One View On Sociology & Online Anonymity

One View On Sociology and Online Anonymity

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      Privacy is a crucial element in an individual’s self-actualization and rehearsal of socially constructive reflexive behaviors.  In The Human Condition (1958), Ardent argues that “privacy guarantees psychological and social depth, containing things that cannot withstand the constant presence of others on the public scene; it undergirds the public by establishing boundaries, which fix identity; and it preserves the sacred and mysterious spaces of life.  Some phenomena are different if they are not private; confessions of shame or guilt made public become boastful; over-disclosure becomes false; terror, a guilty secret; love and goodness are destroyed.”⁽²⁾  The psychological benefits of privacy are important to individuals and their personal development.  If individuals benefit from the availability of privacy, one could logically come to the conclusion society as a whole benefits from it as well.

      I should have rights to my individual intellectual property (the information I produce, regardless of its origin), access to information and choices about what I choose to ingest (to include food and medicine), freedom to choose how I make positive impact with my life, as well as how (and under what circumstances) I spend my money.  Privacy, or the perceived lack of it, plays a crucial role in how we exercise these rights within society.  Indeed, “the concept of privacy also matters for another, deeper reason.  It is intimately connected to what it is to be an autonomous person.”⁽³⁾  A surveillance state, in which privacy does not exist, affects the social psychology of its citizens, their autonomy, stunts honest creativity, and negatively impacts important catalysts for change in social institutions.

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      Since the time I began taking an interest in information security, corporate information brokers and United States government privacy policy posturing do not subscribe to the concept of private matters.  They are, in fact, so against the concept that many hacktivists who have exposed poor corporate security have been imprisoned under unusual conditions.⁽⁵⁾⁽⁶⁾  Famous whistleblowers who have played a part in exposing government surveillance,⁽⁷⁾ service-members’ blatant disregard for human life are either seeking asylum in foreign countries or are imprisoned under harsh sentences and branded as traitors.  Additionally, the technologies, forums, and groups associated with these alleged crimes (The Onion Router (TOR) network, Bitcoin, the Silk Road, and online Anonymous collective) endure an interminable onslaught of media criticism and smear campaigns; this distorts the social lens through which these entities are observed and warps the public perception of people who believe online anonymity and privacy are fundamental human rights.

As an American citizen, these are people and situations I would like to be aware of.  I want to know if the details of my personal life are being recorded, if they’re analyzed and the nature of that data’s format, and what that information will be used for.  I am creating the data; therefore I should have the right to keep it private, unless I am under the scrutiny of a legitimate criminal investigation.

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      “If you’re a non-criminal, you don’t need anonymous, untraceable financial transactions.  Or you could use cash, which is still almost completely anonymous.  But criminals have a different problem when it comes to cash.  Once your criminal business becomes successful, say from dealing drugs or running sex slaves or poaching rhinos, then the cash really starts to pile up.”⁽⁹⁾  To that, I would like to retort without an academic reference: it is a known fact that even socially sanctioned technologies are used to commit these crimes.  Cellular telephones and printed money are used in drug and human trafficking every day.  If these new, anonymity technologies are as detrimental to society as the media portrays them to be, why did two law Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents steal $800,000 in Bitcoin during the Silk Road investigation?^(10)(11)  If Bitcoin is considered a “currency for criminals,” I would think public officials would have no interest in maintaining vast personal stockpiles of it; not unless they’re dealing drugs, running sex slaves, or poaching rhinos.

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Because I openly use Bitcoin, does this somehow indicate I am implicated in criminal activity?  If so, would the sociological way people view my hobby be different if Bitcoin were painted under a different light by the media?  I believe so.

      Bitcoin is an unregulated, digital currency that uses a decentralized monetary system built on complex encryption algorithms.  What is fascinating about Bitcoin is that it records each transaction in a public ledger called the “blockchain,” which is fed back into the encryption algorithm that keeps Bitcoin user identities secure.  Each time a user conducts a transaction they are charged a “mining fee” to compute the transaction.  The transaction is “hashed” (transaction information is shortened into a numerical, mathematic equivalent) and an exchange event is created based on the time of the transaction, currency exchange amount, “wallet” (or Bitcoin account) number, among other electronic details.  This hash is recorded into the Bitcoin blockchain by Bitcoin “miners” (individuals who purchase Bitcoin transaction processing hardware to collecting mining fees), to be used in deriving hashes for use in future transactions.  The user is also issued a new, uniquely random wallet (or account) number after each transaction, and old wallet number is discarded.  Condensing the previous paragraph was no easy task, but by comparison, the electronic function of Bitcoin is even more mind-bogglingly complex.

