China's New Wave of Internet Censorship: Name Verification for Online Commenting
thediplomat.com
thediplomat.com
This isn't some western media propaganda. I tried one of them very recently (I don't want to give them any undeserved marketing), they allowed me to sign up and the moment I clicked on my camera button it took me to a page asking me to "verify" my profile as apparently it was Chinese government's new regulation. Guess what? They asked me for my passport before I could upload a damn thing on their app.
Imagine, Facebook asking you to upload your passport before you do a live stream. Only the Chinese government can get away with something unbelievable like these regulations, while still gaining loyalty from their citizens to the point where these supporters will even defend the govt. everywhere online trying to explain how normal it is to submit your passport and your real identity to some random app company because you know, you just wanted to try it out and it's totally normal.
It wouldn't surprise me if a Western government (probably the UK's) considers introducing legislation to require exactly this in the not-too-distant future, most likely under the guise of preventing the spread of extremist propaganda.
If they do, companies like Facebook and YouTube will face a choice between acceding to the new regulation or incurring punitive fines. Guess which option most of them will choose?
The only way we can prevent George Orwell's vision from becoming a reality is if we build a more decentralised web. However, that also threatens the walled gardens' revenue streams.
Especially with the way we are moving. Most people today are happy to use sso with services like facebook or google. Most people also have their real identify tied to their core profile they use to sign on to other services. The abstraction between the internet and the cloud is becoming more blurry to a internetizen that is technologically ignorant.
Practically the only way of connecting anonymously to the Internet is the old-fashioned wardriving, or getting lucky and finding a "free wifi" which is not limited to the Web only.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
Wikipedia cites this term being coined in 1988 ;).
If it's left-wingers, it'll be hate speech and "think of the women/minorities".
Same outcome, of course.
There is, evidently, a fairly powerful and far-reaching population of left-leaning people who believe and are willing to act on the idea that the internet should be politically controlled. I've never heard of this being done successfully against, say, a communist website.
[1]https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/18/cloudflare_ceo_rubb...
Also: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/12/german-police-...
Took me 2 seconds to find that. Your lack of knowledge isn't proof of something not existing.
Where Antifa discharging firearms at peaceful protesters? Or was that the neo-nazis?
I have nothing more to say to you.
I'm also not defending Antifa, I'm commenting on your equivalence between the two groups. Sure, in the broadest of strokes they are the same, but so are all criminals. But one would not say a shoplifter is the same as a murderer.
> I seriously don't get how you can ham on the murderers but defend shoplifters, they're both fringe groups that shit over society's rules.
Yes, there has been some violence from the anti-fascist side, such as Eric Clanton being hit with a bicycle lock. But you are overlooking the fact that fight-wing activists have initiated more and more deadly violence in similar contexts: a stabbing at a rally in Sacramento last year; a shooting Washington state earlier this year; and of course the deliberate driving of a car into a crowd at Charlotteville a couple of weeks ago. Screenshots from Discord suggest that particular tactic was discussed in advance by RW activists.
I don't want to go on a Gish gallop or we'd be here all day, but I'd also encourage you to reflect on the fact that while Antifa supporters endorse the idea of punching nazis, popular figures with a public following on the far right have publicly and formally expressed the desire for civil war and even genocide. It's not possible to have a reasonable discussion without addressing that dichotomy.
Wikileaks has been immorally persecuted in many ways, but direct censorship is not one of them.
I get my only news about US politics from HN, so I genuinely have no idea.
It wasn't the GOVERNMENT that did this. That's the only thing that freedom of speech laws give you freedom from.
And, those sites weren't suppressed because they impacted politics; they were suppressed because they impacted profitability.
It's almost like the right needs some sort of "neutrality" laws that guarantee that internet websites and internet traffic they need can't be restricted.
I'm pretty far left in my politics, and I find the idea that these websites got kicked off quite worrying. However, I also find the centralization of internet services quite worrying.
I'm still old school enough that I run my own servers for exactly this reason.
I agree censorship of political content on private infrastructure is (and should be) legal; I also believe it's plainly immoral and should alarm people. I also believe that, given that the public DNS is government-controlled, it nominally belongs to the public and private entities like cloudflare should not be gatekeepers to it.
