Traceability on the Internet
&gt; <i>This is an example of differential traceability; the police department has the authority to demand ownership information from the Department of Motor Vehicles that issues the license plates. Ordinary citizens do not have this authority</i><p>This is a <i>fantastic example</i>, but not in the way he intends!<p>While it is only the DMV that has the official database of license plate numbers, simply having attached a unique identifier to each car means that we&#x27;re trivially subject to all sorts of independently-implemented surveillance, from the lone PI stalking a target to the wide scale ANPR dragnets we&#x27;re currently grappling with. In fact I&#x27;d go so far as to say that in the face of modern technology, the current implementation of license plates <i>is a gross rights violation</i>.<p>As other commenters have noted, where is this glaring threat? We&#x27;ve had Eternal September for 25 years and this &quot;harmful behavior&quot; has yet to manifest in a way that can&#x27;t be solved by a combination of good old fashioned policing and Postel&#x27;s law. Yet we repeatedly hear this tired refrain of ominous ne&#x27;er-do-wells who simply must be stopped.<p>The current concern is harassment on quasi-public communications platforms like Twitter. Yet Twitter is <i>already operating with everyone having a nym</i>, and still not succeeding at the goals each of its critics envisions. Making these nyms more permanent doesn&#x27;t change the actual technical difficulty of the problem of moderation!<p>If we&#x27;re concerned about &quot;social network bullying and misinformation&quot;, then we should first demand to see progress on the topic from independent entities that can each try many approaches and fail in isolation. Changing the Internet to have a baked-in totalitarian identification regime and assuming these platforms will <i>then</i> address our wishes is downright foolish.