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Bitcoin has come under scrutiny because of its decentralized nature, “lack of clarity about its legal structure,” and “creates challenges for regulatory authorities.”⁽¹⁴⁾  Comprehensively, Bitcoin derives its value from the dollars exchanged into the blockchain, but ultimately from the perceived level of privacy it can provide to its users regardless of structure or regulation.

Recently, a prominent Bitcoin dealer began “stress testing” the Bitcoin blockchain by introducing a large volume of transactions that were of little value; they were of less value than the mining fee collected by Bitcoin miners, which put significant strain on the blockchain transaction network.⁽¹⁵⁾  Since the stress tests began, the Bitcoin software development core engineers have been submitting proposals to expand the transaction capability of the Bitcoin network.⁽¹⁶⁾

Anyone who enjoyed profitable Bitcoin trading in the first half of this year woke to bad news on July 11, 2015, after Bitcoin reached a peak of $310.00 for the 2015 year.  Investors watched Bitcoin’s value slide and by August the currency had been devalued by nearly a third to $213.00.

 

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The devaluation indicates two important points about anonymity services: first, there is nothing broken about the Bitcoin blockchain except that its core functional promise of anonymity and privacy had been undermined.  Second, while it is encouraging that Bitcoin’s Developer Core is addressing the problem through Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIP), at least one of the proposals would utilize a software mechanism (called a “hard XT fork”) that could potentially reveal a user’s identity or location, while also exposing users of an online anonymity service called The Onion Router (Tor) network.⁽¹⁸⁾  Proposals of this type caused the Bitcoin to lose value even more drastically than anticipated, and sewed distrust amongst Tor users.

As an example of monetary values placed on anonymizing services and their related software, Bitcoin is only one product.  The entire situation implicates it in an entirely new arena of online anonymity: a human’s right to privacy on the Internet.

      The Onion Router (Tor) anonymity network comes bundled in a powerful suite of privacy and encryption software named TAILS Linux.  Tor circumvents typical Internet Protocol (IP) address assignment methods and makes it appear as if the user’s computer is located in another country.

There is an ambiguous controversy surrounding Tor.  On one hand, the infamous illicit drug market Silk Road was built using Tor technology.  On the other hand, this technology is immeasurably valuable in protecting activists, “journalists, whistleblowers, domestic abuse victims, and dissidents living under repressive regimes.”⁽¹⁹⁾

Within the computer science field, it is rumored that United States federal agencies have attempted to arrest control of (at least parts of) the Tor network.  As a skeptic, I tentatively dismissed these rumors as conspiracy theories and consigned them to the back of my head for use in a future information security thriller novel.  However, on September 10, 2015, an article was published describing the interaction between a library in New Hampshire that wanted to offer Tor services to its patrons, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).  I whole-heartedly agree with the library’s position, even if Tor is merely used for educational purposes within the library.  I was baffled at the reasons for DHS’s reservation in allowing the library to offer Tor services; DHS spokesman Shawn Neudauer was quoted in the article, saying “the protections that Tor offers can be attractive to criminal enterprises or actors and HSI [Homeland Security Investigations] will continue to pursue those individuals who seek to use the anonymizing technology to further their illicit activity.”⁽²⁰⁾

While I was reading the article, I asked myself why citizens of the city were not being asked to offer their opinions on the issue.  Near the bottom, the library’s director reflected my concerns, saying “we need to find out what the community thinks.  The only groups that have been represented so far are the Police Department and City Hall.”  The article was updated on September 16, 2015, mentioning the “overwhelming support from the community to restart its participation in the anonymous Web browsing project.”⁽²¹⁾

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The library board Chairman Francis Oscadal, at a meeting about the Tor service, said “with any freedom there is risk, it came to me that I could vote in favor of the good… or I could vote against the bad.  I’d rather vote for the good because there is value to this.”⁽²³⁾  The community support for Tor is just a small example of public interest in anonymity technology.  Another, much broader example of public interest in anonymity, clothed as a global sociological Internet movement, is the group Anonymous.

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Anonymous is an Internet collective with no central leadership, which uses its vast membership and a number ideological propinquities found within its members to carry out vigilante forms of social justice.  They were founded within the Internet message board 4chan.org and evolved into the first Internet collective to physically protest in the streets while conducting disruptive operations online simultaneously.

