I don't think anyone is arguing taking away the right to anonymity, ggr. I'm certainly not.
If you mean here on this forum, true. If you mean in the larger world, there are certainly many people arguing for exactly that, for example the Director of the FBI.
But let's talk specifically about a forum like this. Should there be anonymity? This isn't someplace where people NEED anonymity to be protected. (A car forum is not some place where the ACLU would be concerned with protecting rights.) Would lack of anonymity weed out those that are paid to place certain types of messages here or have other interests at play? Would people behave differently?
Removing anonymity is not under discussion by the forum, btw. Just an interesting thought brought on by the article and other stuff I've read recently.
Thinking as an engineer, how would one actually go about removing anonymity on something like this forum? Or, to frame the question slightly differently, how would one
strongly authenticate the association between an individual's posting and their identity? If my friend signed up for this forum (which he might, he has a Sig X on order) he would probably use some variation of the name Richard M. Nixon; he uses that for all sorts of things! Hypothetically, if you wanted to remove his anonymity, you might want to see some form of government issued ID, but who would he actually have to show it to? Or maybe some sort of digital credential like a certificate from a trusted Certificate Authority, like Comodo
. That begs the question of how did he authenticate to the CA.
The point of that is that even for trivial cases, the only way it can work is for there to be a very pervasive infrastructure in place and in use, and this is what scares me. There are things for which I want that strong authentication to be
possible, but very few things for which I want it to be
mandatory, yet there are technological difficulties with making it work unless it is very widely deployed. The solution to this can't be technical, it has to be legislative protections.