Few days ago Massimo Mantellini brought to my attention this Wired article from cryptography guru Bruce Schneier. It’s a brilliant short essay that explain how bold is the error of those confusing anonymity with accountability and how important is the quest for accountable systems, especially those accessed by anonymous users.

If someone isn’t accountable, then knowing his name doesn’t help. If you have someone who is completely anonymous, yet just as completely accountable, then — heck, just call him Fred. History is filled with bandits and pirates who amass reputations without anyone knowing their real names.

Then I came across this post from Dion Hinchcliffe. Dion has a completely different vision and is ready to give up anonymity for the sake of preserving the writeable web!

Of course, there will be attendant problems with this approach including a rapidly vanishing anonymity on the Web. But that just might remain a nice artifact of being a read-only Web user.

I don’t believe anonymity is just a “nice artifact of the read-only web”, it’s an important part of our everyday life. Most of our time we are in an anonymous mode: when we walk the streets of our towns, when we pay cash our newspaper, when we attend the Sunday Mass, when we watch tv at home, ….

But Dion wishes for a different world:

[…] controlling anarchy on the writetable Web might be as simple asking that folks flash their Identity 2.0 credential right before they change something on the Internet. This ensures their personal identity is attached to the change. And creating a verifiable chain of evidence might be all it takes for people to act more responsibily. Wiki vandalism, comment flaming, and other forms of anonymous mischief on the writeable Web may be eliminated forever when you know that your ID will be attached to it in perpetuity, affecting your hireability, possible suitability for public office, and more, forever.

How scaring! Thankfully the day after I could read Rob Hof post about the same topic and it was a real relief. Suddenly I felt less of an anarchist …

Some people—perfectly good people with insightful opinions—simply don’t want to be identified in some circumstances. Their employers may object. They’re worried about government intrusion. Maybe they’re just shy.

I always thought that Identity 2.0 should give us more freedom, not “creating a verifiable chain of evidence” for anything we do online. I always admire the pragmatic and sensible approach of Dick Hardt to identity, in his answer to Rob he says:

A goal of Identity 2.0 is to mimic aspects of identity transactions that work well in the physical world. We all have different personas depending on context. I present different aspects of myself depending on wether I am interacting with my mother, my friends, my employees, a server at a restaurant, or my banker.

Right, but please remember that for the server at the restaurant you often are just a perfect stranger and hopefully an accountable one!

While showing your identity is easy (exhibit an ID card, logon to a web site), proving your accountability is more difficult and needs more complex infrastructures (technical or social) like the nexus of your professional relationships or the eBay feedback system.

No wonder that there are more people working on identity and much less on accountability. But we need both.

PS - Clipperz, not this blog but the service we will soon reveal, will definetely be an anonymous service. One like you have never seen before. And you can hold us accountable for providing you with real anonymity!

(thanks to Google Image)

Actually this post is not very much related to Web 2.0, but nonetheless talks about a threat for the emerging online social environment, i.e. the very fabric of Web 2.0.

During last summer, Italy government passed a new law that requires Internet Cafe managers to check and make photocopies of every customer’s passport. Accessing Internet, phone, or fax is no longer an anonymous activity. Furthermore Internet Cafes have to document which computer have been used, login and logout time. All the computer usage will be logged.

It’s not a fresh news, but this recent Christian Science Monitor article made the law quite popular among traveller forums and blogs.

But while Italy has a healthy protest culture, no major opposition to the law has emerged.

Sad but true: nobody is complaining. The italian blogosphere is silent. I think there is one explanation: nobody knows about the new law! I couldn’t find major newspaper articles about it and Internet Cafes are mainly used by immigrants and tourists, and very seldom by residents. So, nobody is aware of the new limitations. This ignorance is more frightening than the law itself …

Thanks to security guru Bruce Schneier for discovering the CSM article, and thanks for gathering so many interesting comments from his civil rights conscious readers. Here is one of them:

How much data is needed to be collected until the bulk data becomes a fuzzy, worthless snowstorm? How in the hell is this going to stop “terrorism” (note the quotes)?

Yes, who is going to collect the paper photocopies? Who will train the managers to detect fake Moldavian passports? I’m pretty sure Italy cannot afford the cost of properly process this data …

And, following this dangerous path, what about the owners of unprotected WiFi networks? Will the government hold them liable for supporting terrorism?

I’m afraid this is not just another example of byzantine bureaucracy, this is the making of a police state …