Consequences of an Anonymous...
By Eli Jah
2:35 AM on 4/26/2002


"Consequences of an Anonymous World"

The Internet for the most part, is anonymous. It has been that way for years, and I see no change in sight. A skilled person can sign up for an email address, an instant messenger program, and a community forum in less than an hour and have a completely unique identity. And rightfully, so. Online hacking, piracy and identity theft appears to be a real problem on the net. So much, that people will go to great lengths to stop themselves from becoming the victim. And with the ease of identity creation, the internet world becomes a lot more unknown, helping to keep those that commit crimes unknown as well. It’s a cycle that is likely to continue until something is done about it.

Of course, I realize that there are security measures out there to help identify online criminals. IP tracking for instance can identify the unique IP address of anyone. There is no blocking IP tracking, however IP addresses can be changed, either manually or by merely signing offline and then back online. Because of this, people that send hateful email, spam message boards, or hack websites are able to escape and commit the perfect crime.

This has caused many people to be extremely cautious when online. And it’s allowed various websites to apply less-than-adequate checking methods for verifying a person’s identity. When signing up for an account at a website, quite frequently you will need to provide a small amount of personal information. Information that can easily be made up. One piece of information that must be true is the email address since many websites send confirmation emails out to prove that you are who you say you are. However, there is no confirmation when signing up for that email address. Therefore, all these websites are doing is verifying that your email address is indeed yours.

I do believe that there are ways to stop the internet from continuing to be an anonymous world. However, these methods have been proven very unpopular to doomsayers and anarchists who warn against too much control of a free world. The same people who would be arguing against a government controlled police force if they were living in the times before organized police were established. Of course, besides the usual anti-government protesters, those that would be complaining would be the websites themselves because of added work required to validate identity, the overall consumers because of the time it takes to validate, and the criminals themselves. Thus, this would be an extremely unpopular to nearly everyone though it would in effect be an extremely accurate way of protecting them.

And so, the “free” world of the internet remains intact at the expense of our rights. “That among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Taken from The Declaration Of Independence, Thomas Jefferson.