Of course, the best solution is for everyone to switch to some sort of crypto-based truly public DNS system like Namecoin, but that's not happening for a while.
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2017/07/21/richard-...
When something happens, the media gives right-wing fascists the benefit of the doubt; "we don't know who he is", "he doesn't represent the movement", "he was scared", "he was attacked", "he's crazy", and once the proof is out they tend to draw false equivalencies with left.
That doesn't happen as much on the left - it's stigmatized full stop, no excuses. CNN's clickbait news will drag it out
Does it though? Because I found the majority of the media except niche-oriented ones like FOX and Breibart do not fit that profile.
CNN had no problems attacking with everything they knew, but they avoided excess speculation and treated the Charlottesville attacker the same as Hodgkinson... which was my point.
Whether Democrats are they are hardly left wing, and somebody who would found PMRC even less so...
They bind our hands and tape our mouths all under the guise of protecting us.
People likely won't resist it too much. We've had this identification requirement imposed upon us in the Netherlands a few years ago, and while there is valid criticism on this requirement, it passed. So to vote now you need to bring a valid ID. If the British government wants to do this with a minimum of fuss, they'll do what our government did and make the driver's licence a valid identity card. That way the majority of adults will already have their ID on them as a matter of habit (and won't complain).
Of course mentioning that it is needed to prevent Muslim voters from committing voting fraud (see¹…) will help push the bill trough.
1: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/12/27/voters-will-have-...
Of course, most people tell their friends which way they voted, but that's their choice.
Only an extraordinarily confident and popular government would have another go (and it's not what the UK has now).
As for the voting scheme you describe, it's entirely voluntary, for 2018, and no council has signed up yet.
Things may move in that direction slowly, but to suggest that the UK is particularly close to requiring ID for internet accounts is downright silly I'm afraid.
However? Don't you mean, "as an added benefit"?
No amount of decentralized web will help if ID is legally required to post things. Torrenting, encryption, and similar will simply be made illegal, since that's required for enforcement. Many of the established lobbies would support that, for the usual justifications.
You can only fix this by not letting the law start on this crazy slippery slope.
Without centralised gatekeepers, the only viable way to censor the internet is to enforce laws on end-users, which is a daunting task for any government.
And technologically, at least two of the necessary elements for a global meshnet are here: protocols for decentralized addressing and routing, like cjdns >1, and protocols for peer-to-peer electronic value transfer between nodes, like Raiden >2. The only major missing piece of the technological puzzle, AFAICS, is a technology for cheaply deploying telecommunication backbone links.
>1 https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns/blob/master/doc/Whitepape...
>2 https://github.com/raiden-network/raiden/blob/master/README....
DISCLAIMER: I am by no means a bonafide cryptopunk. I have contributed very little code and other meaningful technical work to privacy tech projects.
So making phones more traceable doesn't really work against terrorists, when there are so many incompetent people watching us :(
Would you elaborate more on the background of this? Were the SIM cards sold and registered with a private company? I would suspect it is (or they were, if more than one). Which national defense agencies are you referring to? Did the national defense agencies search these records? Do you assume the agencies have access to this information by default? If it's through a private company, should the agencies have access by default? Do you think the private companies should have contacted the agencies if they didn't have access?
There are answers to these questions, some of them factual, some of them ethical or legal, and up for debate. In only a few situations I think it would be fair to call the agencies "so dumb". What leads you to use those words?
https://english.atlatszo.hu/2016/11/08/illegal-trade-of-burn...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-05/deutsche-...
In the communications act there was a provision about suspicious registrations reporting requirement.
The big providers (like Telekom, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telecom) have a well established working relationship with the defense agencies (they are called national security services, there are a few of them in Hungary, some are focusing on Internal Affairs (counter intelligence), some are on conspiracies, etc.
Expecting perfection out of the gate--or even at any given time--is setting someone up for failure. If this is something you care about, what you can focus on is that they're making changes to improve the situation: they're actively responding to correcting and preventing these kinds of mistakes in the future. Unless they're omniscient and omnipotent, it's really all they can do. This applies to work in general, not just security.
Eventually they'll fix this "security hole", but they won't magically become hyper-competent :/
To have an email, you still need a mobile phone number to register for gmail (the most popular choice).
To have a mobile phone number, you need your passport or ID.
