An Argument Against Internet PrivacyAuthor: Chris F
You know those secret forum trolls. Tough guys n gals hiding behind their keyboards and dimly lit screens in their mom’s basement causing grief. A stock of Jolt and Yoohoos at their side, grinning away as they reply with racial/homosexual slander ruining the experience for all the “regular” folk. We need to protect those rights! Of course, what if that grief online, turns into real life grief? What if – and a big if – that basement dwelling comic book guy stereotype is true, and turns into so much more than a few words on a message board? Where is the line drawn – when protecting our right to privacy also protects criminal activity?
Slippery slopes after the jump.
The “Telephone Terrorist”, as reported in the link above actually lives in my community. All name calling and finger pointing aside, I can’t help but think how easily this could have been stopped right in it’s tracks – with a little understanding that participating in criminal activitiy, RECORDING PROOF of it, and then posting it on YouTube, message boards, etc. is some sort of waiver of rights to privacy. I am not going to get into investigative journalism into it, but by reading the article above it seems that this has been going on for some time – and no one figured out who this person was until The Smoking Gun fooled him into clicking some IP logging links, came to Canada, staked out his house and uncovered the whole mess.
Granted, I am not big on privacy rights. I don’t fear my government (my tax collectors don’t carry guns), and Politicians in Canada are public servants – not celebrities. This will shock and awe some of you, but if a police officer knocks on my door and asks to have a look around because there was a crime in my neighbourhood I’d let him in – without a warrant. I have nothing illegal, and nothing to hide. If I did then shame on me. If I can assist in some way by opening the door to help in an investigation I would. No, I am not naive – just fully comfortable in my participation of a fine standing community member.
I know many are afraid that if some privacy is given up, then ALL privacy would be gone. I am not big into conspiracy theory. I think there can be reasonable laws setup based on my previous argument: If you commit a crime, record the proof, and decide to share it with the electronic world then you give up your privacy rights. Pretty simple. In fact, in the case above, I can’t believe it took a news outlet to figure this out. Pretty open and shut case for me.
I half expect some diehard privacy advocates to comment here – and I am very interested in hearing from that side. What is the fear founded on? Where is the limit on privacy over the internet – how about internationally? Where is the comfortable line in the sand.
While this doesn’t relate to gaming explicitly I have always argued that removing a level of anonymity on message boards, etc. would improve that community as well. If the WoW boards forced you to post with your account name, and a person could click it and see a list of ALL of your characters, that would provide a level of self moderation. People generally care about their online reputation – giving them avenues to hide who they are creates the cesspool to begin with. If it was your real name and state/province it would be even cleaner. Is the former okay, but the latter pushing it too much?
Where is that safe middle ground?
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I’m an MMO developer and administrator, and my job would be a lot easier without internet anonymity.
Yet, I support privacy rights. That should tell you something, and not that I’m a paranoid schizophrenic writing a manifesto. (Although I have the beard for it.)
I’m glad you trust your government. But, and this is something that one usually has to say to Americans: your government doesn’t control everywhere. The same internet anonymity that allows some guy to get people to break windows in hotels also allows people to see “radical” ideas like democracy from beyond the “Great Firewall” or post up Twitter messages about a questionable election. Is allowing tyranny an appropriate cost to stop a “prankster”?
And, even if you trust your government, do you trust everyone else? Laws on privacy are usually to protect you from others who would abuse your private information for their own gain. Want to see a demonstration? Feel free to post your name, address, mother’s maiden name, and a scan of your ID; we’ll see how happy you are when you aren’t “hiding” that information from everyone.
What about that story you linked to? Frankly, it has nothing to do with internet privacy and everything to do with law enforcement. The story itself says that one police officer was stymied because the federal law enforcement didn’t “seem interested” when they traced the source to Canada. Perhaps instead of denouncing internet privacy you should advocate letting U.S. state law enforcement have legal jurisdiction in Canada, so that they can hop across the border and detain anyone they want to pursue a case without having to worry about all that silly sovereignty stuff.
I’m sure that wouldn’t worry you at all, because governments are always trustworthy, right?
I probably shouldn’t have made such a short and encompassing post on a huge topic of debate – granted. It’s a bit of a shallow look at the topic and maybe unfair along those lines. And to be fair, I wasn’t denouncing internet privacy completely either – only when it pertains to situations like this – where the perps in this situation felt protected by their IP providers, Skype, etc. Without them having that comfort of anonymity they wouldn’t have performed these actions in the first place. Their feeling of the rights they had and the companies who had to provide thier privacy rights was an enabler for the crimes themselves. That was more of the angle I was taking.
