Continuing with my desire to open up this conference to the press and the public here´s a transcript of everything that was said this morning at the Terrorism in the Internet session.

http://freenode.net/faq.shtml#nicksetup

[2005-03-09 03:33:04] joho is blogging at http://hyperorg.com/blogger/ & journal of the hyperlinked organization & David Weinberger & always confused & often miscellaneous

[2005-03-09 03:33:06] surely part of the point is to look out for possible terrorist activity between us

[2005-03-09 03:33:55] chrisg – possibility of “electronic pearl harbor”, looking disaster – unlikely. more likely to be a diversion

[2005-03-09 03:34:30] chrisg – might use networks to divert first responders so that when real attack occurs, they’re already diverted to another location

[2005-03-09 03:34:59] chrisg – one definition of crazy: doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results

[2005-03-09 03:35:23] chrisg – if BoozAllenHamilton has been designing our networks for twenty years and we keep getting borked, that’s crazy

[2005-03-09 03:35:55] chrisg – very little audit capability in secure networks, little to audit against.

[2005-03-09 03:36:39] chrisg – talking to guys in the Pentagon – we spend hundreds of millions every year, and we keep getting hax0rd. couldn’t we be spending this money on something else?

[2005-03-09 03:37:28] chrisg – can’t just give people money to fix things. need to fix things against standards, audit for compliance with these standards.

[2005-03-09 03:38:00] terrorism is one of the faux arguments people wheel out against an identity meta-network…

[2005-03-09 03:38:26] chrisg – if we can come up with recommendations that include specific reccomendations, auditability, maybe someone will listen

[2005-03-09 03:38:31] …as if things aren’t many times worse on the current net

[2005-03-09 03:38:56] joi – introducing Martin Varsafsky, Ejovi Nuweri

[2005-03-09 03:41:01] joi – picking up a theme from Chris’s presentation – Chris has broken into almost everything – usually wasn’t using the Internet. One question – feels like the open internet is more risky than a trusted system, but trusted systems often have weak links. As this applies to national ID systems – when have criminals used legit IDs? People social engineer around these barriers

[2005-03-09 03:41:23] joi – So does this mean we should move away from open Internet systems and towards a microsoft “trusted system”>

[2005-03-09 03:42:11] paulvixie – there may be situations where there are no internet connections, but there are indirect connections. From intermediate connections, there may be Internet connections, via modems, wireless, to trusted business partners

[2005-03-09 03:42:48] paulv – almost never true that there are no connections to the Internet. Proven time and time again that there are connections from protected networks to the Internet.

[2005-03-09 03:43:13] re “trusted systems”: not microsoft–it has to be distributed

[2005-03-09 03:43:26] joi – mark routenberg, head of EPIC. Andrew McLaughlin, senior policy officer, Google. And Mark’s daughter, Chloe, who just wrote a paper on privacy

[2005-03-09 03:44:04] joi – paul vixie is one of the authors of BIND, runs the “f” root server

[2005-03-09 03:44:25] paul – internet is nowhere near as robust as some of you have alluded

[2005-03-09 03:44:49] paul – had a DOS attack against the root name server – if all thirteen went down, the internet as we know it would go down

[2005-03-09 03:45:11] actually, kim cameron of microsoft is facilitating an ongoing blog debate about the development of just such a distributed identity/trust meta-network…

[2005-03-09 03:45:13] paul – so we protect these servers,
put them in bunkers, give them redundancy. In October 2002, there was an attack against all 13

[2005-03-09 03:45:31] http://www.identityblog.com/

[2005-03-09 03:45:56] paul – I have some notoriety for running the one server that went down. that’s because we are a nonprofit and had infrastructure that’s superior to infrastructure you could buy (taking a quick dig at Google… 🙂

[2005-03-09 03:46:21] USG was interested – what are some of the circumstances in which someone might want all rootservers to be unreachable?

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[2005-03-09 03:46:33] hey David(1)

[2005-03-09 03:46:40] *** mmdc (~jim@usen-221x249x96x53.ap-US01.usen.ad.jp) joined

[2005-03-09 03:46:42] hi there

[2005-03-09 03:46:58] paul – popular myth that we’re involved with every internet transaction – not true.

[2005-03-09 03:47:31] *** weaverluke changed nick to _weaverluke

[2005-03-09 03:47:51] paul – 10% of users who cache correctly would probably stay up for days in circumstances where 13 root servers went down. But 90% of the internet would probably go down in hours.

[2005-03-09 03:48:28] paul – hard to know who would be interested in taking down all 13 servers. Casinos have a line item in the budget to pay the Russians to keep them online, but unclear who would pay to keep us online

[2005-03-09 03:49:28] paul – I like to think like a bad guy. If I were to fly an airliner into a building, I’d like to paralyze the world’s communications ahead of time. first responders have built all sorts of lightweight, independent infrastructure

[2005-03-09 03:50:07] paul – then again, connections to first responders depend on global internet. So attacks on the rootservers might have serious security implications for first responders.

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[2005-03-09 03:50:43] paul – temptation to tell governments we’ve got it under control, we don;t need help – that’s because governments often respond by saying “let’s put it in my bunker”

[2005-03-09 03:51:07] paul – admission control. Bet everyone in the room has been spammed. That’s because the ‘net was an academic network designed for use by academics

[2005-03-09 03:51:29] paul – if you misused the network, odds were the government would yank your contract and connection. no need for admission control in that network

[2005-03-09 03:52:25] paul – want to find ways to get email from people we’ve not met before, but not get spam. don’t have admission control either at the email level, or at the packet level

[2005-03-09 03:54:07] paul – packet can claim to come from anywhere it wishes to claim it came from – no admission control on the packet level. In a DDoS attack, very difficult to figure out where those packets are coming from. Many hours of a person to person process to determine where those packets are coming from. Then it usually ends up being 10,000 hosts around the world attacking you.

[2005-03-09 03:55:19] paul – robustness we feel about the internet is illusory. An angry teen with $200 equipment bought off ebay can put together 10,000 ‘bots (all Microsoft), can create a major attack – gigabits of packets – against a target like Google. Total investment is a few hundred dollars of equpiment or Mom’s old PC.

[2005-03-09 03:55:38] paul – and motivations aren’t ideological – it can be pissed off kids

[2005-03-09 03:56:06] paul – how do we save the internet without destroying it. Need to be able to track where packets came from. At the same time, there’s a valid need for anonymity.

[2005-03-09 03:56:40] paul – there are governments that would treat political dissent as a form of terrorism – they don’t have my sympathy. But I don’t want the terrorists or the angry teens to decide whether or not I get to use the internet.

[2005-03-09 03:57:50] joi – the people who make the rules are the people who write the code. glad that paul comes out on the side of anonymity. Admission control versus anonymity will tie into democracy debate

[2005-03-09 03:58:05] I don’t understand admission control. How you control admission while preserving anonymity?

[2005-03-09 03:58:25] joho. that’s a good question. 😉

[2005-03-09 03:58:39] Really? i meant it as a dumb question.

[2005-03-09 03:58:52] Wendy Seltzer – gov’t approach – if we could just track everyone, we’d know who the terrorists are!

