In an earlier post, I talked about Zooko's views on pseudonymity and privacy, including the general idea that pseudonymity is quite a lot harder to maintain that cypherpunk privacy enthusiasts originally hoped.
David Weekly sent me a very thoughtful comment on this, with a similar skepticism. David recalls that a friend happened to comment that she kept a journal on-line.
"LiveJournal?" I guessed.
"Yeah," she said, "that's right. But I don't use my name, so people can't find it."
"I can find it in 15 minutes."
[... S]ure enough, I found her pseudonym on LiveJournal in about fifteen minutes. Basically, it's a compression issue. Unless you can assume a very large shared secret codebook (certain "replacement names" for people, a la "C" = Chris the ex, "E" = Elizabeth the roommate, etc.), a certain amount of the keying and introduction has to actually be on the site. For instance, if you went to visit a specific place or had specific new interests, you probably would have to write out those things fully for the blog to be at all useful to your friends.
I would therefore posit that any public blog whose point it is even in part
to reveal the life of the underlying person and their experiences is findable in a trivial amount of time, given even only a small amount of knowledge about the person. Public pseudonyms used in anything but the most academic of discussions are quickly discoverable by mentions of facts alone.
Beyond that, of course, there is the issue of "fist". As I'm sure you know, there were code listeners in the UK who would listen to transmissions from German field operators. Without even being able to decode the texts, the listeners were able to uniquely identify specific operators by the patterns of their transmissions. If this applies to banging out dits and dashes, how much more would this apply to style used in writing? Indeed, this is how the Unabomber was found out...the style was Ted Kaczyinski's and Ted's alone. So as long as one writes consistently, or even making use of a consistent set of aphorisms and analogies, one can be uniquely identified.
It's possible that automated tools will be able to scan the Net, matching well-defined personal sites and emails with public pseudonyms. The only real way around this is to either never make one's public persona public or never make the pseudonym public. The former is arguably difficult, save living as a hermit (with an Internet drop) and the latter defeats much of the point of having a pseudonym.
The "fist" idea reminds me of some of David Molnar's research on RFID privacy, where RFIDs that supposedly are privacy-protective may actually divulge persistent tracking information as a result of lower-level protocols (collision-avoidance schemes) that had not been specially designed for privacy protection.
There really is a layer-crossover problem. People rarely go to great lengths to make themselves statistically indistinguishable from other people. A pseudonym that writes only about a single topic (without making reference to life events), as Unlimited Freedom does, is better off, especially if that pseudonym writes only infrequently and at seemingly random times. But that doesn't coincide with the communications habits or preferences of very many people who might want (or think they might want) anonymity or pseudonymity.
There certainly are possibilities for mechanically rewriting texts. A machine can perform certain transformations to ensure consistency (or consistent randomness!) in certain stylistic distinctions, for example "it's" vs. "it is", "don't" vs. "do not", certain cases of passive voice vs. active voice, and so on. Pseudonymous writers should definitely use a spell check if they're not confident about their spelling or typographic abilities. (I think a persistent typo was one of the stylometric tricks that linked up pseudonymous posts in the stylometry paper that the Tor bibliography includes.) But David's observation functions mostly at higher levels, which can't be mechanically rewritten. And I think his observations are dead on with regard to people blogging about their own lives, unless they already belong to a simply vast anonymity set or make very cautious military-censor-like decisions about what they're going to include. Loose lips sink pseudonyms, but most bloggers who discuss their personal lives have nothing if not loose lips...
I visited
my elementary
school during my vacation last week and was pleased to run into about five of my elementary school teachers. Apparently, it's routine for teachers to teach at the Campus School for over twenty years. I was very excited to see them again and was once again persuaded that the Campus School is a wonderful place.
Various civil liberties attorneys, international visitors, and I made the brief trip two weeks ago over to the main courthouse of the Ninth Circuit in the South of Market Area in San Francisco. It's a beautiful building, and, though I've seen one other argument in the Ninth Circuit at another venue, I had never been inside this courthouse before.