Yes, in some cases you can get phone numbers without passport, but then again you can also get IDs and fake passports easily in China if you want.
> but then you again can also get IDs and fake passports easily in China if you want.
I agree to a certain extent that your passport is indirectly linked to these online services.
Where I don't agree is that you can still use an email service that doesn't require you to provide your phone numbers and you can use it to sign up for Facebook (not a legal offence, there is still a way to access the service).
Use of fake passports is a criminal offence (And there isn't a viable alternative to use the service without committing a criminal offence).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_real-name_policy_cont...
So don't use gmail?
That wasn't hard, was it?
It is one thing to have alternatives, but to actually execute the switch to alternatives seems near impossible. Breaking away from Google is already hard, breaking away from Google + Facebook (which has your phone number on WhatsApp) seems impossible.
Not to sound too personal, but I thought everyone pretty much gave in to Google already.
If I may draw another parallel:
There are also loads of people out there who can migrate out of the system (China/Google) if they don't like. And those who stay with the system (China/Google) seems to be fine with the system knowing their identity.
People on HN are terrible with email. How on earth is it possible to think Gmail is the only option for email, a decentralized, standardized service? How ignorant do you have to be to make that assumption?
A lot of us use services like Fastmail, Protonmail for email and simply do not use Facebook. Gmail is so bad it's not even usable for me in comparison to how it was several years ago.
Changing your email account is easier than you think, especially if you already use Password Managers like most of HN will be doing. You can redirect email from Gmail to your new email address, and at your new email provider put a footer into your every sent email which states you've switched to this new email address. I advise backing up your email from Gmail using Thunderbird just in case, but personally I've never had to access the backup, it's really much easier than you imagine.
Actually I'm talking about Google account and services in general, not just gmail. Google account also exists as an IAM service for various Google branded products, such as YouTube, and a lot of other external services, which use Google account as the preferred or only authentication method. It is much harder to break those once you are locked in.
I suspect it will ultimately be upended through a deeper change, likely with agent based computation.
Not in the UK you don't. I can order a bunch of free sims with fake names and addresses and get them. I've got about 20 from EE, gifgaff, Vodafone, NanoSim, O2, etc.
So by your logic. I can create fake facebook and email from a free SIM of a number that has no connection to me.
Every system has a weakspot. You just need to know how to exploit it.
I've lived in China for 7 years, and your statement surprised me. Care to share more information to support this claim? I'm genuinely curious.
Or at least you used to be able to. As with other commerce, I think this is all done online now.
It sounds hard to fake a 身份证 because there are systems to validate their info. You'd get caught pretty quickly.
There was something about how Wen Jiabao's mom's ID number must have been stolen to drive a billion dollar empire...so, at least as far as the government officials are concerned, it happens (or to say, they use it as an excuse).
http://prepaid-data-sim-card.wikia.com/wiki/France
Belgium, Spain, Italy, Greece:
https://www.miteksystems.com/blog/mobile-identity-verificati...
US maybe soon:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/4886
http://www.salon.com/2017/08/23/mark-zuckerberg-might-be-the...
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/when-si...
Many countries do. To watch certain youtube videos in south korea you need to provide your social security number or something like that.
Edit: it actually redirects to a police warning, so presumably it's illegal to even access it.
See if you can figure out why Q_qoHCd3iuQ is age-restricted.
South korea also strictly censors any publicly visible posting relating to elections and requires something like social-security number, or a faxed and verified passport for foreigners[0]. I guess that's meant to stop subversive groups from swaying elections.
Oh snap. Because in the mean time, government security agents were using the internet to propagandise for their preferred electoral candidate and manipulate the outcome of elections. Which only switched to direct vote pretty recently, and even then, merely elect a president with near dictatorial powers over all major government appointments.
Anyway, they're an ally, so there's no need for outpourings of scorn like there is in the case of china or russia.
[0]. wiki Internet_censorship_in_South_Korea [1]. guardian "South Korea spy agency admits trying to rig 2012 presidential election"
No. For what it's worth a very famous French website dedicated to FPS started asking for ID card scan before registering new members and to keep your account active.
I don't know if they still do that though, at that point I stopped visiting the website as much as I used to. It was like ten years ago.
> Imagine, Facebook asking you to upload your passport before you do a live stream.
I seem to remember in some case they are asking for it.