[2005-03-09 03:59:10] wendys – problematic, to say the least. value of privacy needs preservation

[2005-03-09 03:59:14] <_weaverluke> surely identity has to be localised to relevant contexts

[2005-03-09 03:59:30] *** _weaverluke changed nick to weaverluke

[2005-03-09 03:59:47] entity-identity-identifiers

[2005-03-09 03:59:51] wendys – RFID to track shopping, reading habits. Tracking schoolchildren with RFID, supposedly for their own benefit.

[2005-03-09 03:59:57] law 3: http://www.identityblog.com/stories/2004/12/09/thelaws.html

[2005-03-09 04:00:16] you can be anonymous at the “entity” layer and use identities for access control. indentities are roles and persistant ID, but don’t connect to your physical entity

[2005-03-09 04:00:16] Is there a list of the people in the room?

[2005-03-09 04:00:17] wendys – online tracking – domain name and whois debates – continual attempts by ICANN to demand “accuracy” in registration of domain names

[2005-03-09 04:00:30] yes. on the wiki… but doesn’t include some of the newcomers

[2005-03-09 04:00:37] maybe: admission control + anonymity is better achieved as traceability/ auditability, subject to (whatever might be the borderless Internet equivalent of) judicial oversight

[2005-03-09 04:00:56] I don’t trust Japanese judicial oversight

[2005-03-09 04:01:02] wendys – very little of what you do online is truly anonymous, unless you’re taking active steps to make it that way, as people who’ve been subpoena’d in a filesharing suit have figured out…

[2005-03-09 04:01:21] pseudonymous is easier than anonymous

[2005-03-09 04:01:21] what’s an example of admissio control?

[2005-03-09 04:01:40] wendys – increasing storage, computing power = huge databases, dossiers that are mineable to create detailed profiles of your activities.

[2005-03-09 04:01:57] admission control = you only get access to the UCLA network if you have authenticated yourself as a UCLA student

[2005-03-09 04:02:01] KevinMarks, yes. I think pseudonymity might be enough actually… it’s the same as “anonymous” for people who want control

[2005-03-09 04:02:03] joho – the badge system and metal detectors at this conference is a good example of admission control… 🙂

[2005-03-09 04:02:28] or your login to amazon

[2005-03-09 04:02:32] wendys – Senator Kennedy manages to get himself off the no fly list, but it’s a bit harder for ordinary civilians who end up on that list…

[2005-03-09 04:02:34] but us outsiders are sneaking memes in via irc

[2005-03-09 04:02:47] heehee

[2005-03-09 04:02:57] how do you manage admission control to the Net without creating a record that an oppressive govt could use to crack down on dissenters?

[2005-03-09 04:03:21] wendys – ISP may be storing carbon copies of email, IM messages. Some privacy laws protecting communications, but also vulnerable to law enforcement or hacking?

[2005-03-09 04:03:22] you should ask the question joho after wendy finishes… (I’ll make a short comment and give it to you.)

[2005-03-09 04:03:32] better you ask the dumb question than me

[2005-03-09 04:03:45] joi, only if i’m not the only one with that question. i don’t want to slow things down.

[2005-03-09 04:04:04] well, you cna create a persisten psedonym

[2005-03-09 04:04:07] no. it’s a good question. I have some thoughts, but would be good for the geeks to answer it.

[2005-03-09 04:04:25] the question is… if the punishment is just termination of connection, it’s easy.

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[2005-03-09 04:04:29] ejovi is either in boston or tokyo, he is the CTO of SecurityLab and blogs at

[2005-03-09 04:04:30] so you are identifiable as ‘joho’ but that is not linked to david Weinberger

[2005-03-09 04:04:38] If it requires the ability to put the guy in jail, it’s not

[2005-03-09 04:04:55] wendys – privacy important for its own sake, on a personal and political level. political dissent can be interpreted by some gov’ts as terrorism. America’s founding fathers used psuedonyms… wanted to be heard for their ideas, not for their names.

[2005-03-09 04:04:58] ?def joho

[2005-03-09 04:04:58] joho is blogging at http://hyperorg.com/blogger/ & journal of the hyperlinked organization & David Weinberger & always confused & often miscellaneous

[2005-03-09 04:05:03] ?def joho lives in Boston

[2005-03-09 04:05:03] Nobody has defined joho lives in Boston yet

[2005-03-09 04:05:14] but, kevin, if there were admission controls, couldn’t an evil govt go to the authorizing body and demand to know who joho is?

[2005-03-09 04:05:41] that information doesn’t exist in the network joho

[2005-03-09 04:05:48] wendys – privacy traditionally protected as matter of free speech, protection against government abuse

[2005-03-09 04:05:50] because you never made the connection, right?

[2005-03-09 04:06:15] the cost to you is that you can’t unify the two ids, joho and D.W. in your digital life

[2005-03-09 04:06:19] wendys – protection of privacy can be, itself, a security matter. Data collection, creation of dossiers, creation of a national ID system can create new vulnterabilities

[2005-03-09 04:06:23] the benefit is pseudonymity

[2005-03-09 04:06:38] wendys – more powerful a national ID is, the bigger a target it is for hackers, overreaching bureacrats\

[2005-03-09 04:07:06] everyone please post your mother’s maiden name on the wiki

[2005-03-09 04:07:11] understood, weaverluke, but in practical terms, can we trust the govt not to get at the university’s files to find out who’s making comments it objects to?

[2005-03-09 04:07:12] wendys – instructive that we’ve seen the rise of identity theft as SS #s , mothers maiden names become keys to larger sets of data.

[2005-03-09 04:07:29] who uses their mother’s actual maiden name anymore?

[2005-03-09 04:07:35] * ejovi

[2005-03-09 04:07:43] and the last 4 digits of your social security please

[2005-03-09 04:07:52] * ejovi too

[2005-03-09 04:08:07] my mother turns out to have had several different maiden names…

[2005-03-09 04:08:29] (If these questions don’t make sense, it’s entirely possible I’m missing a key concept or two.)

[2005-03-09 04:08:33] (or three)

[2005-03-09 04:08:41] wendys – what happens if someone starts using data from “easypass” (an RFID ticket for toll booths in the US) to detect tax evaders

[2005-03-09 04:08:49] http://www.ucomics.com/nonsequitur/2005/03/08/

[2005-03-09 04:10:02] wendys – ties in with quesitons of open internet versus trusted systems. In open internet, by not placing too much trust in any particular identifyer, we protect ourself against misuse of those identifiers

[2005-03-09 04:10:54] wendys – we can imagine tech responses to these privacy concerns. EFF working on TOR onion routing project – gives people a way of anonymizing connections through routers that keep no logs.

[2005-03-09 04:11:37] wendys – we’re seeing backlashes against the TOR project – people don’t want anonymous commenting, ISPs afraid to host those that are allowing anon connections. Worry they’ll be held responsible for copyright infringement

[2005-03-09 04:11:57] wendys – we can build the tech solutions, but government can attempt to outlaw them or increase liability associated with them.

