Online Anonymity: pro @ contra
Like never ending cat-and-mouse like game with CryptoWars (in Serbian: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4), there is ever present push by the governments to criminalize online anonymity. In most cases there is some pretext like war on terrorism or preventing online bulling and child pornography. However, on the other side those could easily be just a cover stories by governments intended to increase surveillance and control over it’s citizens. We already have increased number of countries requesting ID for buying SIM cards (prepaid), increased number of cameras in cities, and increased censorship and deplatforming on social media. All of those indicate increasing authoritarianism government control in cyber realm, but with what results to justify it?
How many terrorist attacks are prevented by GCHQ and NSA surveillance programs for more than decade now? I have a feeling that if they did they would not stop talking about it, as they want to show how efficient they are.
Every citizen has a right to privacy in physical world as well as in digital one, that is why you do have window rolls and curtains on your windows and doors in your home.
Anonymity and privacy in digital world are also essential for journalists and activists as they need them to protect their sources and hold people in power accountable before public. Without possibility for online anonymity there wouldn’t be a way for people to have leaks of information on government corruption and war crimes. We wouldn’t have Edward (Joseph) Snowden, Chelsea (Bradley Edward) Manning, Wikileaks and Julian Assange.
And there is also another ways to fight terrorism, trough following money, guns, explosives and drugs being bought and sold in real world. Having mandatory education, training and psychological tests before person can buy weapons.
And for online malicious groups like terrorists and pedophiles, the law enforcement is already doing infiltration, which was resulting arrests in majority of publicly known cases. Breaking or weakening encryption wouldn’t influence the success rate as those malicious groups will eventually make OpSec mistakes and get caught by watchful eye of government. And majority of social networks do not have End-to-End encryption for direct messaging or chats so there is really no need for anything to be done, as they are already not privacy friendly by design towards their users.
Problem of online bulling on social networks does not have anything to do with anonymity, since companies control the accounts and can suspend, censor, flag or ban anyone who violates their Terms of Service, as they are already doing policing over their platforms. In any case, anonymous or not, bad actors and violators of ToS are going to face a consequence of account suspension or removal, but without anonymity far more people would be scared to report of government misconduct, or misconduct of people in the ruling and ones in high and influential positions.