We get all the negatives of anonymity now with foreign actors, domestic actors, and bots flooding the zone with lies, and not of the benefits since all the corporations and governments can trivially pierce that veil.
One uni in my country has been getting bomb threats during the exam period every year for multiple years (a random article says 20 times at least). The whole place gets evacuated each time, nothing is found and nobody is caught.
But people who think they're anonymous because they used a different nick? Yeah, those are idiots, their ISP and the platform knows who they are and anybody can deanonymize them through stylometry.
I don't think surveillance is the solution though. I'd much rather see a network of trust or (second best) anonymous proof of identity.
Any place selling alcohol or cigarettes is able to check if you're 18. They could just as easily check your nationality by looking at your ID and give you a crypto key which can be used to prove that to online platforms without revealing who you are.
But there's no money for big corps in that and most people are not even smart enough to think of it.
Even if NSA captured and logged all internet traffic, they'd still only get a fraction of the information within without breaking all the encryption.
And even if they could break the crypto, the ability would only have any power if/when they acted on it. Which in turns reveals the capability to both normal people and other nation states.
The limitations aren't laws, it's the practical consequences.
Of course, having laws with actual teeth helps.
So they use it when they feel like and not willy nilly? That doesnt change my perspective. They still have the ability to do it at will.
No, when they can get away with it. When the pros for them outweigh the cons. And every person affects that calculation in some small way - by their tolerance to injustice, by their outspokenness, by their ability to detect it, by the probability of an employee becoming a whistleblower and even by people's willingness to punish bad actors extra-legally.
> They still have the ability to do it at will.
Yes and your neighbor has the ability to wait on your doorstep until you open and then slit your throat.
He generally doesn't because of internal safeguards (humans have evolved emotions like remorse, though not all of them feel it - see psychopathy/ASPD for details) and external safeguards (the state generally opposes people infringing its monopoly on violence but in the absence of a state, he would still risk being hunted down and tortured/killed as punishment by your relatives and friends).
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I get what you're saying and I oppose dragnet surveillance but seeing things in pure black and white does not help.