anonymity // Current

How 10 digits will end privacy as we know it

Internet denizens and urban dwellers alike need to recognize that an era of anonymity is ending.

The population of the world stands at about 7 billion. So it takes only 10 digits to label each human being on the planet uniquely.

This simple arithmetic observation offers powerful insight into the limits of privacy. It dictates something we might call the 10-Digit Rule: just 10 digits or so of distinctive personal information are enough to identify you uniquely. They're enough to strip away your anonymity on the Internet or call out your name as you walk down the street. The 10-Digit Rule means that as our electronic gadgets grow chattier, and databases swell, we must accept that in most walks of life, we'll soon be wearing our names on our foreheads.

A study of 1990 U.S. Census data revealed that 87 percent of the people in the United States were uniquely identifiable with just three pieces of information (PDF): five-digit ZIP code, gender, and date of birth. Internet surfers today spew considerably more information than that. Web sites can pinpoint our geographical locations, computer models, and browser types, and they can silently track us using cookies. Banking sites even confirm our identities by verifying that our log-ins take place at consistent times of day.

Database dossiers, too, carry surprising amounts of identifying information, even when specifically anonymized for privacy. Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin last year studied a set of movie-rating profiles from about 500,000 unnamed Netflix subscribers (PDF).

Knowing just a little about a subscriber--say, six to eight movie preferences, the type of thing you might post on a social-networking site--the researchers found that they could pick out your anonymous Netflix profile, if you had one in the set. The Netflix study shows that those 10 deanonymizing digits can hide in surprising places.

Our physical belongings also betray our anonymity by silently calling out identity-betraying digits. Small wireless microchips--often called radio frequency identification, or RFID, tags--reside in car keys, credit cards, passports, building entrance badges, and transit passes. They emit unique serial numbers.

Once linked to our names--when we make credit card purchases, for instance--these microchips enable us to be tracked without our realizing it. One popular book inflames imaginations with the lurid title, "Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track your Every Move with RFID."

But wireless microchips also highlight the futility of anonymity protections. To begin with, concerns about RFID tracking miss the forest for the trees. After all, mobile phones are ubiquitous and can be tracked at much longer ranges than standalone chips. Many people have GPS receivers in their phones and are signing up for location-based services, voluntarily (if selectively) disclosing their movements. There's little point in hiding the serial numbers of chips when your mobile phone squeals on you.

Many scientists (including me) have developed antitracking techniques for mobile phones and microchips. Instead of fixed serial numbers, wireless devices can call out changing pseudonyms, such as the rotating license plate numbers on spies' cars in the movies. The problem is that the plates may change, but the car always looks the same. In this regard, chips are like cars.

Scientists at ETH Zurich recently showed how to identify microchips uniquely using radio waves (PDF)--and consequently to see through the disguise of pseudonyms. Their experiments showed that thanks to manufacturing variations, microchips, laptop Wi-Fi cards, and other devices can't help but emit physical "fingerprints"--essentially God-given serial numbers. More digits that we radiate unknowingly.

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Creating a Non Violent World - Is it Really Possible?

Introduction—Confronting the Ideological Beast

America is desperately searching for heroes! If this were not true we would not see the incredible success of blockbuster action movies featuring mostly males with superhuman powers who fight for the underdogs by battling greed, injustice, and corruption of power. We have all seen time and again, story after story, encounters between the forces of good and the forces of evil; and we are constantly being challenged to take a side and fight. The emphasis of popular culture in mass media is a perpetuation of violence as the primary solution to the problem of enforcing the American Dream—“The Myth” (Hedges); like Superman fighting for “truth, justice, and the American way of life.” This portrayal of violence as a necessary judicial tool works inevitably to subjugate the most vulnerable people of our planet, namely women and children. It accomplishes this by portraying unrealistic ideologies and distorting and exaggerating differences among race, class, gender, age, sexuality, and especially religion. The media uses images that “shock and awe” our sensibilities—causing us to constantly react—deflecting our attention away from resistance and away from collective empowerment. “One of the most obvious signs of widespread acceptance of violence is the amount of it that routinely appears in media.” (Wood 314) Violence has become a pervasive part of our reality causing us to react with fear—a state in which we can be easily controlled and manipulated.

