want anonymity gone aren't threatened by the implications. Some people have the privilege of living in a social circle that approves of their ideas, personal choices, and lifestyle in general. A hypothetical Asshole Mc Racist is able to post his stuff without IRL consequences because his friends are all in the MRA, his boss is in Tea Party, and his family prays to Ayn Rand five times a day. So a hypothetical Tumblr S. Justice is also fine not having anonymity because their friends follow their blog, their family really enjoyed the 60s, and I'd come up with more stereotypical jokes, but I'm tired right now.

Now on the other hand, there are people whose anonymity is their only defense against harrasment. And I'm not just talking about myself or others in situations like myself(stuck in corrupt oppressive regimes that is). I'm talking about people who have to hide parts of their identity because those parts are unacceptable in their social circles. Homosexual kids in conservative families and schools who would have their lives ruined and themselves driven to suicide if their identity was discovered.

Perfectly demonstrated by David Wong of Cracked, who's all "fuck anonymity" and then articles on gender issues credited "Cracked Staff" mysteriously pop up. Funny thing that it was also him who brilliantly pointed out how people tend to only hate methods when they're used against them. The irony is stunning.

Bottom line, removal of anonymity will only increase internet harrassment and bigotry, and drastically so.

@Fighter, here's my solution, have your cake and eat it. People are dicks online because their actions are free of consequences (sometimes because the real them can't be found but more often because the place they are being a dick doesn't care). But imagine if you could make people face consequences for their online actions without killing the anonymity. We do it in part here, you get known and then if you break the rules your 'account' is punished, that works to keep most of us towing the line. Now expand that principle, imagine if getting known was done once and covered more than a single site, imagine if being a dick here would result in you being banned from dozens of sites where you used the same 'know' (because they made you)? I reckon that would bring a lot more people in line with the rules.

And yes nowhere in that process do you have to compromise the anonymity of someone's meat-space identity, just the anonymity between online identities in those places that work together, which I'm all for fucking over.

It's not a bad idea. We already have something like it, with a lot of sites using Facebook or Google or Live as a universal login. The problem is that the consequences don't carry over from one to the other — there's no entity coordinating punishments for misbehavior.

Things is Facebook and Google don't punish people for being assholes, they are not part of the civilised Internet. What I'm thinking of is almost the formation of Internet nations, as currently each site is akin to its own tribe/city state.

There's a reason I wish we had an Internet culture thread, I'd love to discuss ideas for making the Internet more civilised.

This happens regularly, by the way. Wal-Mart for instance fires people for talking about unions in any capacity.

I don't think I'd want to roll the dice on some exec in California who I'll never meet googling my name and coming up with the economic ideas I've expressed here. I mean the company I work for isn't assholeish about that, but a) I've seen too many people get sacked for dissent elsewhere in the market and b) it's none of their damn business anyway.

edited 28th Dec '14 8:22:27 PM by Pykrete

Personally, there's a part of me that likes the fact that the internet is the wild west for no other reason than I like it the way it is just fine. I like that there isn't really any governing body out there that has control. Every other place you will ever go has control over you in some fashion, one of the things I kind of like about the internet is that even though stupid shit can be expressed, so can awesome shit, and both the stupid shit and the awesome shit are bound to offend somebody.

Hand over control of the interwebs to an actual organization with a face(which most likely ends up running akin to a business) and next thing you know, the social justice mafia gets to dictate what is acceptable, because law suits.

Or, alternatively, a corporate mafia seeking to squash any economic or political dissent (especially in the Western world).

Or the fundie crazies.

Or a horrifying combination of all three. You've probably seen corporate twitters. They go out of their way to be as inoffensive as possible to the point their messages don't even resemble human speech anymore. Giving control of all social media to such a thing will result in a bloated, cosmic horror version of a soccer mom - pulling the roots of anything that can be even remotely considered offensive(like the word "butt").

And I wouldn't use such a ridicilous example if some type of phone(forgot which, either Google or Microsoft) didn't already censor the word "butt". Like what the hell?

edited 29th Dec '14 7:28:53 AM by Luminosity

And then have it run by the UN?

The NSA quietly slipped out its oversight report during the Christmas season. I don't have time to read through all these pdfs right now, so if anybody wants to comment how successful (or not) they were in protecting U.S. persons' privacy/liberties, it would be appreciated.

These appear to be quarterly reports to Congress prepared by the NSA to self-report any actions undertaken by their employees that violated any regulations governing intelligence activities. According to the NSA, very little happened.

GCHQ's 'spook first' programme to train Britain's most talented tech entrepreneurs

NSA Reform Faces Hard Sell After Paris Attack. Great, so thanks to random lone-wolf attacks, we'll never see any meaningful reform.

The NSA agrees with the FBI that North Korea was behind the Sony hack. I'm still skeptical it was North Korea, but on the other hand, they may have info that nobody else does.

A MN senator introduced a bill that would make the NSA's activities illegal in MN without a warrant. As a citizen of said state, color me intrigued.

edited 12th Jan '15 9:24:09 AM by speedyboris

The last one: I thought the NSA didn't monitor domestic American communications, and sub-contracted it to GCHQ?

As the NSA is a federal agency, state laws have no jurisdiction.

They don't deliberately from my understanding. Plus even if they do, it wouldn't be the first time someone had tried to outlaw something that was already illegal.

edited 12th Jan '15 9:47:09 AM by Silasw

They don't do it deliberately insofar as "accidentally" collecting data about millions of people completely unrelated to any case they're working on constitutes indeliberateness.

They collect massive information from emails, text messages and phone calls passing through certain servers, regardless of the nation of origin of the messages.

Wasn't quite sure where to put this, but: 2014's list of most-used passwords. Really, people? You're still using 123456 as a password? Or "password"? Do you -want- to be hacked? Clearly you do.

A surprising number of people simply don't give a crap about security, and then they wonder why they get hacked. As a famous comedian said, "You can't fix stupid."

edited 20th Jan '15 7:36:56 AM by Fighteer

Or maybe they don't think they need safe passwords.