Loss of Privacy

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.

Wikileaks Julian Assange Shuts Down Alastair Mullis in regards to the censored BBC report in regards to the Company Trafigura dumping toxic waste on the people of the ivory coast.

The censored BBC report referenced can be downloaded here.

The entire conference can be seen here or watch it below.

This material belongs to HBO and is used here under fair use law.

Pass this on! If there were any video worthy of being passed on it’s this one! And while you’re at it. Help take back our Country!! Stop saying how bad things are and do something about it. You do have a voice in your Government!

These are some photos I’ve collected from last week’s Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.

Taken from the Norman Rockwell painting:

Of course, poking fun at anything needs a yo dawg.

Over on reddit, there was an interesting discussion as to whether folks were okay with making fun of 9/11, since people were making fun of Islam and Mohammed. So, here’s a picture from that discussion.

There are also now talks from Muslims about Everybody Draw the Holocaust Day and Everybody Deny the Holocaust Day.  To each his own.  Free speech is vital to society.  Tacky, distasteful, or intelligent, we all need to protect free speech.

Philip Pullman answers a question on the shocking title of his new book. Filmed at the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford on 28 March 2010.

“It was a shocking thing to say and I knew it was a shocking thing to say. But no one has the right to live without being shocked. No one has the right to spend their life without being offended. Nobody has to read this book. Nobody has to pick it up. Nobody has to open it. And if you open it and read it, you don’t have to like it. And if you read it and you dislike it, you don’t have to remain silent about it. You can write to me, you can complain about it, you can write to the publisher, you can write to the papers, you can write your own book. You can do all those things, but there your rights stop. No one has the right to stop me writing this book. No one has the right to stop it being published, or bought, or sold or read. That’s all I have to say on that subject.”