The Anonymity Experiment | Popular Science
February 13th, 2008 by Lance Cottrell
The Anonymity Experiment | Popular ScienceThis is an interesting article on trying to live in the modern world without leaving any digital footprints. It is nice to see they suggested Anonymizer, unfortunately they got the facts completely wrong. They suggest that anyone could run an Anonymizer proxy, and that those people could be monitoring traffic. That is true of the TOR network, but not of Anonymizer. We own and operate all of our own servers and networks, for exactly that reason.
- Lance Cottrell
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March 6th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
Dear Lance,
This is Catherine Price, author of the piece. I wanted to reply to your comment saying that the section on Anonymizer implied that anyone could run an Anonymizer proxy. Holtzman wasn’t saying that *anyone* could run a proxy — he was implying that there might be more nefarious efforts (or, rather, secret) efforts by the government to gain access to the traffic. Whether or not that’s true, I do agree that the way the quote was phrased could be taken as implying that anyone could run a proxy just by volunteering, and I apologize for the confusion.
March 8th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
I appreciate your direct response Catherine. I am very sensitive to this issue because it is easily misunderstood by many, and makes a significant difference to the security model.
As to the government spying fear: I think that if this was happening, there would be victims speaking up about it and it would be widely known.
March 24th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
Yes. That was the point; the problem with open source, consensually run systems is that someone with a hidden agenda could get involved. I think that it’s safe to assume that people in government are comfortable that they can get past anonymizers, presumably by a means like I described. If they didn’t believe that, I think that there would be more governmental howling trying to make anonymizer systems illegal. I could make the same argument about personal encryption technology.
March 25th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
I am not sure I agree that the government can break all these systems with ease. In my experience, it is not difficult to be anonymous if you are willing to break the law. Stolen credit cards, dial up, bot net relays, open WiFi, etc. make this reasonably easy. Very strong encryption is also widely available to the bad guys through many international channels.
I think that there is a recognition that banning such tools only keeps them out of the hands of the law abiding. If Crypto / Anonymity is outlawed, only outlaws will have ……