Perhaps I am taking too easy of a view on it. My main point is that you post things like that on the internet and a law enforcement agency should be able to pull the proof and easily get the info the need to stop it before it escalates.
And that is where the slippery slope begins – can they pull for felony crimes only? Misdimeanours? Possible empty threats? By no means do I think it should be carte blanche. How a program could be used and monitored safely is the difficult question. In this case it seems pretty simple – in some of your examples, not so much.
Access to some information is already so abundant – it wouldn’t take me long to figure out where you lived and your home phone number with only the most basic of information available to me. If I had reason to try and cause you harm I suspect you wouldn’t be that hard to find – beard and all. (no worries, I have no intention – I honestly just want to pay you for M59 when your payment processing is back up *grin*)
Also – probably better to explain not fearing my government doesn’t mean complete trust either. Lack of fear doesn’t imply trust in any case.
Touche on the sovereignty comment – and that does kind of illustrate my thoughts a bit though – discussions around privacy rights typically escalate very broadly, sometimes I feel to a detriment to the point in hand itself. Of course we can’t take such a narrow view on such a stickler. Instead of advocating US state law in your example, why not just be able to contact the Canadian authorities and say hey – can you stop these guys? Here are their name and addresses, here is their self admitted and proof of crimes that they are bragging about, and it definitely needs to be looked into.
Thanks for the thoughts!
That feeling of anonymity that lets people be assholes (even harmful pranksters) isn’t unique to the internet. Take driving in a car, for example: the same person who would never push you out of the way in a store thinks nothing of cutting you off on the road. Why? Because that person is shielded in their car, and you probably don’t know them. Should we require names and addresses to be painted on cars to try to reduce instances of road rudeness? What we do have is license numbers that the police can use to track people down if there is a real problem. Someone can find out your information easily enough with a license plate number, but it’s not the same as having your address painted on your car so someone can stop by for a “little chat” about your behavior on the road.
Your original article also ignores the fact that it’s pretty much impossible to eliminate internet privacy. A person can set up a system that is very difficult to trace and still carry out mischief. And, laws in other countries are going to make it harder to enforce these rules in your own, since people can just send a signal outside the country; we already see this with proxy servers intended to get around regional restrictions.
Again, I see the real problem here is with law enforcement. The article says that he felt secure not because of internet anonymity, but because he lived in Canada and was harassing U.S. businesses. He was relying on the problems in crossing jurisdictions to get out of trouble easier. It took a journalist with less restrictions to track the person down and provide information to the police.
But, I’m not quick to propose any fixes in that area, either. Established rules like jurisdiction and individual rights are usually there for a good reason, because people in positions of power will abuse that power. I don’t think giving U.S. law enforcement jurisdiction in Canada will really make anyone happy.
[W]hy not just be able to contact the Canadian authorities and say hey – can you stop these guys?
Take the article, go to your local police station, and ask. Give them the information. Find out what the problems really are instead of assuming it’s just internet anonymity to blame. I’m no expert on Canadian law, but the first step is bringing a problem to someone’s attention if you want to get it resolved.
The only weakness in your licence plate analogy is that it does indeed slow people committing crimes – because the licence plate ANYONE can see. They may cut you off, but they probably won’t ram you or drive into parked cars – people will take the licence plate down and inform the authorities. Why not have your IP address posted underneath your name on every board, forum etc? It would work much like a license plate – pretty useless to anyone to look at unless you were committing crimes. (In North America anyway, in some other countries it could be used for anti government forums, etc – where people have to fear that.)
Isn’t the privacy of the internet only nearly impossible because of all the privacy barriers? Your computer is always connected to something, somewhere. I’m sure many can slip through the cracks (like regular criminals do).
I read up on some other articles on it – not just the one I linked (I’ll try to find them again) where the law enforcement agency said that Skype is pretty much impossible to trace or tap. Obviously, Skype itself would know who was using their service – wouldn’t they?
If I would have known about Pranknet (I had never heard of it until that article) I definitely would have done what you said. Much like how I would have reported a hit and run if I had seen it. I suppose the next interesting part will be seeing what comes of all of this now that it is out.
Again, further clarification, I am not against privacy rights by any means. The spirit of the article was using this direct case as an example only – IF Skype and the internet protected these people committing flagrant crimes and If Law Enforcement was unable to crack those privacy rules to find out the gloating perps, then yes, in THIS specific case privacy laws failed society. Again, just in this case. My point was to open a discussion on the broader issues of doing so. (And I thank you for participating in that second part)
I disagree with your extension to my license analogy. Ramming a car incapacitates the driver’s car, too, so there are reasons for not doing it more vital than knowing there’s identifying information on the car.