So, essentially, you can't even watch porn without an id now.
When I created an account with AirBnB I had to upload government-issued ID documents and a photo of myself [1]. Their Android app even asked me to scan the chip in my UK passport via NFC.
[1] https://www.airbnb.co.uk/help/article/1237/how-does-providin...
In cases like this, where anonymity allows users to cause serious damage without repercussions, I don't think identity requirements are problematic. However, extending this to harmless actions like commenting online is a completely different thing.
The only difference is that it is not physical damage.
I support anonymity, I hated what Airbnb made me do in terms of insecure exposing of my identify to them (and then had I use an empty gmail account to verify in the end).
I can imagine it very well. Just like most countries require an ID to purchase a mobile account / SIM card.
The US and EU have tons of those sort of things. Patriot Act? Mass surveillance programs? Required ID to get a mobile connection? UK's largest number of CCTVs on any place on earth?
Heck, in the US they can trial you as an adult at 15 and send you to war at 17 but you need to be over 21 and show ID to drink a beer at a bar...
I love most asian things so I could gladly list much many things I liked from China. Even after that happy introduction, the discussion went into "you know China is not all good" then listing a few problems. So far nothing surprising. But then a weird silence occured and all of a sudden, the other user started to nervously type "nono, forget it, I said nothing; oh my god .." * user disconnected *
that's what real lack of freedom of speech is.
Thats only half of it. For the other half : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
No need to imagine anything. Right after Facebook started their war on fake news, my FB acount was locked and the only way to unlock it is to provide my ID/passport to prove the name of the account is my real name.
Btw same thing happened on G+ few years ago.
Many Western messengers try to obtain your phone number and phone contact list when installing the app, and some of them (Whatsapp, Telegram) require you to provide a phone number to register.
Private companies and democratic governments are no less curious than Chinese government. They also want you to save your data into their "cloud" so NSA can look at any time.
Russian major social network Vkontakte requires a phone number to register an account. Russia is also developing a legislation requiring all messenger apps to identify their users with a phone number.
And by the way (I have read it somewhere) if you are trying to access pornhub from Russia it requires you to sign in with Vkontakte (social network with real names policy) account to prove that you are adult. So even if you want just to watch video you have to identify yourself first. I wonder, what are they going to do with that information? Will they post "videos you might like" to user's wall in Vkontakte? Or will they show who of your friends likes the same genre?
"Soon Aadhar will solve all the world's problems." /s
The reason, in my opinion, is that the Chinese leadership is about to change recently, the 19th party meeting, Those who currently control the power just want everything under control. So the do not CARE about what the civilians care about. POWER is above all of that.
The Eastern desire to require "harmonious thoughts" is so at odds with the skepticism required to birth true innovations. I was once convinced that China was on the verge of becoming a new force in modern technology. But after seeing a long line of regulations meant to increase the echo of their political echo chamber, I doubt technological innovation can linger much longer.
They have amazingly intelligent people and a wonderful hacker community, the problem is it stands entirely at odds with the government's "what's best for society" attitude. The problem most overtly controlling government's aren't willing to accept is that what's best for society this exact moment might not be what's best for it overall. This is why there's no Chinese technology leaders, no Chinese Apple. Communism brews mediocrity.
- Chat/Social Media: Wechat's P2P money transfer, cashless transaction
- Drone: DJI
- Phone: Xiaomi Mi Mix, One Plus series
- JS framework: Vue.js
helps when there are no foreign competitors (thanks, GFW!), and credit/debit card infrastructure is underdeveloped
> Phone: Xiaomi Mi Mix, One Plus series
Both of which are barely profitable or operating at a loss
>JS framework: Vue.js
MVVC with html bindings has been around for years now
Because you seem to be picking the whatever that suit your argument, while we usually consider any one of them to be an achievement.
>This is why there's no Chinese technology leaders, no Chinese Apple
Going off that,
> Chat/Social Media: Wechat's P2P money transfer, cashless transaction
same point as in my original comment, and it shows because there's barely any use outside of china (and maybe expat communities). they're only a "leader" in china.
> Phone: Xiaomi Mi Mix, One Plus series
For one, apple has killer margins on its phones, whereas they do not. Even comparing among android phone manufacturers, they're worse in terms of market share and profitability (as opposed to Samsung, for instance). Their only selling point their $/performance, which will surely disappear when their VC subsidy runs out. "leaders" aren't underdogs. "leaders" don't sell discounted phones at a loss.
