I ask this in order to start an honest discussion. Reading the comments, there seems to be an immediate, and in my opinion unwarranted, jump from authentication of identity directly to censorship. Cutting through the article's FUD bullshit, censorship is not what Mundie is proposing. He's proposing a connection between internet presence and identity, as a means of combating cybercrime.
While his proposal conceivably enables censorship activities, I am wary of slippery-slope arguments in general, and in this case the proposal has nothing to do with the legality of censorship in whatever jurisdiction it's present it. In areas where censorship is more common than the US it might make it easier. But, in the US at least, I personally don't see lack of anonymity as necessarily being the first step on an irresistible march towards a soviet dictatorship.
I'm rather on the fence about the specific issue of anonymity being a principle aspect of freedom of speech.
No, but you're asking the wrong question. The right question WRT to free speech is whether there is any free speech which requires anonymity -- and the answer to that is obviously yes. Martyrdom should not be required to speak against those in power.
But, even that is beside the point. An internet id implies authentication to use the internet. Identification is a _secondary_ purpose of a driver's license -- the primary purpose is to control who can and cannot operate a motor vehicle. That's the problem. Not anonymity,
If you can't be authenticated, you can't speak on the internet -- that is precisely what he's proposing (you can consume but not contribute). It's very small step from that to controlling speech. And it's not even about anonymity -- If you can't get on, no one is going to hear you complain. And guess who holds the keys?
And furthermore, cert authorities for the things that need them already exist. So, he is obviously pushing censorship, whether he's too stupid to realize it (it's a microsoft talking head, after all) or not.
You have a valid point that there are instances of free speech that do effectively require anonymity.
The point of an actual driver's license is first to certify, and second to identify. However, if you give Mundie the benefit of the doubt, he was just using the wrong metaphor and didn't mean that some people wouldn't get the keys to the castle. Would an "internet license" that demonstrates your identity but has no entrance requirements and no way of being denied or revoked be as directly correlated with censorship?
The conditions you laid out are hypothetical. Yes, if we ignore the anonymity requirement for all free speech, and it was strictly identity only with no other requirements, it would less directly associated with censorship. But this hypothetical is begging the question... If everything were sweetness and light, we wouldn't have problems with a stricter license for access proposal either because there would be no fear of retribution, and no one would have a reason to speak out. But there is, and they do...
So practically, even your proposal is broken. There is a requirement. You must identify yourself. So how do you do that? Well, you have to supply the proper "papers" -- and what authority will guarantee those? Oops, you've just handed the keys over again...
And the best part? It does nothing to stop criminals, who would have no problem breaking the law again, to just fake the papers and get an id to use a conduit for... whatever. It just institutes another level of control, another mental and practical barrier, to cross for normal people who wish to speak their mind.
You don't need anonymity to speak freely. You might need anonymity to protect yourself from loss of freedom, property, or life.
For example, in the 1770s some people wrote pamphlets criticizing a man named George, publishing them under pseudonyms to protect their lives. Others signed a declaration of independence with their given names, risking death. To each his own.
Such risks may not be an imminent danger where you live right now. Nevertheless, Craig Mundie's proposal will make it far easier for armed men to track down people who disagree with them. That is, of course, the whole point of the proposal.
Yes. This is why for example voting is anonymous in the US, so your employer or local corrupt official or whoever can't force you to vote a certain way.
> censorship is not what Mundie is proposing. He's proposing a connection between internet presence and identity, as a means of combating cybercrime.
Online there's not much difference between "doing" and "saying", and some kinds of online crime are about "saying" (ie, things like kiddie porn).
> While his proposal conceivably enables censorship activities
The only way it can possibly work is by enabling censorship (not proactive censorship, but reprisals for saying the wrong things).
> I personally don't see lack of anonymity as necessarily being the first step on an irresistible march towards a soviet dictatorship.
That's quite a jump, from censorship to dictatorship.
What permits bad rulers is that the people who know either don't care or don't matter. Censorship acts to reduce the number of people who know. Proper institutions can make it easier to reach individuals who both matter and care. If a large enough number of people know and care strongly enough, then together they can matter.
If there's a culture of removing bad rulers immediately, the ability to censor probably isn't a big deal. If there isn't, censorship can make it significantly harder (but not impossible) to remove the bad rulers once they've had time to get entrenched.
I ask this in order to start an honest discussion. Reading the comments, there seems to be an immediate, and in my opinion unwarranted, jump from authentication of identity directly to censorship. Cutting through the article's FUD bullshit, censorship is not what Mundie is proposing. He's proposing a connection between internet presence and identity, as a means of combating cybercrime.
While his proposal conceivably enables censorship activities, I am wary of slippery-slope arguments in general, and in this case the proposal has nothing to do with the legality of censorship in whatever jurisdiction it's present it. In areas where censorship is more common than the US it might make it easier. But, in the US at least, I personally don't see lack of anonymity as necessarily being the first step on an irresistible march towards a soviet dictatorship.
I'm rather on the fence about the specific issue of anonymity being a principle aspect of freedom of speech.