Consider this instead: do people commit crimes in cars even though they have license plates? Yes, drive-by shootings still occur. If someone can notice the license plates and report them, then it becomes easier to find the criminal. If a criminal is worried about license plates identifying his car, he’ll just steal one if the punishment for the crime is bad enough. As much as some people hate car analogies, this is a good layperson’s explanation for how IP addresses work.
So, the core question is what’s appropriate. Again, in this case, there’s no problem with internet privacy. It looks to be failures in how the law enforcement handled the issue; I suspect that’s mostly because they didn’t understand the scope of what was going on. That’s why I’m harping on this, because eliminating internet privacy would have done nothing here. Here’s a quote from the article, bottom of the second page:
Even beyond that issue is if the loss of privacy is worth the other side-effects. As I said in my first post: is tyranny acceptable if we can stop harmful “pranksters”? I don’t think so. I’d rather risk that someone may be tricked into drinking someone else’s urine rather than know that someone living in a brutally oppressive regime has no technological tools to help fight that regime.
Why not have your IP address posted underneath your name on every board, forum etc?
The thing is, we could. I know Wordpress saves the IP number of people who leave comments. If you wanted to change the system, you could get it to do that on your own blog. But, consider why that’s not a default behavior. Consider why that information is generally hidden if it could be a great boon to humanity. People who know more than you have decided that’s not a good idea.
If you do want to implement this, do me one favor: delete my posts from your site. Not that I have anything illegal or immortal to hide, there are just some people I prefer not to have my IP address easily available just by visiting a site. If you want to know why, post your IP address and I’ll share it with some of those people.
I have some real problems with this article. I have little to no trust in the government and law enforcment.
The problem is that people don’t care anymore, and there are too many problems.
The reason I like my privacy, even from the government, is that you can not know and trust its employees. As a business owner, I know that none of my employees know all my policies, or even follow the ones they do know. Do you think the government or law enforcement is different. Sure they may have some checks and balances, but those have been proven time and again to fail.
I could go into details here and post a million links, articles, and documents showing that corporations (and yes the government is a corporation) are currupt and mislead people, but I wish not to waste my time, because very few people care.
The licence analogy is a stickler. A driver could run someone over with little damage to their car. I suppose that is the challenge with analogies, its even easier to twist them around and get away from the core issue at hand =)
I did give leeway in my comment alluding to the fact that criminals will find a way regardless, it just acts as a barrier for crimes nonetheless. Perhaps we look at it as a drunk driver instead. Someone sees the licence plate and can call the authorities before any real damage is done.
I’m not so sure there isn’t a problem with internet privacy, from my (granted limited) understanding of it. Take piracy over the internet – isn’t it extremely difficult to get a list of people downloading torrents, etc? Again, Internet Privacy acts as an enabler to those “crimes” (quotified as I know there are arguments on whether it is illegal or not, depending on state and country).
And I do sympathize with your oppressive regimes concern (which I didn’t take into consideration when I wrote the piece in the first place) – but we aren’t talking about abandoning privacy rights across the board, or in every country, we are talking about IP in a stable government structure where legitimate crimes are being committed, recorded, shared, and bragged about. Also, the pranks, at least in one case, caused damages upward of $50,000 – not to mention the costs associated with the other ones. It is a really good thing TSG broke the story and the perps, as we all know people typically will try to push their own limits and one-up themselves.
“Why Not have your IP address posted..” I posed that more to counterpoint the licence analogy – as that is what cars currently have. I honestly wasn’t suggesting it – same along the lines of my previous comment where posting of City/Province would probably be a good start as a deterrent. I did flesh out the probability that that would be used for criminal activity as well (which is why I don’t share them)
I guess this argument will circle like a gun control argument – Gun control legislation inconveniences proper owners, and criminals still get the guns they need to do crimes.
@Marc: Just to be clear we aren’t talking Carte Blanche here, sweeping openness to all who care. If we break it down to the simplest form:
If you commit a crime, record the proof, post it in a public forum and invite others to view it – then it should be real simple for law enforcement agencies to get your info. This had been going on for over a year with Pranknet, with the perps only doing so because they could easily hide behind their anonymous “protection”.
I’m not so sure there isn’t a problem with internet privacy, from my (granted limited) understanding of it.