[2005-03-09 04:12:16] joho: the consensus in the digital id debate seems to be that it is not the role of the meta-network to determine the nature of trust relations, but to uphold them transparently

[2005-03-09 04:12:18] everytime someone ask me for the last 4 digits of my social. the more convinced i am that it is useless.

[2005-03-09 04:13:04] so if the government passes laws giving them rights to snoop around your server, their is no purely tech solution for that surely–it’s a legal issue

[2005-03-09 04:13:08] joi – when national identifiers are created, they inevitably take on mission creep, get used for far more than they were intended for

[2005-03-09 04:13:30] the british id card is going to be scrapped, I hear

[2005-03-09 04:13:51] that was headed in just such a direction, ethanz

[2005-03-09 04:14:07] weaverluke, so it’s not the concern of the net technologists to worry about whether govts are going to grab te links between the pseudonym s and the people? Is that it?

[2005-03-09 04:14:18] grabe te = grab the

[2005-03-09 04:15:36] joi – trust and trustworthiness are different. what’s the risk of making people feel safe when they’re not?

[2005-03-09 04:15:36] yes, but the tech must facilitate the distribution of personal data across multiple network nodes

[2005-03-09 04:16:15] this contrasts with the current status quo where we actually have to duplicate personal info on many services, because there’s no way of securely federating the info

[2005-03-09 04:16:32] david weinberger – still confused. As I understand it – admission control lets you on the net because you

[2005-03-09 04:16:48] davidw – have gotten online using something like a university. you then use a psuedonym

[2005-03-09 04:17:12] davidw – that puts the burden on the university to protect your identity from the government. Is that the right understanding?

[2005-03-09 04:18:01] paul – you’ve drawn the right conclusion – if people could not forge the source of their traffic, whoever carried that traffic would be liable and could be made to reveal their traffic.

[2005-03-09 04:18:17] * JoiIto goes to register ito.fi

[2005-03-09 04:18:38] paul – traditionally, the fins have had good privacy laws. that’s why anon remailers were there. May have changed – unsure anywhere is truly safe nowadays

[2005-03-09 04:18:59] paul – infrastructure now works on days when everyone wants it to work, and that’s not an internet I want to work on.

[2005-03-09 04:19:11] davidw – how do we make an internet with no forged headers?

[2005-03-09 04:19:47] paul – tech is pretty simple. New configuation options on routers. They used to be new, dangerous and expensive, but that was years ago. Now everyone has them, no one uses them. Because they don’t have to…

[2005-03-09 04:20:06] paul – dropping tide lowered all the boats – we’re all losing traffic, getting attacked.

[2005-03-09 04:21:02] what about replacing/supplementing admission control with flow control — i.e., you can be anonymouns, but you might get to speak more slowly

[2005-03-09 04:21:04] paul – re: US FCC. Gee, we might be able to regulate this problem if we could regulate ISPs. Most of us think this is a bad idea. But if we embraced this strategy – fine the ISPs if they don’t turn on configurations that prevent false headers – problem will just move overseas.

[2005-03-09 04:21:26] wendy: what do you mean in practice? how would that work?

[2005-03-09 04:21:30] wseltzer – I think that’s the direction most of the best solutions I’ve heard go in…

[2005-03-09 04:22:03] if you don’t have a validated id, you can send only a few messages. validate that id, via reputation over time, and suddenly you can send more messages

[2005-03-09 04:22:31] wonder if this would be abused in the same way that zombie bots send a very few packets and still function as effective DDOS engines…

[2005-03-09 04:22:42] that’s been freenode’s response to tor: identify users from known tor nodes, but don’t automatically block them

[2005-03-09 04:22:51] paul – need to internationalize control mechanisms if you want these things to work

[2005-03-09 04:23:22] jeffmoss – is rate limiting a possible solution to the problem? Egress filtering only works if you’ve got enough people participating.

[2005-03-09 04:23:40] egress filtering?

[2005-03-09 04:24:15] paul – reverse packet lookup, etc., not being done by ISPs because it uses a bit more CPU power. Major NSPs, ISPs don’t like doing anything that increases load.

[2005-03-09 04:24:42] jeffmoss – engineers still seem to believe that it slows down routers to turn on “these knobs”

[2005-03-09 04:26:13] joi – as a side thing to the document we’re writing, could we offer suggestions to ISPs – if we don’t start requiring valid headers, we’re going to get legislation that requires us to validate.

[2005-03-09 04:26:51] joi – wikipedia was blocking TOR routers because people were spamming wikipedia from TOR routers. Now wikipedia is looking for ways to throttle TOR traffic, rather than banning it.

[2005-03-09 04:27:18] ” without the proper security controls in place, an attacker could use your network to siphon sensitive information from a system he’s compromised”

[2005-03-09 04:27:33] http://www.tisc2001.com/newsletters/41.html

[2005-03-09 04:28:23] stefan from markle – 100% privacy is becoming less possible. What percentage are we happy with? What are the lessons learned regarding risk management?

[2005-03-09 04:28:24] We’re talking about terrorist attacks against the net. ARen’t we also supposed to be talking about terrorists using the Net to coordinate rw attacks?

[2005-03-09 04:29:25] marc rotenberg – response to an internet worm – NSA sent people around saying “don’t release this code – we want people not to have access to this”. Interesting that gov’t reaction was to hide the information, instead to share it widely.

[2005-03-09 04:29:57] marc r – transparecy and privacy need to be complimentary

[2005-03-09 04:30:25] marc r – reluctance to talk about law because internet doesn’t want to be regulated. we want to resist bad laws. international norms – soft law – could be very helpful to us here

[2005-03-09 04:30:37] joho – with you on that. maybe we need to address that topic head on.

[2005-03-09 04:31:53] marc r – publishing long report on privacy and cyberrights. After 9/11, focused on how gov’t are responding to cyberterrorism.

[2005-03-09 04:32:14] joho – three threads I detect: (1) attacks on net infrastructure itself; (2) attacks on Internet users; (3) use of Internet by terrorists to coordinate realworld activities

[2005-03-09 04:32:25] (1) and (2) can’t properly be called “terrorism” IMHO

[2005-03-09 04:32:39] joho: i think terrorist using the Net to coordinate attacks is more likely then a terrorist studying how to hack into powerplants.

[2005-03-09 04:32:47] joi – you can use destruction against order. you can’t use destruction against chaos.

[2005-03-09 04:33:14] ethanz+

[2005-03-09 04:33:25] Martin – focus of the conference is on global terrorism. When we think of the net, we should also focus on how the net can be attacked by global terrorists. But we’re also thinking about Jihadis…

[2005-03-09 04:33:40] ethanz++

[2005-03-09 04:33:46] is karma turned off?

[2005-03-09 04:33:55] martin – terrorism is killing of civilians for political objectives.

[2005-03-09 04:34:33] martin – cost-effectiveness of terrorism – what we spend as terrorists to cause desctruction is much less expensive than what we spend to protect from, recover from these attacks.

[2005-03-09 04:36:30] john perry barlow – we need to address mass halucination created my mass media. groteque overexpenditures based on failure to understand risks.

