http://www.economist.co.uk/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2246018
The issue boils down to the question of how much anonymity society can
tolerate on the internet. Drivers' licences and registration plates
dramatically reduce the incidence of hit-and-run accidents. Crack cocaine
is never bought by credit card. If everybody on the internet were easily
traceable, people would think twice about hacking. "I'm kind of a fan of
eliminating anonymity," says Alan Nugent, the chief technologist at Novell,
a software company, "if that is the price for security."
The internet is heading in this direction already. Enrique Salem,
Brightmail's chief executive, says that all e-mail in future will either be
authenticated or be sent into a quarantined in-box where few will dare to
click. The sender's authentication may well be tied to a driving licence,
social-security number or passport. An entire industry has sprung up to
work on other forms of identification, such as the biometric scanning of
irises or hands.
All this may not be pleasing to libertarians, who envisioned the internet
as offering individuals the cover of relative obscurity. What use is the
network to dissidents in China if the Communist Party is watching
everything they do online? And what use is the internet, whose whole point
was to connect people, if it is balkanised into separate, walled subnets? ...
To preserve freedom further, suggests Mr Lessig, anonymity could be
replaced by pseudonymity. It might become legal, for instance, to have
credit cards for online transactions under different names, as long as
these could still be traced to the individual owner. The challenge is to
set the legal hurdles for online search warrants high enough so that
governments cannot abuse their power. But at the same time to keep them low
enough so that criminals can be found and stopped. In this respect, the
online world should be no different from the real one.
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Intro