Not to insult you, but I think this is part of the problem. You do not have a very good understanding. But, please don’t think that means you should just sit down and shut up, but you should get informed. If you don’t want to get informed, then you need to accept that the choices others have made may be for the best. Asking for something to be changed that you don’t understand, like internet privacy, is dangerous.
I do understand the issues. It would make my professional life easier. It’s absolutely not worth the cost to do so.
I’ll say again, the article makes it clear that the pranksters felt security because they were in a different country. Internet privacy probably helped a bit, but eliminating it wouldn’t have changed this situation much.
BTW, it’s actually quite easy to see who is downloading a torrent. Or, at least, who they claim to be. The nature of BitTorrent is that peers connect to each other to distribute the file. The real problem is if requesting a part of a torrent means you’re breaking the law. If I own a DVD, is it illegal for me to download the movie? If I start downloading but then decide to stop, is that illegal? If someone uses my open WiFi to download the torrent am I responsible?
These are the thornier issues.
Anyway, perhaps we should agree to disagree at this point. I do hope you choose to learn more about the issues, though.
I don’t find it insulting. I do believe the issue in this discussion is that I took a small black and white issue and painted it with ‘internet privacy’.
I am not afraid of this happening as a result of it, mind you, although I know some are. Hence the use of slippery slope alot – where does it end, where does it begin?
Not to keep beating this dead horse (I agree to disagree, although I think the small frame I put around it shed to the larger scope – perhaps rightly so considering the topic and content) but I will share a recent Torrent experience for myself.
I don’t download them, first off. Except for last week. I am a certified diver of 10 years and couldn’t find my dive manual – I hadn’t dove since last March and wanted to refresh myself on the content. After a LOT of digging I found it online, and had no problem downloading it.
1) Its expensive, the $60 dollar range, not a quick picker up for $15 bucks
2) I HAD to buy it to get certified in the first place, so my dive card is proof that I had purchased it in the past
3) It wasn’t available on the website for those who have purchased it before (but should be).
If companies put digital recordings and music available to someone who has proof of purchase, I wonder if that would increase – or decrease piracy of all forms? Would people be more likely to share it with their friends since they already paid for it? I wonder how many legitimate torrent users there are. For the most part, we all know they are hacks just trying to save money with I’m just curious what percentage of regular users would skip supporting those sites if they had other means to get their legitimate property back.
Bah, probably save that for another post another day, this thread is already gooey. =)
Yeah I’m sooooo not getting deeply into this conversation.
I do have a little bit to say though, that I’m frustrated as a Canadian how many other people take our privacy laws for granted, as if they’d be thrilled to toss them away. =(
This debate makes me alternatively very sad and yeah, quite angry.
Don’t be sad Rog, here’s a cookie! (And definitely don’t be angry, I do appreciate your contributions here). I don’t want to throw away privacy laws for whome they are created to protect – law abiding citizens.
I just with there were some real life easy way to have our cake and eat it too. Make it easier for criminals to be un-protected by Privacy Laws, but keep the regular folk protected. I know that is impossible, but hey, dare to dream, right?
Well that’s the part I hope for. I’m hoping that you can see the extreme naiveté in these sentiments.
What you’re asking for is an exception to privacy laws for a specific case. The assumption that it would be applied appropriately once the laws were change, is such a huge mistake that it’s literally offensive to me.
This isn’t even an agree-to-disagree topic. This is a debate versus sanity.
In other words, if it’s just a dream, I understand the desire. But please, show some pragmatism before suggesting changing our country this way.
As I tried to clear a few times, I wasn’t trying to throw out the baby with the bath water. Just that in this specific case – if indeed they were able to hide behind internet privacy laws to do their crimes (which, as Psycho pointed out, still isn’t clear), while posting proof and admitting guilt in public forums, then THIS case could be used as an argument against internet privacy. In some of my extreme examples (posting IP addresses, names, etc under posts) was just illustrating where the lines are that would make the bubble burst – I was not advocating for those changes.
Granted, my lose conversational blogging style failed the intent behind the post – on such a hot topic, I should have written more essay style and had been absolutely clear on certain points. With each response I made I just made it less clear and more fuddled, so it seems =)
That is of course the concern. A more apt comparison might be burning down a church because a criminal is taking sanctuary inside.
Ultimately, removing sanctuary may give satisfaction to those that want justice, but it’s a compromise with little results and great loss.
I applaud Brian for his patience above. I react too quickly on this topic perhaps. Right now Canadian laws regarding privacy are currently under fire not due to what I would consider crimes, but for the interests of media conglomerates that have far less respect for unintended consequences. They don’t need more fuel for the fire.