Something interesting in the woodshed...

Right after writing the previous entry "Let the battle begin" I went to Google to search on the term "anonynet" which I had been using. I thought, perhaps, I'd managed to be original and actually coined a new term. However although this site was already the #1 listing for "anonynet", there were a few more references to the term. Most notable was by one Mitch Wagner who in December 2003, briefly mentioned in his blog the concept of an athentinet (which I called an "Identinet") and an anonynet.

Wagner is a security writer for the magazine Internet Week and cited a Newsweek article A Net of Control by Steven Levy. It turns out Levy had been talking to John Walker, founder of AutoDesk, about his prediction of doom and gloom "The Digital Imprimatur" that Walker sees as inevitable. Building on many current and soon to be implemented technologies, each independently lauded as "a good thing", "The Digital Imprimatur" describes how every aspect of Internet access, communication and basically every digital system we interact will soon become authenticated, regulated and controlled by external powers.

As such Walker and I are in quiet agreement and its not until the very end of Imprimatur (its a long read - put a hour or two aside for digesting it) that you discover he's dead against this seemingly inevitable synergy of "good things". As he describes the ever expanding tentacles of The Trusted Computing Platform you can feel it spreading its wholesome goodness everywhere, while behind your back spreading its sickly distrust based poison everywhere. Yes at each turn we are given a good consequence - no more viruses, no more spam, no more crime on the Internet, no more porn accessible to minors - but the cost is very, very high.

Imagine a world where every document you read is directly controlled by someone and can disappear without notice because someone revoked your credentials to read it, or the author's credentials to publish it. Or perhaps a world where every piece of software on your computer, car, or toaster (even) could stop working because it has been found to be flawed or in violation of some patent. And finally, imagine a giant pyramid of digital certificates that grant everyone and everything their very rights to publish, consume, communicate, and basically exist in a modern digital consumer society. At the top of this pyramid is your government that can at any time reach down and "pull the plug" at whim on any and every citizen, exercising prior restraint on all those peoples basic freedoms. Basically you have the classic sci-fi nightmare scenario of a person without identity in a society where everything is controlled by identity. The person is helpless, a zero at the mercy of those in control. Unable to do anything but submit. Dissent will be impossible, insurgence infeasible, and rage against the machine? Futile!

And yet Walker also acknowledges the slippery slope towards such a society is so compelling and such a soft sell to the average citizen. In "The Internet Slum" he exposes the realities of living on an Internet that is increasingly polluted by the lowest common denominator of Internet users. As I'm fond of asking "Did IQs just drop sharply?" (its a quote from "Aliens" by the way), "Yes" comes back the answer from Walker - he is so bold as to point out the decrease in average IQ of those connected to the Internet, from 115 in the early 1990s to 100 now and ultimately to the worldwide average 86. Of course that is not to say that only people with low IQ send spam, viruses and the like, quite the contrary - it is they who are the victims of such schemes and make them viable. If no one ever responded to spam it would become economical unviable and no one would bother sending it. Viruses are a slightly different case, being launched by social miscreants, however again it is often those with insufficient knowledge or intelligence to configure their systems correctly (where such options have been provided) that fall foul of them.

In my reading thus far Walker offers no magic bullet to solve the problem of the Internet Slum and the impending "Death Star" scenario of Digital Imprimatur. His Fourmilab site, operated from the relative safety and sanctity of Switzerland is extensive so I'm still churning through his many interesting articles. Its encouraging to discover a kindred spirit that is thinking deeply and intelligently (and writing about it much more coherently than I do) about where the Internet is going. I look forward to more input from Walker - I may even send him some feedback using his cunningly designed (he calls it "notorious") linear algebra based challenge-response feedback form, one of the many delightful discoveries that await the enlightened explorer of Fourmilab.