The media is a multinational enterprise—an “Eminent Domain”—which is the luxury of a privileged few who influence our popular culture and control the mechanism through which the mythologies of popular culture are transfixed. Its primary existence serves to preserve their control of global socio-economics in posterity by bombarding us with so much violence that we scarcely have time to be aware of the fact that we are being manipulated. However, there are those subtle geniuses who emerge from the frontlines and through personal experience have concluded that the status quo is a never ending merry-go-round leading to the annihilation of both sides. In other words, they have come to realize that hero fixation is a sickness that symbiotically—Ying Yang, 69—enforces victimization. These geniuses work behind the scenes influencing the media content, often changing its’ focus or challenging accepted norms. Although there are many people who are actively participating in efforts to transform the socio-economic landscape on many different fronts whether through academia, media, or politics, the most effective means to communicate ideas is through writing.Introduction—Confronting the Ideological Beast America is desperately searching... more

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Anonymity - How important is it in society? VETO POWER TO THE PEOPLE

Photograph by Sabin Corneliu Buraga

With all the clamor of daily life revolving around the acquisition of wealth; every one tries to draw attention to themselves or at least their company or their product. Companies wouldn't make money if they didn't advertise and publicize their names, their logos, their brand.

Many people want to be recognized, liked, admired, and followed. They want their fifteen minutes. They want to be fashionable and trendy.

And yet their are those who prefer to remain in obscurity, privacy and isolation even though they may possess some amazing knowledge or insight that if shared could revolutionize the planet and its inter networked social systems. These are the anonymous contributors that have enriched our experience of reality. They have left their stories, their poems, their art and these contributions that when found and/or publicized, have touched us, sometimes deeply and profoundly.

When I first encountered the concept of anonymity it was in a poem called "Sister and I". This poem was a poem my mother would recite to us when we were little kids as part of a routine of things she did to lull us off to sleep at night. The poem was written by anonymous. As I learned to read books in school and had to check them out from the library at times I started to encounter more writing by this mysterious person called "anonymous". It actually took me a while to figure out that there wasn't just one "anonymous" that there were many anonymous writers. Why would they not want to get credit for what they made? It was an intriguing question.

Later in my academic career I encountered the concept of pseudonyms, that is words that are used as a substitute for the real word or that they mean the same things. And then I learned that writers sometimes wrote in pseudonyms or pen names...Wikipedia has a real cool article about pen names here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pen_name

My point that I am trying to make is that anonymity is important to the security of our nation and the people of this country. Anonymity is what the whole issue around a National Shield Law and Whistle Blower Protection is all about. The people coming forward want to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation; although sometimes the one being ratted out can figure out who did the ratting because the circle of those who knew was small and they could figure it out through a process of elimination and then silence the witness. This is why we have a Witness Protection Program.

With all the fear that the average person is in these days what with Iraq and Armageddon nipping at our heals, its no wonder that we don't have many courageous good Samaritans running around and that integrity and honesty are not even requirements for running a government anymore. Something is seriously wrong with this country; it has a cancer growing and its got a touch of Alzheimer's and I am talking figuratively here ok?

These three things alone would create fear in those that we entrust to govern us and to exploit our god given resources. This is our planet by God and we need to take the power back. TAKE THE POWER BACK!!!

Now why stop at a trifecta, why not give VETO power to the people through the power of the petition. In the Constitution it says that the right of the people to peacefully assemble and to petition for a redress of grievances shall not be unduly denied. I think there could be a constitutional basis for what I am proposing here. The number of signatures needed to achieve a VETO could be argued of course, but think about it. Any legislation and/or executive order could be challenged and placed on hold until a super majority of Senatorial and Congressional votes could overturn the VETO.

Please tell me what you thing about these ideas of Anonymity, and Veto power to the people.

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