Speaking as both the original author and someone who's been studiously pseudonymous online for well over a decade (after several decades of generally-public disclosure): anonymity and pseudonymity are exceedingly challenging.
I know I've left trails, and that if this were something my life absolutely depended on I'd probably not be writing this now. There are any number of ways to determine who a person is, or even to narrow down the probable set of individuals, often with only the thinnest of data. Given the prevalence of sensors, tracking, and physical-space monitoring (facial recognition, device tracking by WiFi and Bluetooth sensors, license plate readers, purchase and credit card data, and more), odds are pretty good that an online persona could be narrowed down to a few score of potential targets reasonably quickly by a motivated entity. Doing that at scale might be more challenging, but seems to be at least roughly possible by some state-level actors.
And that level of surveillance many well not be necessary, only the threat of such actions.
For discussion, semantic analysis, time(s) of activity, correlation with other known factors (travel or commute patterns, power or communications outages correlating with non-active periods, and the like), there's a lot of data to go on.
The biggest protections seem to me to be far less technical measures such as encryption, obfuscation, and pseudonymity, than they are strong privacy laws, civil rights, legal protections, rule of law, and civil institutions which are strong, robust, highly-trusted and trustworthy, effective, and dedicated to their mission.
That's not to say that technical protections aren't necessary; I absolutely believe that they are. However they are not sufficient, and often prove to be highly brittle: affording strong protection until at some point, whether due to a technical fault or lapse in tradecraft, they aren't. At that point the jig is up, and absent the social institutions in my previous 'graph, vulnerability is absolute.
We cannot live without trust. An absolute faith in anonymity is the false belief that we can.
dredmorbius|2 years ago
I know I've left trails, and that if this were something my life absolutely depended on I'd probably not be writing this now. There are any number of ways to determine who a person is, or even to narrow down the probable set of individuals, often with only the thinnest of data. Given the prevalence of sensors, tracking, and physical-space monitoring (facial recognition, device tracking by WiFi and Bluetooth sensors, license plate readers, purchase and credit card data, and more), odds are pretty good that an online persona could be narrowed down to a few score of potential targets reasonably quickly by a motivated entity. Doing that at scale might be more challenging, but seems to be at least roughly possible by some state-level actors.
And that level of surveillance many well not be necessary, only the threat of such actions.
For discussion, semantic analysis, time(s) of activity, correlation with other known factors (travel or commute patterns, power or communications outages correlating with non-active periods, and the like), there's a lot of data to go on.
The biggest protections seem to me to be far less technical measures such as encryption, obfuscation, and pseudonymity, than they are strong privacy laws, civil rights, legal protections, rule of law, and civil institutions which are strong, robust, highly-trusted and trustworthy, effective, and dedicated to their mission.
That's not to say that technical protections aren't necessary; I absolutely believe that they are. However they are not sufficient, and often prove to be highly brittle: affording strong protection until at some point, whether due to a technical fault or lapse in tradecraft, they aren't. At that point the jig is up, and absent the social institutions in my previous 'graph, vulnerability is absolute.
We cannot live without trust. An absolute faith in anonymity is the false belief that we can.