[2005-03-09 04:37:03] leffmoss – if Internet is an amazing multiplier, maybe terrorists aren’t interested in blowing it up because of their dependency on it.

[2005-03-09 04:37:18] joi – Taking a long break, clustering up to discuss some of these thoughts in more detail.

[2005-03-09 04:37:36] hey, anyone else want to take over transcribing when we rejoin the main group at 11am?

[2005-03-09 04:37:39] I would question the extent that the security/privacy issues can be resolved purely at a physical network level, ethanz

[2005-03-09 04:38:30] not sure that was my assertion, weaverluke – any chance I was quoting someone?

[2005-03-09 04:39:08] stepping away from the channel…

[2005-03-09 04:39:18] I guess my point is we have to look at representations of granular community *within* the net as well as the infrastructure

[2005-03-09 04:39:30] and that happens at a higher level

[2005-03-09 04:43:25] …people’s identities are not limited to a single physical or even DNS location

[2005-03-09 04:44:10] …they’ve gone :)…

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[2005-03-09 05:09:44] test

[2005-03-09 05:09:57] ping 🙂

[2005-03-09 05:10:36] what session are you guys in?

[2005-03-09 05:11:13] The Internet session

[2005-03-09 05:11:37] marko – what can be done to prevent terrorists from using the internet for sinister topics? We felt this was a narrow breifing

[2005-03-09 05:11:49] OK… fixing the font for the big screen

[2005-03-09 05:12:04] marko – without getting on “the happy bus”, let’s discuss the impact of the internet on democratic cultures

[2005-03-09 05:12:38] JoiIto: is that a working group members only session right now?

[2005-03-09 05:12:55] marko – we work until 12:30, then visit the plenary session, then a late lunch at 2pm, then we reconvene at 4pm and try to draft a document

[2005-03-09 05:13:08] it’s scheduled as closed, but we have some members coming in who can contribute

[2005-03-09 05:13:17] marko – tomorrow, open panel session

[2005-03-09 05:13:32] Joi Ito: may I join? what room are you in?

[2005-03-09 05:14:22] Berlin

[2005-03-09 05:14:24] 1F

[2005-03-09 05:15:15] marc – attended last week’s press conference from Club de Madrid at the national press club. Was impressed by commitment of this grroup to find solutions to future acts of terrorism that are consonant with democratic values.

[2005-03-09 05:16:01] marc – reminded me of reactions in Washington after 9/11 – something that united comments was a need to preserve democratic government

[2005-03-09 05:16:26] marc – eventually, this became a joke – if we don’t go shopping the terrorists have won – but the commitment to democratic principles was sincere

[2005-03-09 05:17:00] marc – Club de Madrid’s committment to democratic principles is congruent with the internet we’d like to have. Alignment between democratic principles and open internet principles

[2005-03-09 05:17:34] marc – what do we mean by “open”? Transparecy – we know who makes decisions. We resist secrecy. Part of our custom and culture online

[2005-03-09 05:17:58] marc – notion of subsidiarity – we push decisionmaking and responsibility to the endpoints to avoid centralization and authoritarianism

[2005-03-09 05:18:37] marc – control of identity online is a critical human rights concern. to the extent that governments control and force ID of internet users, concerns about control and coersion arise.

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[2005-03-09 05:19:23] marc – need to embrace a view that open systems are better enabled to weather attacks. Governments weather the challenges of terrorist attacks better when they are open.

[2005-03-09 05:19:53] marc – Internet is seen as a system that can be exploited – we need to see it as a backbone of a democratic society in the 20th century

[2005-03-09 05:20:21] pekka himmanen – democracy – defending an important tradition in history. We’re the ancient geeks, rather than the ancient greeks

[2005-03-09 05:20:55] pekka – if we believe in safety and free expression, we need to be concerned about strong encryption.

[2005-03-09 05:22:20] pekka – what are the core values of modern democracy? electing representatives. Three quarters of people, including in democracies, feel that their governments don’t represent them. This has to do with the rise of transnational institutions, not participatory, governmed by the “law of the Jungle”

[2005-03-09 05:23:25] pekka – 2nd core of democracy – free media, freedom of expression. Here the problem is “a culture of amusement”. Mass media focuses on entertaining the public, more money to be made in amusing people than in allowing for serious political debate. Internet is emerging as the only serious place for this debate.

[2005-03-09 05:24:11] pekka – political processes need to be entirely transparent, from initiative phase onwards. might require decisionmakers explicate each decision on the Internet how the decision impacts finanices.

[2005-03-09 05:24:42] pekka – can try to assist 2 billion people living under non-representative governments by enabling them with digital devices.

[2005-03-09 05:25:17] pekka – third, civil society. Source of new political ideas, challenges to the political powers. Living in a culture of narcisism, masturbation. People care about their own pleasures above all else.

[2005-03-09 05:25:29] pekka – “masturbating outselves to death”

[2005-03-09 05:26:27] pekka – only heroes are the people who’ve realized their narcicstic fantasy… maybe we could do a “real heroes” project, recognizing people who actually help others

[2005-03-09 05:27:26] pekka – as jgage emphasized, we need to go to the root causes of terrorism – inequality. One fifth of the world’s population gets everything, the rest have nothing. We need to move away from the rule of one-fifth.

[2005-03-09 05:28:25] pekka – free trade needs to be genuinely free – developed nations protect their markets. For all the people who live on one dollar a day, we pay $2 for each cow in the EU

[2005-03-09 05:29:16] pekka – “the more democracy you have, the more safety you have”. Actually, the more you talk about security, the less democracy you have. The real risk is a culture of fear.

[2005-03-09 05:29:54] pekkka – Danger of answering terrorism with “fearism”. Turn the world into a bad horror movie, making us feat the wrong things.

[2005-03-09 05:30:46] barlow – No consensus here (or perhaps anywhere) about what we mean by the term “democracy”. Would love to see us parse out the term and figure out what’s good that’s associated with democracy. “Democracy” means voting rights, period.

[2005-03-09 05:31:04] barlow – The Internet doesn’t have voting rights in any useful sense and is far freer.

[2005-03-09 05:31:16] I hate to use the “N” word, but Nazi Germany was a democracy overrun by fearmongering

[2005-03-09 05:31:29] ethanz: I take issue with the concept of “open system good, closed system bad”

[2005-03-09 05:31:44] if the net is to support community, it must allow for both, surely?

[2005-03-09 05:31:46] barlow++

[2005-03-09 05:31:57] what’s her name?

[2005-03-09 05:32:02] speaking now?

[2005-03-09 05:32:08] Desiree

[2005-03-09 05:32:17] weaverluke – again, I’m transcribing these comments, not advocating. every time I start a comment with someone’s name, that’s the person making the comment

[2005-03-09 05:32:30] whoops. I see. sorry

[2005-03-09 05:32:39] * weaverluke still takes issue with it 🙂

[2005-03-09 05:33:01] a community is, by definition, closed in some respects. that’s what gives it its identity. otherwise we become one big soup

[2005-03-09 05:33:08] ethanz++ 🙂 I am in Sweden, quietly following in real time, thanks to you

[2005-03-09 05:33:13] desi – Is democracy the answer of terrorism? No individual can predict the outcome of what democracy will be. Democracy has been hijacked in the US

[2005-03-09 05:33:24] desi – what are the motives of people who have hijacked democracy?

