Anonymity

Anonymity is the quality of being unknown or unacknowledged. In the digital age, primarily among [Page 10]Internet users, anonymity is perceived as a right, even as a necessity for the preservation of free speech.

There have always been writers and artists who have published anonymously. Scribes using the pseudonym “Publius” wrote and published The Federalist papers, on which the U.S. Constitution was patterned. But on the Internet, the first medium to place publishing in the hands of almost any individual, anonymous communication is often motivated by concerns that are far different from those that drove Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison to hide their identities while writing in 1787.

People seek online anonymity for many reasons. Perhaps they dabble occasionally in online pornography, and prefer that their neighbors never know of it. Maybe they employ stinging wit to deliver sharp, frequent rebukes of email discussion-list participants. Or they could be whistleblowers who would face the loss of their careers if anyone were to learn that they've posted damning accusations about their companies to an online bulletin board, or emailed such material to a journalist. Or perhaps they are political dissidents in exile, communicating with other exiles under assumed names on Usenet, who would face prosecution or execution at the hands of dictatorial regimes should their names be revealed.

Anonymity and privacy are sometimes confused; though intertwined, they denote different concepts. Privacy is a kind of contract between parties. The online shopper, for instance, may divulge credit-card and other personal information on the condition that the e-retailer won't sell it without permission. Patients searching for information on a medical Web site want assurances that their search queries won't be sold to a health-insurance company. These are privacy concerns.

Those who seek anonymity online however, generally are not seeking the protection of a limited social contract. Rather, they want their identities to remain undisclosed even as they seek to make their feelings, thoughts, schemes, and outrages public.

A number of commercially available technologies have emerged that attempt to protect anonymity online, and they illustrate the types of anonymity that Web users seek. Subscription products like “Anonymizer” guarantee anonymous, secure Web browsing by keeping online activity invisible to site administrators, marketers, Internet service providers, co-workers, or anyone else. Anonymous remailers, meanwhile, are computers connected to the Internet that forward email to other addresses on the network, stripping away identifying headers from messages to make it nearly impossible to trace a post's origins anywhere except back to the remailer itself. The Onion Routing research project, meanwhile, is building an Internet-based network system that attempts to resist traffic analyses, eavesdropping, and attacks from Internet routers while preventing online users from knowing who is communicating with whom.

There are a number of barriers to anonymity online. Attacks on the network, for instance, can prove insurmountable. A Finnish anonymous remailer called Penet.fi was the longest-running service of its kind as of the mid-1990s. But “mail bombers” (harassers sending quantities of redundant emails) and “spammers” sending bulk email forced administrator Julf Helsingius to close the site down permanently in 1996. A related barrier is the fear felt by system administrators, who often oppose the use of their sites as anonymity servers because they fear being taken to task if acts such as electronic terrorism, defamation, or other crimes are facilitated through anonymous messages passing through their pipelines.

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