At the World Economic Conference in Davos, Switzerland, Microsoft’s chief research and technology officer made a rather startling proposal for dealing with the security issues plaguing the online world: a sorta driver’s license for the Internet.
What Mundie is proposing is to impose authentication. He draws an analogy to automobile use. If you want to drive a car, you have to have a license (not to mention an inspection, insurance, etc). If you do something bad with that car, like break a law, there is the chance that you will lose your license and be prevented from driving in the future. In other words, there is a legal and social process for imposing discipline. Mundie imagines three tiers of Internet ID: one for people, one for machines and one for programs (which often act as proxies for the other two).
Now, there are, of course, a number of obstacles to making such a scheme be reality. Even here in the mountains of Switzerland I can hear the worldwide scream go up: “But we’re entitled to anonymity on the Internet!” Really? Are you? Why do you think that?
What a great idea, I mean, if you’re the government of Iran or China, seeking to track dissidents and discourage public discourse. And I suppose it might be an intriguing proposition to a company like Microsoft, which would be in a great position to profit off the creation and administration of such a government mandated authentication system.
But I honestly can’t think of anything more antithetical to the American spirit.
Anonymity — or at least, pseudonymity — holds a long and cherished place in American history, dating back well before our nation’s founding. Benjamin Franklin honed his skills as a journalist writing under a number of pseudonyms, and Thomas Paine’s highly influential and historically revered Common Sense was originally published anonymously in 1776. And then of course there are the Federalist Papers, which were published under the pseudonym Publius, though authored by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay.
I mean, if anonymity is good enough for the founding fathers, it’s good enough for me.
Yeah sure, there are those who abuse the privilege, as evidenced by the sewer that is my comment thread, but Democracy is a messy thing, especially the nearly inviolable right to free speech that guarantees it.
Yet listening to Ross Reynolds and David Brewster — two journalists — discuss Mundie’s proposal on KUOW yesterday, I was struck by how… well… how damn credulous they sounded. A revocable license to post content on the Internet should be a facially ridiculous and offensive proposal to anybody who cares about the First Amendment, and yet Brewster refused to dismiss it as the absurdity it is, while Reynolds kept coming back to the point that maybe it should be required if you accept money online?
Really? Your right to free speech ends the minute you accept payment for it?
My guess is that Mundie and Reynolds/Brewster were focusing on two different issues. Despite the ungenerous headline, I’ll be generous enough to assume that Mundie is merely attempting to address the technical security issues that plague the Internet, to which end I would suggest that Microsoft focus on producing better software, rather than shifting the security burden to the enduser. Reynolds and Brewster on the other hand, seemed to start from the premise that anonymity poses some sort of threat to the world of words and ideas in which they make their living.
Again… really? Do anonymous writers really pose that big a threat? KUOW and Crosscut are free to require registration before allowing a commenter to post; hell, I keep threatening to move to some sort of registration system as a remedy for HA’s chronic troll infestation. But a government issued Internet license? That’s fascism.
What I think we really see here with the type of conversation we heard yesterday on KUOW, and in similar lamentations throughout our news and opinion industry, are the traditional media gatekeepers expressing their discomfort with the way the Internet hasn’t just enabled the rabble to crash through their gates, but has torn these gates from their hinges entirely.
And yes, the inevitable result of this new technology is that there is an awful lot of crap on the Internet. In fact, it’s mostly crap. But to suggest that the credibility of ones words should be so closely tied to the identity of the author, displays both a lack of trust in intelligence and judgment of the reader, and a remarkable disregard for the inherent value of the words themselves.
I don’t write anonymously, but if I did, what would be the difference? Let the unsigned editorialists at the daily newspapers hide behind the presumed credibility of their mastheads; as for me, I’m proud to simply let my writing speak for itself.
Or you could just write software that doesn’t suck. ‘Oh wait, we’re talking about Microsoft. Never mind.
More proof that the private sector is wonderful and can do no wrong!
“I keep threatening to move to some sort of registration system as a remedy for HA’s chronic troll infestation.”
Well, if it includes an edit function that actually works…
How ironic. A liberal tool (Goldy) against the equivelent to “the fairness doctrine” for the internet. The hypocrisy get’s better every second. heheehehe
Imagine trying to get a renewal after your high school did something like this.
Does it surprise you that Ross Reynolds was credulous? He never seems to disappoint my expectations of inanity. I’ve complained more than once to KUOW about something stupid he’s said, or when he’s repeated some unexamined canard of conventional ‘wisdom’, often a conservative talking point. He’s a major putz.
Ah yes, anonymity….thanks Goldy!
“Anonymity — or at least, pseudonymity — holds a long and cherished place in American history” — we will quote you Goldy, when we brief the US supreme court on the right to be anonymous when signing petition signatures, this is part of our plan hashed out with Robers to ultimately strike down all disclosure laws. Because you know, those disclosures of who gave money? And who paid for ads? Their violate the right to anonymity, dude.
Thank’s for helping out the other side!
There is an alternative.
Why couldn’t there be a voluntary registry?
Then, if I WANT to ignore anons I can.
OTOH, registered users could do things like like buy stuff or post /s passwords.
Of course, then Iran could just choose to make everyone register … oops, why can’t they do that now?
Goldy,
Despite the ungenerous headline, I’ll be generous enough to assume that Mundie is merely attempting to address the technical security issues that plague the Internet, to which end I would suggest that Microsoft focus on producing better software, rather than shifting the security burden to the enduser.
At the risk of incurring both your wrath and the wrath of some of the resident trolls (some of whom seem to not understand the difference between deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning), I have to say that such glib response to the overall security problem really doesn’t contribute much to the discussion.
More specifically, unless you have some concrete suggestions in addition to banning the use of insecure CRT APIs (and replacing them with more secure versions), comprehensive threat modeling with data flow analysis, strict requirements for static code analysis, rigorous code reviews, test-driven development, file fuzzing, a well-defined suite of acceptance tests plus follow-up for those issues that manage to still slip through all that safety net, if you don’t have anything to add to this, then you are forced to admit that internet security is not a problem that can be solved simply by writing better end-user software. That’s like saying that we can solve the problem of earthquakes by improved construction and design techniques for buildings and bridges.
But a government issued Internet license? That’s fascism.
Was Mundie really proposing a government-mandated solution? I mean, it’s possible, but, knowing Mundie, I wouldn’t expect that out of him. More likely he’d suggest that content and service providers adopt such an authentication system for the sake of their systems.
Quite a few companies already adopt some variation on IPSec within their corporate networks where computers on the network simply reject connections unless the network packets themselves contain some form of credentials.
At that point, what’s the moral difference between Mundie’s proposal and your requirement that people provide some form of credentials before they can put up a top-level post?
An internet license would weed out all the Conserathugs and only nice liberals would remain.
i love post reminding us of the hypocrisy of the left…
goldy…i think you simultaneously want..
…no regulation of Internet postings
…but regulation of radio talk radio
…killing tax exempt status for churches who mention poltics (unless that church is black or left wing libral)