Is AI about to destroy anonymous speech?
Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority . . . to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation — and their ideas from suppression — at the hand of an intolerant society.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
Anonymity is often vital for those who want to speak truth to power and expose government wrongdoing. We only need to look to the US government’s treatment of National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to see how far governments will go to target those that don’t have the shield of anonymity when they reveal information that governments want to hide.
it’s more dangerous than ever in America and the West more broadly to voice an opinion at odds with the official, regime-sanctioned one mandated in Washington.
A wrong word, or any word mentioned to the wrong person or in the wrong venue can destroy a career, a reputation, a livelihood. As America becomes an increasingly unfree society under the reign of the Globalist American Empire, the right to speak anonymously . . . is crucial.
Yet at this very moment, anonymity is also in more danger than ever.
As the wheel turns and one cause becomes more or less popular, the destruction of anonymous speech should scare everybody. It is only a matter of time before your view differs from the government of the day and as AI becomes more and more powerful, the difference of opinion that unleashes the full force of the state against you will become less and less. It could even be something you said 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. Hello 1984.
Anonymity is facing an existential threat in the form of high-tech artificial intelligence research. The European Union, the Pentagon, and Big Tech giants have spent billions building capabilities that are well-understood among those who work in the field, but remain obscure to ordinary people. With the power of modern artificial intelligence, tech-driven censorship can extend far beyond simply deleting Twitter accounts or suppressing links to Hunter Biden’s sex tape. It will also include the power to effectively destroy the right to anonymous speech online.
The potential reach of Big Tech and Big Government in a world stripped of anonymity and bolstered by powerful AIs is frightening to think about. It’s not just a matter of preserving the right to mock, question, criticize, or defy the government without being shamed, fired, or arrested.
Anonymity protects the most vulnerable people.
Having the choice to remain anonymous gives people more power and agency when they’re navigating their online interactions. Research shows that women — who are much more likely to be targeted by online harassment than men — are much more likely to use pseudonyms or temporary identities than men. This is an important frontline defence against online harassment. Take anonymity away and people become easier targets — especially considering a large proportion of perpetrators of online harassment already know the people they target. If we limit people’s capacity to choose anonymity online, that proportion will rise.
GetSession.org
Anonymity versus Privacy
Anonymity and Privacy are 2 different things, often mixed and used interchangeably. There is some speech you want to be anonymous and public (so the world finds out about it) while there is other speech you want to be anonymous and private (a whistle blower communicating with a journalist or law enforcement) while there is other speech where privacy is important, but you want the other person to know who you are (family discussions, business transactions, etc).
How do we protect ourselves?
I wanted to share some suggestions with you on how we can protect ourselves and I have listed some suggestions below for:
- anonymous and private
- non-anonymous and private
- anonymous and semi-private
But I have not found a good solution to protect “anonymous and public” communication. By virtue the communication is public, governments can throw AI at the problem to remove the veil of anonymity. They do this by analyzing the words and phrases you use and comparing them to other public communications.
Session
Session protects:
- anonymous and private
- non-anonymous and private
- anonymous and semi-private
Session describes itself as:
Session is an end-to-end encrypted messenger that minimizes sensitive metadata, designed and built for people who want absolute privacy and freedom from any form of surveillance.
In researching Session, I came across a very interesting discussion on why they chose to remain based in Australia with it draconian anti-privacy, pro-surveillance laws rather then relocating to somewhere like Switzerland:
Choosing to build Session in Australia is something that has always raised eyebrows for people who are privy to the Five Eyes intelligence alliance. Why wouldn’t Session be based in Russia, Switzerland, or…just anywhere with a less hostile regulatory environment, really.
The answer is simple: running away from regulators is not a sustainable future for private tech. No, the solution is to build technology which is actually resistant to surveillance and other encroachments on people’s personal privacy. Local regulatory environments are always evolving and changing, and it’s not viable for development teams to pick up and move to the latest privacy haven every time their local laws change.
Session is:
- open source
- Anonymous — no email or phone number required
- Does not collect data — nothing to leak
- Uses an onion routing network similar to TOR to protect you IP address and anonymity
- Distributed system with no single point of failure — hard to shut down.
I would also suggest you read an article on how they get around the problem of Contact Discovery and not letting it destroy your anonymity:
Messaging platforms aren’t useful if there’s nobody there to read your message. That holds true for every single piece of communication technology, whether it’s smoke signals, telephones, or Session. The social network rules all. The more people you know using an app, the more likely you are to use it. This is a well established fact in the tech world, and everyone is tweaking and designing their apps and services to try and hitch their wagon to the fabled network effect.
Briar
Briar protects:
- anonymous and private
- non-anonymous and private
- anonymous and semi-private
Briar uses TOR and describes itself as:
- Peer-to-peer encrypted messaging and forums
- Messages are stored securely on your device, not in the cloud
- Connect directly with nearby contacts — no Internet access required
- Free and open source software
It certainly has some unique features like being able to operate without the internet, using bluetooth or wifi. Here is the description of how Briar works:
Briar provides private messaging, public forums and blogs that are protected against the following surveillance and censorship threats:
Metadata surveillance. Briar uses the Tor network to prevent eavesdroppers from learning which users are talking to each other. Each user’s contact list is encrypted and stored on her own device.
Content surveillance. All communication between devices is encrypted end-to-end, protecting the content from eavesdropping or tampering.
Content filtering. Briar’s end-to-end encryption prevents keyword filtering, and because of its decentralized design there are no servers to block.
Takedown orders. Every user who subscribes to a forum keeps a copy of its content, so there’s no single point where a post can be deleted.
Denial of service attacks. Briar’s forums have no central server to attack, and every subscriber has access to the content even if they’re offline.
Internet blackouts. Briar can operate over Bluetooth and Wi-Fi to keep information flowing during blackouts.
Briar is designed to resist surveillance and censorship by an adversary with the following capabilities:
- All long-range communication channels (internet, phone network, etc) are comprehensively monitored by the adversary.
- The adversary can block, delay, replay and modify traffic on long-range communication channels.
- The adversary has a limited ability to monitor short-range communication channels (Bluetooth, WiFi, etc).
- The adversary has a limited ability to block, delay, replay and modify traffic on short-range communication channels.
- The adversary can deploy an unlimited number of devices running Briar.
- There are some users who can keep their devices secure — those who can’t are considered, for the purposes of the threat model, to be controlled by the adversary.
- The adversary has a limited ability to persuade users to trust the adversary’s agents — thus the number of social connections between the adversary’s agents and the rest of the network is limited.
- The adversary can’t break standard cryptographic primitives.
Use the Network Effect to help these products
As I discussed in my article about the Network Effect, your use of one of these product will have twice the impact on the value of the anonymous private networks they are building. Likewise stopping using one of the platforms currently spying on you reduces the value of their spy network.
So it is up to you. If you care about anonymous and private communications, start using Session or Briar or a similar open source product. You and your friends can make the difference between their success and failure. Are you a talker or a doer?
Conflict of Interest Disclosure
Writer and family members do not hold any financial interest in the businesses manufacturing, developing, and/or selling any of the products or services mentioned in this article. Nor are we compensated in any way e.g. commission or affiliate program if you decide to purchase these products or services.
Is AI about to destroy anonymous speech? (text only excluding videos, graphics, and sound) by Beating Big Tech © 2021 is licensed under Attribution 4.0 International