[2005-03-09 05:33:55] desi – important to focus on how to keep the internet open. can we harness the power of civil society to help us understand how interconnected we all are as human beings

[2005-03-09 05:34:00] what’s the url of the wiki ?

[2005-03-09 05:34:19] does this session have a defined focus?

[2005-03-09 05:34:28] desi – three fates forum – threefatesforum.org.uk – representatives of Muslim, Christian, Jewish religions to build a discussion space – a safe space

[2005-03-09 05:34:31] joho: wiki’s at http://www.socialtext.net/madrid-internet/

[2005-03-09 05:34:56] (threefaithsforum ?)

[2005-03-09 05:35:09] AndrewMcGoogle Democracy/Social issues…

[2005-03-09 05:35:17] desi – should gov’t finance the building of these trusted spaces? Or should it happen on its own?

[2005-03-09 05:35:22] today’s focus is to put together a
document to present to the world leaders…

[2005-03-09 05:35:22] morning was tech and risks etc.

[2005-03-09 05:36:11] desi – if you declare war on “terror”, hard to pin down. creates perpetual fear. Orwell’s 1984 – living in perpetual fear.

[2005-03-09 05:36:34] joi:

[2005-03-09 05:36:41] i can’t get socialtext login to work

[2005-03-09 05:36:43] marko – good lead in to discussions of the role of media

[2005-03-09 05:36:53] i keep resetting my password, but it never gets accepted

[2005-03-09 05:37:13] dangillmor – parallel session talking about how the bad folks need the media to feed what they’re doing. If no one saw terrorism, would it happen?

[2005-03-09 05:37:19] I’ll reset it.. check your email in one minute

[2005-03-09 05:37:25] is it ok to blog on the current discussion? or should I wait until it’s formally presented?

[2005-03-09 05:38:06] DanG – one of the core values of the American Republic is a free press. You can’t have self rule without knowing what you’re talking about. Mass media, rather than informing citizens, has been dumbing us down

[2005-03-09 05:38:27] DanG – media treats us as if we couldn’t possibly know or understand the things we need to know

[2005-03-09 05:38:54] DanG – Internet gives us the opportunity for people at all levels to communicate with each other not just one to one, but many to many, few to few, etc.

[2005-03-09 05:39:18] I think David Isen’s having trouble getting here…

[2005-03-09 05:39:33] DanG – tools of communication become less expensive, more important everyday. Ability for everyone to be a publisher means that everyone who cares to be part of the conversation can be.

[2005-03-09 05:39:51] DanG – We can understand better, and we can decide to participate as well. Devolving from mass media to something more bottom up.

[2005-03-09 05:40:15] DanG – keep in mind benefits of mass media. Awfully good things that come out of it. Need an ecosystem of media that includes everything from citizen journalism to MSM

[2005-03-09 05:40:46] DanG – Makes business world incumbents pretty nervous. Makes governments pretty nervous. Trust issues – what’s true, what’s false

[2005-03-09 05:41:13] DanG – If we ask people to be citizen journalists, we also have to ask them to be responsible and honorable

[2005-03-09 05:41:50] DanG – is this really a binary question – we can have one or the other: privacy or security? I don’t believe it’s binary, and we need to be persuasive that it’s not…

[2005-03-09 05:42:06] Barlow – if anyone presents anything to you as a binary question, they’re trying to control you…

[2005-03-09 05:42:18] McLaughlin – that statement is true or it’s not…

[2005-03-09 05:43:19] DanG++

[2005-03-09 05:43:25] JeffMoss – security people tend to think in absolutes…

[2005-03-09 05:44:02] Martin – Press is not allowed to attend this conference, for security reasons. I’m one of seven board members – frequently outvoted – and think this is crazy. We’re spending 4.2m euros of gov’t money, and the press aren’t participating!

[2005-03-09 05:44:04] *** Q-FUNK (~q-funk@gw-5.suomicom.fi) joined

[2005-03-09 05:44:33] Martin – Advocated for press in the corridors so that they could have access to us.

[2005-03-09 05:45:36] Martin – the reason we were asked not to have cameras, etc., was fear that our gadgets are bombs. Need for a tradeoff of security and democracy. El Pais has a big article about how press isn’t able to attend – Martin is on record as saying that this is a mistake.

[2005-03-09 05:45:56] DanG – the media is here – we’re blogging as we speak. IRC is keeping a running diary of what’s being said.

[2005-03-09 05:46:24] DanG – what’s the media? It’s us… which makes banning the press even more bizarre and more wrong. Would be great if people were blogging all the sessions.

[2005-03-09 05:46:49] DavidWeinberger – Most concerned about how we express this in the report we put together.

[2005-03-09 05:47:39] davidw – I hope we stay away from defining democracy, because we’re not going to. Instead, I hope we make it very easy for the international community to support the shared values of open networks

[2005-03-09 05:47:54] davidw – here are the ways that open networks support democracies – a possible rhetorical approach

[2005-03-09 05:48:11] barlow – not suggesting we define democracy, just suggesting we admit that we can’t

[2005-03-09 05:48:45] davidw – we need to say: here are the things about an open internet that are aligned with democracy…

[2005-03-09 05:49:03] davidw – anonymity is probably not as respected by international leaders as it is by us.

[2005-03-09 05:49:50] davidw – rhetorical things we can do: internet gives us the chance to transform the war on terror into war on ______ (blank). Rise of people’s media – legitimacy comes from the people. Move from fear to hope.

[2005-03-09 05:50:42] davidw – really positive vision of what the internet can be that may not be shared by the people we’re talking to. Not just enabling everyone – individually – to speak. Not just about printing presses and samisdat – about letting people connect.

[2005-03-09 05:50:57] davidw – not just about publishing dissent, but allowing people to connect, which is the root of democracy.

[2005-03-09 05:51:14] davidw: how do you fight the raising censorship trend against the internet as a we:media enabler?

[2005-03-09 05:51:32] jeffmoss – would like to draw the line between technical solutions and legal frameworks. Technology exists in China, but good luck having that discussion there.

[2005-03-09 05:52:01] davidw: e.g. laws are being passed that restrict freedom of press to companies publishing hardcopy newspapers.

[2005-03-09 05:52:03] Rebecca Mackinnon – as a recovering journalist, elaborating on Dan’s points about open discussion, the possibility of connection

[2005-03-09 05:52:40] rmack – One of the big concerns is that extremists are really good at using the net, while silent majority isn’t really good yet

[2005-03-09 05:52:45] *** rvr (rvr@193.Red-81-32-213.pooles.rima-tde.net) joined

[2005-03-09 05:52:46] rvr is Victor R. Ruiz, Spain, and blogs in English at http://rvr.typepad.com/ and is jibot’s father and kandinski’s personal guru

[2005-03-09 05:53:01] rmack – silent majority of iraqis aren’t using the internet – it’s the extremists people are hearing.