We were there to see the rehearing en banc in Yahoo v. LICRA (more fully, Yahoo, Inc., v. La Ligue Contra Le Racisme et L'Antisemitisme). This is better known as the "Nazi memorabilia auctions" case. Previously, a French court had ruled in favor of student antiracist groups that sued Yahoo in France for permitting Nazi materials on its web sites, including Yahoo Auctions. Yahoo then filed suit in the U.S. to try to block enforcement of that judgment against it here on the grounds that enforcing that decision would violate Yahoo's first amendment rights. Yahoo won that case in the District Court and then lost on appeal to the Ninth Circuit. (The three-judge panel ruled that U.S. courts did not have jurisdiction over the French groups at this stage because they had not actually tried to enforce the French decision in the U.S.) Yahoo then sought rehearing en banc (before a larger panel of judges of the Ninth Circuit); EFF was amicus in support of Yahoo's rehearing request.
The en banc panel consisted of 11 randomly-selected judges of the Ninth Circuit, who had the power to reverse the earlier decision of three judges of that court. (Interestingly, they also have the power to reverse other earlier published decisions by the Ninth Circuit, something they alluded to during the argument; a Circuit Court sitting en banc is technically bound only by Supreme Court decisions, making it uniquely unconstrained by precedent if it so chooses.)
In theory, a lot of the U.S. case relates to the question of whether suing a U.S. entity abroad, in an effort to intimidate it or change its behavior in the U.S., is enough to give the U.S. entity a right to sue here for a judicial determination of whether its behavior is protected by U.S. law. This is a particular species of the question of when a court will exercise jurisdiction to grant a declaratory judgment, in order to avoid the "sword of Damocles" problem where someone is intimidated by an ongoing threat of a lawsuit.
Oddly, the judges did not seem particularly familiar with the factual history of the case. The lawyers came prepared to argue about jurisdiction, but a huge proportion of the questioning from the court was about specific facts, which ought to have been in the record. I don't think either side was prepared for such extensive factual questioning; I think both sides assumed that the judges would already have read the record of the case.
One of the judges got very upset at Yahoo for having brought the case in the first place, suggesting that Yahoo should not be seeking the right to sell and profit from Nazi memorabilia. He suggested that Yahoo should simply accept that it was wrong to help people trade Nazi objects or ideas, comply with the French judgment, and go home. The other judges mostly seemed to accept the idea that Yahoo did have a first amendment interest at stake, but weren't sure about whether declaratory judgment was appropriate in a situation like this.
One of the oddities of declaratory judgment is that the plaintiff often tries to show that it does have legal risk or exposure (that it is arguably doing something improper and hence is at risk of being sued), whereas the defendant tries to make the case go away by suggesting that it actually has no objection to the plaintiff's behavior. You can ridicule this dynamic as the "I'm a bad guy and you hate me"/"No you're not, and I don't" exchange.
Indeed, Yahoo spent a long time arguing that it was, in fact, flagrantly violating the French court's order, that it had never been in compliance with the French court's order, and that it was incapable of complying with it. It suggested that it was likely to get in plenty of trouble for continually flouting the court order and could be liable for an enormous fine. (Normally you don't hear corporate lawyers go to such great lengths to argue that the corporations are continuing to disobey court orders.) On the other side, LICRA (trying to make the case go away by suggesting that there was no real disagreement) kept arguing that Yahoo actually was complying with the court's order, that Yahoo was at no risk, that Yahoo was already doing the right thing, etc. This was quite a spectacle.
I'm amazed by the non-universalism that everyone in the courtroom (with the possible exception of the judge who criticized Yahoo) displayed. Everyone accepted the idea that France was right to forbid racist advocacy while the U.S. was simultaneously right to permit it, and that neither country ought to be able to do anything to undermine the other's policy. I heard nothing from other side that would have brought this idea into doubt. There was certainly no argument by the lawyers themselves that Nazi auctions were actually good or bad or that censorship of racist advocacy was actually a good or a bad thing. The theory seemed to be "they censor it, we don't, the question here is whether that discrepancy given a particular set of facts will create jurisdiction for a declaratory judgment action". I guess this could be seen as another instance of lawyers' and judges' famous ability to compartmentalize issues.
