Anonymity on the Internet

Greetings all, It’s not the Angry Webmaster but his Smarter Cousin, the Angry Systems Administrator! Ok, enough of channeling Jeremy Clarkson and on to what I’m really going to discuss. Being anonymous on the Internet.

As most of you know, Anger Central has to sections. Our older section, the main site, where people send us posting ranting and raving about everything. We do not track who visits us and the postings that come in via the ADD Page are designed to scrub identifying information. It isn’t perfect by any means but it’s done the job fairly well over the years.

We have had posting from women regarding husbands and boyfriends that frankly terrified us. Without a doubt these women were in really bad and dangerous situations. Because of our policies, we had no way to track them down to try and help them. All we could do was have the Angry Webmaster post a “Note from Anger Central” detailing things these women could and should do.

The Angry Webmaster has received replies from these ladies thanking us for the information we provided. This, of course, ended their anonymity, but it was by their choice. As always, we’re glad we could do some small thing to help.

Our most recent foray into helping a damsel in distress was a woman who’s husband had just returned from overseas. (He is in the military) She was ranting about the changes in him since he left and couldn’t understand them. The Angry Webmaster saw this and understood the woman needed some help but had no way to contact her to offer some advice.

He posted a “Note from Anger Central” to her and also posted a copy to the Anger Central Facebook page as well as to a forum on Baen’s Bar looking for some way to reach out to the couple and help them readjust. There is little doubt that the soldier in question saw combat. She didn’t say so but her description matched what both I and the Angry Webmaster have heard others say.

In the cases I just listed, these would be the down side to anonymous postings. Someone is looking for help and we can’t reach them. However, one reason these people posted what they did is specifically BECAUSE it is anonymous.

This brings me to Google and their recent trashing of thousands of accounts, (Including ours), because they don’t allow pseudonyms. I found our account disabled last week and blew it away yesterday. We recreated it with a phony name and reactivated it yesterday.

Google’s past history of basically spying on people is well known. They have been called to task several times in the past over their incredible lack of thinking. This is due to not having anyone who thinks about how people act on staff.

Most of the Google developers are engineers, more comfortable with the latest in hardware and software than in dealing with people. I dont’ blame the engineers, I blame management. This is something those two idiots ((Sergey Brin & Larry Page)) who founded Google should have thought of.

First there was the Buzz fiasco. Google activated Buzz, their first attempt at a social networking rival to Facebook last year. They had just one teensy tiny little problem. First it was activated by default rather than with an opt in. Then it read people’s address book and had an autofollow system that blasted out things all over the internet.

This caused massive headaches for people and probably a few lost jobs and wrecked relationships. Why did this happen? The answer is simple and scary. All the engineers working on the product thought this was a great idea. There was no one there to tell them “Hey guys, don’t you think that sending everything to everyone automatically might not be a good idea?”

From what I recall, there were problems with doctors and lawyers email being sent out with privileged information on patients and clients. Women who were literally on the run from stalkers and abusive spouses had their locations blasted to the very people they were trying to get away from.

Good thinking there guys!

Google shut down Buzz very quickly while they made a few changes. It’s back up and running but for all intents and purposes, it’s a dead product. When I activated both accounts for Google+, (The now defunct one and the new one), Buzz was activated by default and I had to shut it down.

Then there was the WiFi fiasco.

This one was a beaut! Google has spent the last few years sending cars with these massive 360 degree camera rigs up and down every street in America. What no one knew was that Google was also recording Wifi router locations. If the router was open, they were sniffing the packets between the router and whatever device was connected to it.

I will say that the Angry Webmaster had an open WiFi system, but this was due to some problems with Mrs. Webmaster’s ancient Wifi card in her old laptop and the antiquared WiFi Router he was using. It was only the “A” band that was open and no one in the area was using it. ((That protocol is all but dead these days))

There is a street view picture of the Angry Webmaster’s house and I have no doubt they sniffed the WiFi signal. The good news is both Mr. & Mrs. Webmaster were at their real world jobs and the computers were offline. In other words, nothing to sniff here. Move along.

Besides Google, there are other enemies of anonymity.

This is the Government. They hate people posting anonymously and have been trying to lock down the internet for years. This ins’t surprising since most politicians, (In the United States that is. I can’t speak to other countries), have been tearing the Constitution up into cage filler for hamsters. These morons have forgotten about the 4th Amendment of our Constitution and with the help of, not be kind or generous, stupid and corrupt judges, have done much to subvert our rights to be secure in our homes and papers.

There are reasons people don’t want to be identified. Saying something that might cost you your job is a big one, especially in this economy. The Angry Webmaster was terminated from a position because of this site. ((They hauled him into HR about this, but it turned out they were looking for a reason to get rid of him and this was the initial charge))

Other reasons are literally life and limb. People do get tracked down, mostly by governments that don’t care about people’s rights, and basically jail, torture and kill them.

There are downsides besides those I mentioned earlier. The big one is criminal activity. There is a group out their that likes to hack into companies and government agencies and steal private/classified information and blast it all over the internet. The people doing this think they are being:

Cool.
Helping bring transparency to government/business.
Showing off how L33t they in breaking into networks.

The problem is, they are doing a tremendous amount of damage and in the case of Wikileaks and Bradley Manning, getting people killed. ((I can’t go into details but I have talked to those who had to recover the bodies))

The group known as Anonymous has been going after a number of businesses and the US Government. (Also other governments as well) What they haven’t really considered is that they have pissed off a lot of very dangerous people. Their most recent attack was against PayPal. Paypal is fighting back. They just handed the FBI 1000 IP addresses belonging to computers or routers that were involved in a DDOS ((Distributed Denial of Service)) attack against them.

Most of those computers are no doubt infected with a Trojan and the owners are totally innocent of any crimes other than having a contaminated computer. However the FBI computer forensics people can use those systems to track back where the attack was initiated. They’ve done this in the past. Already foreign governments are starting to make arrests.

The idiocy of groups like Anonymous and Wikileaks only give more ammo to the powers that be in their charge against privacy and anonymity on the internet. Frankly, anything bad that happens to those idiots is good in my opinion. They are ruining it for the rest of us.

Still, even with the antics of Wikileaks and Anonymous, I support privacy and anonymity on the Internet. I can see a journalist not giving up a source. However, if the story that a journalist writes blows covert operations or gets people killed, then I believe they should be prosecuted to the maximum extent of the law.

The prosecutors can ask for their sources but the journalists can’t be compelled to provide them. Of course, if they are convicted of espionage, sabotage, treason and murder, then they should receive the maximum penalty allowed under our laws.

Oh, if you are a foreign national and you break into or receive classified information and blast it out over the internet? I have bad news for you. You are considered an enemy spy and you can be killed on site. Think you have rights under our constitution? Think again. You have to be:

A citizen of the United States
A Resident legal Alien in the United States.
Be present in the United States during the commission of your “crime.”

If you ain’t here, you ain’t covered by the laws of this land. You’re just a target for Mr. Reaper and his boy AGM-114 Hellfire. 🙂

Well I’ve rambled on long enough. Normally this is something the Angry Webmaster likes to talk about, but in this case, and considering the technical issues involved, I thought I would discuss it.

Thank you

~The Angry Systems Administrator~