Today I stumbled upon a story about the Facebook soldier, Eden Abergil, who had her picture taken with bound and blindfolded Palestinians. In the article, she boasted that she hated Arabs and wished they were all dead.
The article itself was cut and pasted onto another website, in its entirety, yet the original article is now gone. A quick google search reveals that several other blogs and websites read the story earlier as well and have portions of the original article on their sites.
There is no explanation as to why the story was pulled. Censorship of any kind is wrong, especially when you are reporting a legitimate news story. If the story needs to be edited, then do so and inform your readers that you did so. Deleting it with no explanation is wrong and leads to a distrust of media. Fortunately, the story is also being covered by Haaretz. It is unlikely that their story will magically disappear.
A new program allows users in countries that practice censorship and other types of crackdowns on dissidents, to download stories from blocked sites and read them. Using digital steganography, Collage can hide up to fifteen articles in seven medium sized photos.
Once the material is embedded in a Flickr image, anyone with Collage can download it and extract the stories. A censor attempting to monitor traffic from a prohibited site would only see the reader visiting Flickr, which is not generally blocked by web censors.
Collage can also be easily extended so that stories are embedded in other photo-sharing sites. The idea is to spread material across numerous sites that host user-generated content so that the activity of someone running Collage appears much like that of any internet user and the censors cannot just block access to Flickr. Collage does, however, rely on the goodwill of Flickr users, who will have to provide access to the images where the articles are to be hidden.
The software is made up of two distinct parts, according to a copy of the paper the research team plans to present at Usenix: there is a “message vector layer” that embeds the content in the Twitter message or photo — what the group calls a “cover traffic” — and a “rendezvous mechanism” that allows various parties to publish and retrieve the embedded messages once they are downloaded from Twitter or Flickr or some other social network. The researchers say their method won’t allow the sending of large files, but will allow the transmission of short text files or other communications.
Countries that censor the internet will probably label Collage as an illegal program, however, it will still be difficult to near impossible for a country to control all usage of such programs. While a country can ban access to Flickr, it won’t be able to ban every single site that takes photos from Flickr and posts them elsewhere.
I agree with Eric Schmidt on one thing, Anonymity online is dangerous. It’s also very important.
He also makes a distinction between anonymity and privacy.
“Privacy is incredibly important,” he said, adding, “Privacy is not the same thing as anonymity. It’s very important that Google and everyone else respects people’s privacy. People have a right to privacy; it’s natural; it’s normal. It’s the right way to do things.”
However, there should be limits, he said: “[I]f you are trying to commit a terrible, evil crime, it’s not obvious that you should be able to do so with complete anonymity. There are no systems in our society which allow you to do that. Judges insist on unmasking who the perpetrator was. So absolute anonymity could lead to some very difficult decisions for our governments and our society as a whole and I don’t think we want that either.”
Yes, judges insist on unmasking who the anonymous culprit was. The fact is you don’t know who the person is without a lot of researching and detective work. That’s how it should be. While I would never advocate performing horrific crimes, you can commit these crimes without knowing who the perpetrator is. Think back to Jack the Ripper. More than a hundred years later and we still don’t know who his identity it.
Advocating a system where no one can have anonymity because of a few bad apples is the wrong way to go. It relies on the belief that everyone is a threat to you and/or your company. This is simply not true. It has never been true and never will be true. It’s like being in kindergarten and Jimmy steals all the crayons so everyone loses recess.
Anonymous speech is protected in the Constitution and the courts uphold this every time it’s brought to them. The only way to change this is to remove the internet from being a public network to making it a private one. This is exactly what could happen should net neutrality fail. If it does, anonymity on the internet will be difficult, if not made outright illegal.
Anonymity and privacy are intertwined and I’m not sure we can, or should, walk the extremely fine line between the two. If you end anonymity, you end free speech. The next can of worms, as a result of this, will be identity theft and fraud. Mr. Schmidt should be careful of what he wishes for.
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