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I agree that a portion of Anonymous’ activities, both on and off-line, are morally questionable.  Modern Anonymous is fractured and misdirected, but there must be a social mechanism that is not being fulfilled elsewhere if so many citizens flock to its ranks.  Dabbling in Anonymous’ communications, even momentarily, reveals a jarring (but often respectable) point of view that seeks to be a new type of online “agent of socialization” by bringing attention to issues of racial discrimination, animal cruelty, pedophilia, government overreach, and the atrocities of war.⁽²⁶⁾

 

  

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If nothing else, it seems the collective thrust of its members is to burst the bubble of comfort that citizens surround themselves with, in a much less-carefully packaged material than is delivered from main-stream media companies.  Media produced by Anonymous often depicts the Guy Fawkes mask wearing activists as typical people, powerfully poised to restore justice and power to the common citizen.

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In 2011, a prominent member of Anonymous and co-founder of the infamous hacking group LulzSec⁽²⁹⁾ became an informant for the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).⁽³⁰⁾  Other members who chose to “unmask” themselves became targets of law enforcement sting operations, which led to a convoluted string of convictions under questionable circumstances.^(31)(32)(33)

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Why does fear of unknown, and recently-invented methods of social construction and digital protest illicit such a fierce response from authority?  Dissenting opinion and competition between ideas is healthy for the development of more enlightened ideas and social change, but also seem to provide enough “evidence” of crimes by Internet security activists, privacy advocates, and disruptive journalists to convict them, geographically banish them, or place them in solitary confinement.  Not only does this disrupt the communications for prominent advocates for these technologies, but it distorts the sociological narrative of remaining members by inciting fear and self-censorship.

If so many people subscribe to these collective values, why are they not spoken about publicly and encouraged as a contradictory point of view in wider debate?  My belief is, they challenge the purpose and roles of long-standing social institutions (such as government, the war on drugs, the monetary system, and war in general), change the dynamics of typical roles within a society, and in some ways it puts power back into the hands of members of society when they cannot be pursued or prosecuted for their most genuine beliefs unless they reveal their identities. 

      Within the complex debate of one’s right to privacy, the point is often lost between the laws of the land and the responsibilities and roles of citizens within society.  This causes an ambiguously poignant, yet sometimes hopeful paroxysm in what I feel my role is within society: to be unafraid, give a second look to technology that protects the human rights of individuals, and educate others in this technology’s intended utility.

      The Internet isn't going away.  Human beings will continue to use it to socially organize, to express our concerns, and our most fervent hopes.

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Works Cited:

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(2) Ardendt, H. (1958). The Human Condition.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

(3) Lynch, M. P. (June 22, 2013). Privacy and the Threat to the Self.  Retrieved from http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/22/privacy-and-the-threat-to-the-self/?_r=0

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(10) Jeong, S. (April 17, 2015). Could the Crimes of Two Corrupt Agents Free Ross Ulbricht? Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahjeong/2015/04/17/could-the-crimes-of-two-corrupt-agents-free-ross-ulbricht/

(11) Greenberg, A. (March 30, 2015). DEA Agent Charged With Acting as a Paid Mole for Silk Road. Retrieved from http://www.wired.com/2015/03/dea-agent-charged-acting-paid-mole-silk-road/

(12) BTCNews.com.au (n.d.) Handcuffs and Bitcoin Props. [photograph]. Retrieved from http://btcnews.com.au/banks-warn-bitcoin-poses-potential-terrorist-threat.html

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(14) Shcherbak, S. (2014). How Should Bitcoin Be Regulated? Retrieved from http://www.ejls.eu/15/183UK.pdf

(15) Buntinx, J. P. (September 16, 2015). CoinWallet Keeps Stress Testing Bitcoin Network Indirectly. Retrieved from http://digitalmoneytimes.com/crypto-news/coinwallet-keeps-stress-testing-bitcoin-network-indirectly/

(16) Genjix (September 19, 2015). Bitcoin Improvement Proposals. Retrieved from https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitcoin_Improvement_Proposals

(17) CoinBase (September 14, 2015) CoinBase Currency Comparison Before and After the XT Fork Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP). [Chart screen-shots]. Retrieved from https://www.coinbase.com/charts

(18) Galt, J. S. (August 20, 2015). Bitcoin XT Fork Can ‘Blacklist’ Tor Exits, May Reveal Users’ IP Addresses. Retrieved from http://cointelegraph.com/news/115153/bitcoin-xt-fork-can-blacklist-tor-exits-may-reveal-users-ip-addresses

(19) Smith, G. (August 19, 2013). Meet Tor, The Military-Made Privacy Network That Counts Edward Snowden As A Fan. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/18/tor-snowden_n_3610370.html

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