[2005-03-09 05:53:12] rmack – silent majority isn’t motivated to get on the net and have these conversations

[2005-03-09 05:53:15] ?heraldme

[2005-03-09 05:53:16] Now heralding your full definition

[2005-03-09 05:53:30] rmack – MSM amplifies extremists – you get on TV by having an extreme or dissenting point of view

[2005-03-09 05:54:07] rmack – Daniel Lubetsky talks about the fact that only extremists in Palestinian/Israeli debate make it into the media – silent majority don’t get included

[2005-03-09 05:54:28] rmack – how do we help facilitate voices of reason on the internet?

[2005-03-09 05:54:49] rmack – so many more potential voices of ordinary people, greatly outweight the voices of the terrorists

[2005-03-09 05:54:52] funk, I don’t have good answers to your good questions. I mean, I think the overall answer is: political struggle.

[2005-03-09 05:54:56] wiki models?

[2005-03-09 05:55:08] they reinforce consensus and wash away extremes

[2005-03-09 05:55:08] rmack – brings us to digital divide, policy issues – who has access to the internet and why?

[2005-03-09 05:55:30] rmack – if democracy is conducted online, what does it mean that large segments of the population are not online

[2005-03-09 05:55:48] rmack – unless you make efforts to bring more people online, do you create a more and more skewed situation?

[2005-03-09 05:55:48] i wonder what is the correlation between people who have access to internet and people who choose to vote on elections in developed nations

[2005-03-09 05:55:53] Moores law fxes that faster than any govt

[2005-03-09 05:56:16] one question to the whole panel: WRT rising EU regulations that restrict freedom of speech (and other rights) to EU citizens, how are long-term foreigners supposed to fit in and get their voices heard, perhaps using blogs, without risking e.g deportation?

[2005-03-09 05:56:19] rmack – what are our obligations to bring the silent majority online? How do we incentivise the ordinary Iraqi to come online and share her opinions?

[2005-03-09 05:57:12] funk, we’re more focused on Net issues than on broader issues of free speech. (Also, it’s more of an open discussion than a panel, fwiw.)

[2005-03-09 05:57:21] mclauglin – trying to create a framework:

[2005-03-09 05:57:32] mclaughlin – terrorist using the internet to plan attacks

[2005-03-09 05:57:44] mclaughlin – terrorists planning attacks on the internet infrastructure

[2005-03-09 05:57:44] martinvars: The opposition to European Constitution in the Spanish networld was very … apparent. I mean, they did a lot of noise

[2005-03-09 05:57:55] mclaughlin – terrorists propogandizing on the internet

[2005-03-09 05:58:25] mclaughlin – theme I’m hearing – there’s an internet way to handle these challenges – distributed, open, not command and control.

[2005-03-09 05:58:34] martinvars: And a good share of them are people who dislikes current politics

[2005-03-09 05:58:46] joho: noted. my question is precisely that, though: I blog, it sometimes makes local authorities upset. I’m not an EU citizen. I use the net as a collaborative and rhetoric tool.

[2005-03-09 05:59:53] barlow – tough for some of us to get past “religious doctrine” about the internet. Openness is fundamentally important to me – hard to parse down to practicalities.

[2005-03-09 06:01:07] barlow – Internet has a marvelous capacity to advantage the individual. When I talked about that in 1990s, wasn’t considering its ability to support Osama bin Ladn.

[2005-03-09 06:01:46] mclaughlin – principles of open, etc. have demonstrable advantages when we talk about protecting networks, evangelising, etc. What we haven’t tackled – people are going to use this distributed, open network to organize bad stuff

[2005-03-09 06:02:05] jeffmoss – not a solveable problem. You can do bad stuff with phones, passenger pigeons

[2005-03-09 06:02:19] jeffmoss – the fact that it’s open, distributed means we can correct problems quickly.

[2005-03-09 06:02:51] funk, I suspect that everyone here doesn’t want foreigners deported for speaking freely on the net. I don’t know how to get past that to address your question in a way peculiar to this conference.

[2005-03-09 06:03:03] why don´t we agree on a principle that we are for freedom of the net except that we accept the fact that whatever is a crime in the real world is a crime on the net

[2005-03-09 06:03:08] barlow – important to acknowledge that the internet gives advantages to forces like bin Ladn

[2005-03-09 06:04:05] marc – but that’s true of democratic government as well. Democracies allow madmen to come into power. When we dig deep, we’ll be surprised to find how strong the allignment of these paradigms are.

[2005-03-09 06:04:36] marc – we also have to keep in mind what happens if we fail. What happens if we need to replace Paul Vixie because he’s not “properly credentialed”

[2005-03-09 06:05:05] rmack – it’s an old argument – how do you fight bad speech? Either you censor, or you encourage more speech? The response is to get more good, reasonable, rational people speaking

[2005-03-09 06:05:11] joho: one of this conference’s premises is that people who become marginalized tend to be the ones resorting to terrorism. I got marginalized, yet I want to avoid violence, so I blog instead.

[2005-03-09 06:05:34] ejovi – The way you handle network vulnerabilites is by discussing them openly, not concealing them.

[2005-03-09 06:05:57] ejovi – If we brought these hate sites, terrorist sites to the foreground, we’d begin to understand the issues…

[2005-03-09 06:06:20] martinvars: and further, that it’s generally not a crime “of the net” but a crime. Recognize that on balance, the net enables more good than crime.

[2005-03-09 06:06:51] barlow – found himself subsribed to hatelists because he became a hero to one guy on the list. Loathesome, but helped humanize the debate

[2005-03-09 06:06:53] *** fernand0 (~ftricas@ra-amon.cps.unizar.es) joined

[2005-03-09 06:06:54] fernand0 is in Zaragoza (Spain) and blogs at http://fernand0.blogalia.com/ and is Vic’s friend and is Blogometro main developer

[2005-03-09 06:06:56] hi

[2005-03-09 06:07:21] I assume that the leaders we’re speaking to assume that there is a relatively simple change we could make that would enable us to track down terrorists who use the net to organize attacks, and that if that means ending anonymity, anonymity is only for people with somethint ohide.

[2005-03-09 06:07:27] martin – part of the discussion on Friday will be from a group that catalogs hate sites.

[2005-03-09 06:07:40] martin – while we are for open internet, whatever is a crime in the real world is a crime on the net

[2005-03-09 06:08:10] martin – while there are 4k terrorist sites, there are countless million non terrorist sites

[2005-03-09 06:08:57] ethan – the idea of enabling dialog between points of view that are diverse… addressing speech with speech

[2005-03-09 06:09:20] ethan – actively support… hosting sites that host hate sites… getting threat calls from FBI

[2005-03-09 06:09:39] ethan – interesting question – how do you create space to engage in these issues

[2005-03-09 06:10:08] etan – Jeff Ooi – police are going after him for comments on his page

[2005-03-09 06:10:21] ethan – non-trival tast to create
these spaces

[2005-03-09 06:10:25] is censoring hate sites really not simply hiding your head in the sand and refusing to open a dialogue with people having views you don’t share?