>JS framework: Vue.js
I can't say i know the js ecosystem very well, but vue.js does seem to be the fastest growing MVVC framework (at least in the realm of logic-in-tags languages). But the problem I see is that javascript frameworks come and go, and it could very well drop off a cliff in a year or two after the next hottest thing comes out. Is it a leader? Sure, for now...
"Enjoy chatting with your friends while the government of China monitors your every character and transaction!"
...unless you meant "powerful censorship and dissent-destroying spy capabilities."
Yes, you have to know what you're looking for and you'll occasionally run across very low quality products (motorcycle gloves), but you'll find the same on eBay - where do you think most of those sellers are buying from?
What makes you think that this is ideological rather than pragmatic? They look to America and they see the greatest power of all time being torn apart by internal cultural and political conflict. I don't like China's authoritarian system–not one bit–but I can see the logic motivating its leaders.
These differences are nonetheless not my biggest grief with China. The moment you restrict criticism of your institution, you have committed to sacrificing pragmatism for ideology. Pragmatism requires commitment to the truth, which can only come from the status quo being continually challenged.
China is ruled by a one-party oligarchy that acts pragmatically in its own interest, not in the people's. A China with higher risk of regime change - even if it's a stronger and more prosperous China - is not in their interest.
Substitute a few words in there and you would be describing Brexit today. Every ruling regime think they are the best thing for the country and are unlikely to voluntarily step down even when the truth is conyrary to that idea.
The goal needs to be a slow but steady democratisation process.
China: Paper Making, Movable Type Printing, Gunpowder, Compass, Alcohol, Mechanical Clocks, Toothbrush, Paper Money, rockets
Japan: The calculator, Walkman, blue LEDs, dvds, video cameras etc
they seem to come up with some stuff in spite of "harmonious thoughts." I think "commie dictatorship" may be more of an issue.
If you view the societal/political cohesion/consensus as a process of behavioral survival of the fittest (eg. requiring a certain flexibility to adapt) then taking away the flexibility that anonymous online communication affords your citizens might not be so good when/if it becomes time for the system to adapt. There will be less space to communicate and plan gradual change, skipping that possibility and going straight for more bloody forms of change. Say like the way we did things 200 years ago.
Personally and subjectively, I think this is a dumb and evil thing to do. But not unexpected.
But then I realize China has a different system to allow that to happen. In modern China, the only way for politicians to go up the ladder of leadership is to slowly rise from the bottom.
In this sense, they were once a normal citizen as well, and through working closely with the local community in the early political career, they should have a good understanding of the impact of policies on average citizen.
The fact that China is still strong in terms of economics despite being one-party is largely due to the economic reform pushed by the highest leadership Deng Xiaoping.
China has a widespread nepotism.
Leaving aside political effects, this regime makes it very difficult to innovate. A Chinese developer just starting out can't just just rent a VM to show off his work. I helped someone get a webapp running on one of the big Chinese cloud service and it's really, really awful. Exactly what you would expect from an industry completely protected from competition by government.
What I have been seeing is the decline of the United States.
That's said, I'm worrying about China a lot more. I think it's on track to repeat the mistakes it had done before.
You often see articles here saying China will surpass the States in A.I. and science. I doubt it. I doubt a country without freely accessible information will be competent. I doubt true intellectuals would like to live in a place like this. soviet union was an example.
I used to get angry at these things (censorships, corruptions). But now I'm tired, not because China is clearly drifting away from what I want it to be, but because I saw many fellow Chinese really believe in government propaganda, and justify its wrong doings. They have the Stockholm syndrome, decorating a nightmare into a beautiful dream (of China being the new world leader and all the censorship shit is necessary to fence off the invasion of western culture. such a bullshit!). And there are also many others who simply don't care.
Now I just want to hide somewhere and mind my own things.
Who will be replacing the States? Europe is weak and is at its bottom, Russia is no better than China. Maybe Australia or Canada.
Their population is much too small.
In the case of science, if anyone surpasses the US, it'll be Europe. However, the trend now is toward co-operation rather than competition.
Weak in what sense?
