In Pursuit of Mysteries

Anonymity and Free Speech on the Internet

The Internet has had a place for anonymous speech since its earliest days. This is something for which I am eternally thankful. When I first got on the net in the late 1980s, I was using the Usenet forums and mailing lists. For most of that time, no one really cared who I was, just what I was writing. As an 18 year old, this had a profound effect on my development as I was able to talk and argue with all sorts of people without us being overly focused on reputation or “real world” repercussions. As they used to say, on the Internet, no one knows that you’re a dog.

This anonymity also gave me the freedom to be a bit of a young prick but quite a few people that I met then, almost 20 years ago, are people that I still know and am friends with today. One of them is a co-blogger on the upcoming Buddhist group blog that I’m organizing. It also had a strong influence on my spiritual and intellectual development as I could speak to people without the worry that it would get back to my conservative family or to haunt me later. Many of my posts from that era are online, actually, but because we all used happy pirate nicknames, unless you know the variety of names or e-mail addresses that I used then, you would not be able to connect those with the upright citizen Al Billings of today. When I look at some of those old postings, I don’t think of that as a bad thing at times.

There is information circulating today that some people want to change this. There is an “IP Traceback” drafting group, named Q6/17, out there. This is associated with the United Nations but has strong ties to Chinese nationals involved in PRC state-run enterprises. Additionally, it looks like the United States’ National Security Agency is attending their meeting next week as well. Details on what they are up to are not clear as they are refusing to comment or release documents but, as the article discusses, there is pretty strong evidence (even in the proposal names) that they are trying to bring about the end of anonymity on the Internet.

Now, anonymity on the net is an odd thing. Since all packets have addresses and these go back to a source (unless you are spoofing for one way traffic), it is hard to be truly anonymous. Someone, somewhere, may have a log fail containing records of connections between machines. That being said, it is an ocean of data and there are anonymizing tools, such as Tor or remailers. As various scandals in China, Burma, Egypt, Iran, and other places have shown in the last few years, governments will often go to great lengths to track down their own citizens if they engage in unpopular or critical speech (especially when directed at the government). This and attacking the pirating of “intellectual property” would seem to be the most obvious application of IP Traceback technology. A leaked document from Q6/17 seems to support this with its justification of the uses of the technology:

1.5 Proxy “Safe harbor” A political opponent to a government publishes articles putting the government in an unfavorable light. The government, having a law against any opposition, tries to identify the source of the negative articles but the articles having been published via a proxy server, is unable to do so protecting the anonymity of the author.

On the group’s own site it says, “Anonymity was considered as an important problem on the Internet (may lead to criminality). Privacy is required but we should make sure that it is provided by pseudonymity rather than anonymity.”

All of this is a situation that should be monitored closely. Secretive proposals by self-appointed organizations with input from known repressive regimes and organizations (don’t forget the NSA’s role in the wiretapping of American citizens) should be seen with deep suspicion in regards to their intent.

Anathem Launch Event

I went to the launch event for Neal Stephenson’s new novel, Anathem, this evening in San Francisco. It was hosted by the Long Now Foundation and streamed live to the world. (My review of Anathem is here.)

Neal Stephenson

During the event, Neal Stephenson read briefly from the opening section of the novel, explaining terms in brief. Following this, there was singing orchestrated by David Stutz, who is a friend of Stephenson’s and a musicologist. As I have mentioned previously, he has composed and performed vocal music set in the world of Anathem. He had brought with him the other individuals that have performed this music for the CD that Stutz produced. This CD was available at the event in its final form and the group sang portions of it as the interlude between other events of the evening. They also performed some music, a lament, that was not included on the CD but which Stutz has discussed on his website.

David Stutz and Choir

Following the initial music, Stewart Brand, Neal Stephenson, and Danny Hillis did a group discussion of the ideas in the book and took written questions from the audience. As the thinking of the Long Now Foundation for their 10,000 year clock played an inspirational role in the novel, it made sense to have all three on stage.

Stewart Brand, Neal Stephenson, and Danny Hillis

After more music, Stephenson did the required book signing and there was a brief performance of the jokingly named “Shovelfu” with (you guessed it) shovels. I don’t want to give any spoilers to the book since I’ve avoided them so far but this was a joking a reference to some actions in the novel and a rather enthusiastically martial monastic. (Someone also made a reference to the book being “Post-Aclockolyptic Fiction” as well.)

David Stutz with his Tetrahedron

The evening closed with David Stutz giving instructions on the mathematical basis of the music he wrote and with a hands on demonstration. First, he demonstrated the use of the music as part of a Turing Machine (including a roll of paper that he was holding). He then arranged for a crowd of people to handle small tetrahedrons with instructions that were passed from person to person with musical accompaniment. This was followed by a fuller demonstration on the creation, musically, of cellular automata from simple rules with the crowd clapping in rhythm.

Crowd Performing as Cellular Automata

I’m absolutely entranced by the work that Stutz has put into all of this and the obvious fun of it. He has also made the musical scores for this work available with a creative commons license, which is cool.

I managed to meet up with some of my acquaintances from Noisebridge, the local hacker space-in-formation, so it was a pretty good evening overall.

Update: Video of Neal Stephenson’s reading from the event and of the singing of the lament can be watched at fora.tv’s website.

You can also download the video (64 MB) or the audio (10 MB) of this.

Video of Last HOPE Talks Available

The Last HOPE was a hacker convention that took place in New York City in July, 2008. It is one of a series, over the years, sponsored by 2600 magazine. I did not attend because we had just had the Mozilla Summit and I was already scheduled to go to the Black Hat and DEFCON conventions in August. Several of my friends and acquaintances did go though and at least one of them presented there.

The audio of the talks is available on the talks page on the Last HOPE site. You can see descriptions of the talks and listen to lower or higher fidelity versions of the talks. Since many of them have slides or other demonstrations, this is not always the greatest of options. I found out yesterday that torrents have been made available of videos of most of the talks. You can find these here for download. There are no descriptions so you will need to go to the talks page on the main site above if you want information on these talks.

I appreciate that HOPE has made all of these available. The talks from the last few Chaos Communication Congresses are also available for free online as well. This means that those people who don’t have the resources to fly all over to attend these hacker conferences can get some of the value that they offer, which is a nice way of giving back to the community.