Curbs On Internet Anonymity On The Way ?  

Cryptogon has an interesting post on planned restrictions on internet anonymity - U.N. Agency Eyes Curbs on Internet Anonymity. I noted most of my thoughts on this subject in my review of "The Shockwave Rider" a while back which new readers with a spare half hour or so should check out.

The NSA and the Chinese government are working together, through the U.N., to draft plans for systems that would enable all Internet sessions to be authoritatively traced back to their origins.

Man, if this one doesn’t get your tinfoil in a knot, nothing will.

If you want to know what anonymous on the Internet actually means, under the present surveillance regime, here’s an essay that I wrote on the subject.

Via: Cnet:

A United Nations agency is quietly drafting technical standards, proposed by the Chinese government, to define methods of tracing the original source of Internet communications and potentially curbing the ability of users to remain anonymous.

The U.S. National Security Agency is also participating in the “IP Traceback” drafting group, named Q6/17, which is meeting next week in Geneva to work on the traceback proposal. Members of Q6/17 have declined to release key documents, and meetings are closed to the public.

The potential for eroding Internet users’ right to remain anonymous, which is protected by law in the United States and recognized in international law by groups such as the Council of Europe, has alarmed some technologists and privacy advocates. Also affected may be services such as the Tor anonymizing network.

“What’s distressing is that it doesn’t appear that there’s been any real consideration of how this type of capability could be misused,” said Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C. “That’s really a human rights concern.”

Nearly everyone agrees that there are, at least in some circumstances, legitimate security reasons to uncover the source of Internet communications. The most common justification for tracebacks is to counter distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks.

But implementation details are important, and governments participating in the process — organized by the International Telecommunication Union, a U.N. agency — may have their own agendas. A document submitted by China this spring and obtained by CNET News said the “IP traceback mechanism is required to be adapted to various network environments, such as different addressing (IPv4 and IPv6), different access methods (wire and wireless) and different access technologies (ADSL, cable, Ethernet) and etc.” It adds: “To ensure traceability, essential information of the originator should be logged.”

The Chinese author of the document, Huirong Tian, did not respond to repeated interview requests. Neither did Jiayong Chen of China’s state-owned ZTE Corporation, the vice chairman of the Q6/17’s parent group who suggested in an April 2007 meeting that it address IP traceback.

A second, apparently leaked ITU document offers surveillance and monitoring justifications that seem well-suited to repressive regimes:

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.

Cryptogon also has a (mostly disbelieving) post on Lotus' new concept car - Lotus Concept Car Body Made Out of Hemp.

As a few more-aware commenters note, Henry Ford built some cars out of hemp 70 years ago and planned to sell hemp cars fueled with ethanol - an industrial movement known as chemurgy that was stifled and died on the vine pretty quickly.