Crime is lower, standard of living is higher, poverty is less... That's not to say the us doesn't have a lot of problems, but overall, it is objectively better than before.
There is no replacing the US anytime soon and if there is, all the problems you mentioned will persist.
Why wouldn't they?
When you're younger you think there's some villain comic book style, that you have to overcome. You know, a Hitler. Then the world's going to be different.
It's not like that - the country is a reflection of it's citizens - narrow minded citizens, narrow minded governments.
If you want to know where things are headed - just go watch some TV. Is it uplifting/informing or dumbing things down? That's the general direction we as a society are heading in.
As for hiding somewhere and doing your own thing - that's what scientists and intelligent people do - find their niche that is ok according to society (allows them to make a comfortable living), and pursue their intellectual curiosity there.
I don't understand why there needs to be a replacement? I feel as though the United States isn't declining but information is spreading equalizing the equation globally. Sure there are political issues that cause back and forth, but I feel we are moving more towards a global culture with aligned goals faster than ever before.
U.S. can be better with time, but they will be weaker and weaker if they don't stop losing money. Don't forget that you owes me 19 188 102 400 000 $ even in 4000 years we still talk about the debt.
Humanity is mainlining an experimental drug in social media. What makes it insideous is that most don't realize it. Governments are grappling with how to insulate themselves from the threat this tech represents; when will regular people do the same?
I'm geniunely astounded at the small but vocal pro-censorship group on hackernews of all places. Where did this come from?
Just 5 or 10 or 15 years ago, the idea of any tech minded person being anti-anonymity would be incredibly shocking.
Just in the past 2 or 3 years, there has been quite a small vocal group advocating against anonymity and advocating for censorship. Why?
Not only that, there have been a rise in anti-open source software, anti-GNU, anti-linux rhetoric that is slowly rising on social media as well.
I'm just curious what the mindset or rationale is? Is it because hackernews has grown in popularity beyond the programmers/IT crowd?
Github has been blocked before. An outcry from the dev community finally got it unblocked. But that seldom happens.
So I wrote this: http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=114
I am going to post it on HN actually right now.
This is inefficient. They just need to incentivize companies to identify citizens like we have.
Look how the 8 years Dem controlled spooks were insufficient to get 4 more years.
Yes, US law enforcement and security services are doing a lot of dumb things (TSA security theatre, NSA sitting on 0-days and playing cyber instead of helping the civilian sector patch up), but they don't arrest troublemakers. (They arrest you for weed, but not for running an anti-establishment site.)
Funny you say that, because arresting people for weed started as a way to arrest people running antiestablishment sites ;) http://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-r...
And yes, of course, there's a clear bias in the Controlled Substances Act, and its enforcement.
Additionally, I think anonymity tends to bring the worst in us. Perhaps it is because we feel less pressured by social norms of behavior since we are not held personally responsible for our speech as much as it would've been the case irl. While no one is truly anonymous to the state, asking people to identify themselves makes them conscious about it and I believe less likely to start using a given service under the assumption of anonymity.
I agree that there should be places where anonymity should not be authorized, but it should not be mandatory.
Even if the state need people's identity it doesn't share that data with private companies (in general).
> Additionally, I think anonymity tends to bring the worst in us. Perhaps it is because we feel less pressured by social norms of behavior since we are not held personally responsible for our speech as much as it would've been the case irl.
You're right, but what you are describing is the pressure of the politically correct, which can be toxic. Anonymity let people express their opinion without fear of retaliation.
It's a double edge sword. The best solution is to educate people so that they can make the difference, and let people use platforms with strong identification where it's better.
While anonymity-enforcing environments can be useful when users have the freedom to choose, as soon as they become mandatory under an authoritarian regime, they turn into a strong silencer against all dissent.
Moreover in a lot of countries nobody will protect you once prosecutor has enough "clues" to put you in jail for something you didn't commit. Just look at the prosecution process of mr Bogatov for hosting Tor exit node [1]. It's already happening.
Or imagine the possibilities for government to track down the opposition. Well in some countries government already puts in jail opposition based on internet activities.
So even in case anonymity might make people to be a bit overly aggressive online, that's the price I'm happy to pay for my own safety and freedom. Otherwise I would prefer to stay passive network participant or even be offline.
[1]: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/statement-regarding-dmitry-...