[2005-03-09 06:10:44] Gohsuke

[2005-03-09 06:11:13] good example of illegal police censorship in Finland (english version of the text): http://www.mummila.net/marginaali/?p=1010

[2005-03-09 06:11:33] Stefan – to what extent hate speech can be regulated is an old debate. role of media and hate speech in conflict – Bosnia, Rwanda

[2005-03-09 06:12:02] Finnish blogger commenting on local school’s dubvious teaching methods on his blog. police pressured him to remove blog entries – which is illegal. only a court order cna do it.

[2005-03-09 06:12:17] Stefan – hate speech is correlated to violence. To what extent is the Internet different from broadcast?

[2005-03-09 06:12:57] Stefan – content that incites violence is a different kind of content than you would protect in free speech. Does create violent behavoir. Naive to think that dialogue might convince people not to create violence.

[2005-03-09 06:13:12] Stefan – More speech won’t solve speech that leads to violence

[2005-03-09 06:13:25] Ejovi – In the age we live in now, we cannot regulate speech

[2005-03-09 06:13:46] Stefan – didn’t say “regulate”, said we need to address it. Regulation is a tool to limit harmful behavoir

[2005-03-09 06:14:16] ejovi – Impossible to even think about regulating speech or content because the content is so dispersed.

[2005-03-09 06:15:17] mclaughlin – Google gets lots of legally compelling requirements to remove content. We remove nazi material from google.dr, google.fr. Can’t just assume that a bland principle like “you can’t censor the net” is true. We’re talking about terrorists evangelizing violence.

[2005-03-09 06:15:55] mclaughlin – every country close to the free speech side of the line recognizes exceptions to a strong free speech tradition.

[2005-03-09 06:16:01] were regulations and laws trying to suppress P2P technolgies (which can be used to convey material that fascist regimes disapporve of) adressed already in this session?

[2005-03-09 06:16:28] mclauglin – I’m skeptical even of that. If the Rwandan Communications Commission had shut down Radio Mille Collines, thousands of people would still have died.

[2005-03-09 06:16:48] mclaughlin – in terms of thinking about what should get written, marc is right that a defense of the principles we’re talking about makes sense.

[2005-03-09 06:17:10] mclaughlin – can make a clear case about why open, distributed has advantages in repelling terror attacks.

[2005-03-09 06:17:38] mclaughlin – on category of evangelizing violence, requires some defense. Ultimately we all agree (?) more speech is the answer. Probably not going to conclude that censorship is the answer

[2005-03-09 06:18:16] mclaughlin – terrorists talking to each other across the net – not a response to say that they could just use smoke signals or passenger pigeons. The speed and encryption possibilities of the Internet make it really different

[2005-03-09 06:19:00] mclaughlin – In order to get surveilance of communications on the net, you might need to mandate architecture that challenges lots of our other principles. But it’s not a sufficient answer to say “terrorists are going to communicate no matter what”

[2005-03-09 06:19:55] JoiIto: regarding the blog entry you just posted (journalists kept in a separate area outside conference), isn’t this trend to keep journalists and people with diverging views out of the loop worrysome?

[2005-03-09 06:19:59] davidw – in terms of terrorists using net to organize, not enough to say benefits of open internet outweigh risks. Anonymity sounds like a bad thing if your main concern is preventing terrorist activity…

[2005-03-09 06:20:19] davidw – people are going to stop listening at the phrase “anonymity is a good thing”.

[2005-03-09 06:20:52] davidw – the best way of combatting the 4000 sites is not going on those sites and arguing with them – it’s to “route around them” and connect people to people,

[2005-03-09 06:21:20] davidw – we can reach the same people who are supposed to be effected by those sites and give them another space to interact

[2005-03-09 06:22:04] of course, the term “terrorist” is itself problematic

[2005-03-09 06:22:26] wendys – the open internet makes it possible for us to monitor terrorist speech – if terrorists are using backchannels, harder for us to monitor

[2005-03-09 06:22:48] secret government agencies use the net to organise too, and that informs the use of state-sponsored violence

[2005-03-09 06:23:00] wendys – if terrorists are using the internet just as a high-speed encrypted channel, not really an internet crime – just a new communication of offline crime. Openness generally helps us

[2005-03-09 06:23:27] we don’t call that terrorism

[2005-03-09 06:23:39] I see a lot of talks here about erradicating hate speech. I’d like to hear more about erradicating the marginalization that makes people hold statements of hatered and eventually resort to terrorism.

[2005-03-09 06:23:51] marko – draft seems to be congealing around McLaughlin’s four-part model, plus a justification of open principles

[2005-03-09 06:24:11] marc – we have a right of anonymity under US law, established in the constitution, well supported by caselaw

[2005-03-09 06:24:36] David Isenberg just arrived

[2005-03-09 06:24:40] marc – when you say people don’t have a right of anonymity, what you’re saying is that people need to disclose certain things before engaging in certain types of behavior

[2005-03-09 06:24:51] “terrorism” includes within its implied meaning a justification of the economic and political status quo

[2005-03-09 06:24:57] marc – in anonymity, you find privacy, freedom of expression, freedom of association

[2005-03-09 06:25:22] marc – on Andrew’s point about immediacy of the threat and architecting to protect – useful to remember the morris worm and lessons from it

[2005-03-09 06:25:54] marc – possible to engineer to protect 99 or 100 attacks… but if you impair people’s abnility to communicate in that one outlier case, you’re taking a huge risk

[2005-03-09 06:26:34] paul – Martin pointed out that “if it’s a crime in meatspace, it’s a crime in cyberspace”. at the time of Tienamen Square, people weren’t using the internet, they were using fax machines.

[2005-03-09 06:26:36] to me, all this talk about monitoring and erradicating hate speech misses the whole point. you are discussing symptoms of deeper problems that resulted in hate speech.

[2005-03-09 06:27:09] paul – not sure it’s true that something that was a crime in meatspace should be a crime on cyberspace – depends a great deal on where you are and what juristiction you’re under

[2005-03-09 06:27:10] i agree with what paul said

[2005-03-09 06:27:13] Can comments in a State of the Union address constitute inciting violence

[2005-03-09 06:27:30] tiananmen had nothing to do with terrorism. i totally didnt get his point

[2005-03-09 06:27:35] I should have qualified by saying that what is a crime in open societies off the net should be a crime on the net

[2005-03-09 06:27:57] JoiIto: I think they can. GWB’s notorious “with us or against us” could be interpreted as inciting other countries to go to war against USA.

[2005-03-09 06:27:59] I think his point was that the fax machine was illegal in China

[2005-03-09 06:28:02] I think…

[2005-03-09 06:28:06] barlow – my central agenda: the central problem is not terrorism but the response of our institutions. St. Teresa: “I do not fear Satan half so much as I fear the fear of those who fear him”

[2005-03-09 06:28:37] rmack – I took the point to be that stuff that’s illegal in meatspace shouldn’t neccesarily be a crime online. Some of Jeff’s stuff might be illegal in Malaysia – should it automatically be illegal online?

[2005-03-09 06:29:05] so it was illegal in china. but the fact that people were sending faxes made no impact on the events that took place.

