Tag: anonymity

  • Anonymity in journalism and a conflict of ethics

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    I wrote the following essay at the invitation of a journal in December 2020. (This was the first draft. There were additional drafts that incorporated feedback from a few editors.) It couldn’t be published because I had to back out of the commission owing to limitations of time and health. I formally withdrew my submission…

  • A call for a new human right, the right to encryption

    The Wire June 2, 2015 DUAL_EC_DRBG is the name of a program that played an important role in the National Security Agency’s infiltration of communication protocols, which was revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden. The program, at the time, drew the suspicion of many cryptographers who wondered why it was being used instead of the NIST’s…

  • The federation of our digital identities

    Facebook, Twitter, email, WordPress, Instagram, online banking, the list goes on… Offline, you’re one person maintaining (presumably) one identity. On the web, you have many of them. All of them might point at you, but they’re still distinct packets of data floating through different websites. Within each site, your identity is unified, but between them, you’re different people.…