Anon, and on and on

This isn't journalism, it's not polished; it's not even a coherent thought. It's my expectation that these posts (of mine, anyway) ought to be those things that's kept me from writing for too long. But I hope you'll enjoy it. I've included lots of links.


AS YOU ALL KNOW, the DT Twitter feed (link here, or to the right of the Blogger page) went live a month ago, on February 22nd. Because it's too much of a pain to log into Twitter with the account--username desserttickets, password bernice--and perhaps because we don't have much to say, anonymously or otherwise, it hasn't been as prolific as I'd expected; but it has made me think about online anonymity and, yes, WB, I'll say it: Web 2.0.

We weren't the first to come up with anonymous twittering--the splendid fake Christopher Walken is my favourite example, but they took the idea from SecretTweet, and this dude appears to be in on it too--but it doesn't look like anyone has realized, or at least written about, its significance yet.

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Anonymity on the web is neither new nor trivial. Since the beginning, anonymous, open "proxies" have allowed people to mask their IP address from the host resource they're accessing, so that they can surf freely. This has obvious value for a whole host of people, from cybercriminals to political dissidents: anyone who wants to protect his identity online can, in principle, do so without much difficulty. DT 1.0, that is, in its Blogger incarnation, is configured to allow anonymous posting (hence the spree of mild pseudonymous antisemitism in the past few weeks) for precisely that reason: because we believe in free expression, which means expression with impunity.

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It has occured to me that in addition to granting significant technological freedom (people are easily impersonated, for example), Web 2.0--the internet generally--also links people's activities online to their real-life personas in a much more significant and pervasive way than it ever has. We have false names on DT, but our real names tell a lot about us, instantly and for free, if you know where to look.

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Researchers connected with the Munk Centre at the University of Toronto caused a stir when, working with a think-tank and the Tibetan Government in Exile (Munks and monks, yes, har har), they discovered a trojan cyberespionage network apparently based in mainland China, which they've named GhostNet. The Munk people are working hard at CitizenLab with the developers of a software called Psiphon (how cool is this?!) that offers uncensored access to the web--though not totally anonymous access, since information can still be monitored in transmission--from anywhere in the world. It is not my intention to get into the geopolitics of this story here--though I think, as usual, China Matters is not wide of the mark--but this is a fascinating and quietly developing example of the importance of anonymity online.