[2005-03-09 06:29:50] Martin – Atocha attacks were committed using mobile phones to detonate bombs. You can see once gadgets have been used for a massacre, people might be a little sensitive about that. It’s the combination of messaging and the action in the real world that’s scary

[2005-03-09 06:30:31] once we’ve bought into the concept of an objective polarity betw. “terrorism” and “justified force”, we’ve already lost the chance of clear understanding of the bigger picture imho

[2005-03-09 06:30:46] Martin – When I argued that what’s illegal in the real world is illegal online, I was talking about open societies

[2005-03-09 06:30:54] truth is always relative to pov–that’s what blogging teaches us, right?

[2005-03-09 06:31:40] *** _sj_ (~thornton@sj.wikipedia) joined

[2005-03-09 06:31:41] _sj_ is modally in Cambridge, MA & a regenerate wikipedaholic & blogs at tinyurl.com/bq12 & afraid of ftp & often saying thpppppbt

[2005-03-09 06:31:45] the Spanish police got hold of one undetonated bomb with its corresponding mobile phone

[2005-03-09 06:32:03] mclaughlin – assume all devices, soon, are internet devices. So terrorists used internet devices to trigger bombs. Spanish authorities are able to find terrorists based on billing records, SIM cards, etc. So how do we defend anonymity in a world where devices can have real-worlkd impact. This is the hardest question we’re going to have to answer…

[2005-03-09 06:32:07] from there they tracked calls, the place where they were bought, etc

[2005-03-09 06:33:16] stefan – all comes back to the predicate that you can pierce the veil on anonymity. Perhaps you should spend some time on what would be an acceptable predicate to address anonymity questions? Or maybe you look at how to prevent mobile phones from igniting bombs?

[2005-03-09 06:33:30] stefan – what’s acceptable as a predicate within a democracy?

[2005-03-09 06:34:24] a kind of analogy: I am afraid paranoid governments will behave like paranoid sysadmins when it comes to internet, starting to firewall off everything. this will most likely accomplish nothing or even make things worse. the people who really want to get through (to do “evil” for instance) still can, but general population will be restrained

[2005-03-09 06:34:37] barlow – it’s hard to quantify, because the importance of anonymity doesn’t have the impact of a bomb. How do we quantify the cost of our response to terrorism. The gap in value between the US “peso”

[2005-03-09 06:34:53] barlow – and the “almighty euro” is a function of our response to terrorism

[2005-03-09 06:35:16] mclaughlin: by the time every product on this planet comes with an RFID chip, it becomes even easier than GPS.

[2005-03-09 06:35:21] barlow – has to be a way of restating this so we have a balanced view, not a media hallucination

[2005-03-09 06:36:00] anthony – response, in part – we should be moving away from anonymity. only really secure voting systems is by ending secret ballot

[2005-03-09 06:36:22] Jooon: agreed. I already experienced that a number of times with admins of various ISPs blocking out going SSH and IRC ports.

[2005-03-09 06:36:33] anthony – secret ballot was a way of defending against intimidation. If you’re going to be a responsible citizen, we also need to be accountable for our views and decisions

[2005-03-09 06:36:50] anthony: are you going for the total panopticon then?

[2005-03-09 06:37:47] anthony – secrecy of the web is anti-democratic. not willing to enter groups where people are willing to identify themselves

[2005-03-09 06:38:04] marko – can feel the temperature rising… but only going to take one more comment, from Rebecca

[2005-03-09 06:38:14] what does he mean the US is losing anonymity in the secret ballot??

[2005-03-09 06:38:54] rmack – we’re making recommednations for a world where the internet is universal, where there are responsible, open governments. But keep in mind that these protocols are going to be adopted in China!

[2005-03-09 06:39:00] I think it’s understandable (if unfortunate) that some people will choose to ignore anonymous commentary

[2005-03-09 06:39:05] but that doesn’t mean we should ban it

[2005-03-09 06:39:29] anonymity, like other communications, should require mutual consent. i ought to be able to reject communication from unidentified sources. so ought the cell phone providers in greater madrid. anonymity is NOT fundamentally antidemocratic.

[2005-03-09 06:39:40] rmack – we can say “only in certain circumstances is the government allowed to piece the veil on anonymity”. In countries where there’s no control over government use of power, this may not be a good idea.

[2005-03-09 06:39:45] let speakers identify with pseudonyms or names, as they choose, and let listeners choose which to receive

[2005-03-09 06:39:46] I don´t agree with Anthony but I think he has a good point, we may come to the conclusion that anonymity on the net may end up doing more harm than good

[2005-03-09 06:40:08] mclaughlin – a limiting factor: let’s only talk about democracies

[2005-03-09 06:40:27] <_sj_> martinvars: unlike anonymity in person?

[2005-03-09 06:40:27] even in democratic societies the push and bullying of voters can happen

[2005-03-09 06:40:31] marc – club of madrid has been accused of not being sufficiently open to islamic governments

[2005-03-09 06:40:46] see what it’s like to live and vote in the vasc country if you are not pro-nationalistic

[2005-03-09 06:41:26] session closing until 4pm Madrid time

[2005-03-09 06:41:30] http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,20480,00.html

[2005-03-09 06:41:53] American Association for the Advancement of Science – says anonymity is good

[2005-03-09 06:41:56] anonymity isn’t inconsistent with trust

[2005-03-09 06:42:22] you can establish pseudonyms that gain trust for what they say, not for who they are

[2005-03-09 06:42:27] “While there are certainly ways [that] anonymous communication can be misused, it seems to us the benefits from the positive uses far outweigh the risks.”

[2005-03-09 06:45:52] *** johng (~johng@213.229.139.162) joined

[2005-03-09 06:46:18] <_sj_> wseltzer: there are levels of anonymity. the truest anonymity has no record, no history with which to gain trust.

[2005-03-09 06:46:23] ?def johng

[2005-03-09 06:46:24] Nobody has defined johng yet

[2005-03-09 06:46:32] ?def johng is John Gage

[2005-03-09 06:46:32] johng is John Gage

[2005-03-09 06:47:19] sj: sure, and that’s one that listeners are free to trust or distrust, too

[2005-03-09 06:50:37] wseltzer: interesting angle. both parties are free to disclose info and trust each other as they wish but with mutual respect for each other’s choices

[2005-03-09 06:51:36] this is similar to my generative principle for an identity meta-network: Individuals and communities must be free within the boundaries of a respect for the choices and integrity of others

[2005-03-09 06:54:51] US-G8-EU Draconian Counterterrorism Plans http://www.statewatch.org/news/2005/mar/exceptional-and-draconian.pdf
[2005-03-09 06:54:59] *** jalonso quit (Read error: 54 (Connection reset by peer))

[2005-03-09 07:03:36] my little parochial example of using the net for democratic advocacy: http://yptsupport.blogspot.com/

[2005-03-09 07:05:14] *** Tomg2005 (~tom_glais@68-175-94-155.nyc.rr.com) joined

[2005-03-09 07:05:57] <_sj_> your little parochial example crashed my browser…

[2005-03-09 07:06:47] sorry. It does contain Quicktime

• Terrorism on the Internet