User:Lidia.Pereira/GRS5/NTS/SOA

"Anonymity allows the individual to melt into a body of many, to become a pluralistic one, for which communicating a message is more important than the distinction of the participating individual(s)"

• Anonymity as a strategy, a means for a community to articulate its collective force.
• Statements and artifacts produced anonymously serve us as a testimony of the past, while still allowing for collective participation
• Anonymity as a protection for the participating individuals, a sense of unity where participation is fluid and the organisation is distributed.
• Centrally organized anonymity (e.g. uniformed soldiers of a brigade) -> participation is mandatory and control mechanisms are put in place to assure the establishment and "obedience" to existing power hierarchies. The goal is to protect, but not the members of the collective so much.

"The Internet and Anonymity"

• Anonymous communications (e.g. TOR) -> remove any information used to trace the message back to its sender. Observers can see the members are communicating, but not discern who is communicating with whom. Individuals are protected. "Anonymous communications are designed to circumvent the traceability of interactions on the Internet."
• Internet's architecture is all but private -> messages, online actions, 'data bodies', all are traceable.
• Collectives using anonymous communications, however diversified, are vilified in the media as these infrastructures are often linked with criminal activity.
• "It seems, what bothers authorities the most is not anonymity as such, but rather the characteristics of the user base and the distributed nature of anonymous communications. This becomes evident in the keen interest that data miners and regulators have in a centralised form of anonymity applied to large databases, a strategy that fits squarely with the interests of the growing data economy"

"The Market, Governance and Anonymity"

• Data economy hype -> Collected data making societal behaviours more transparent, organisable, controllable, predictable, thus, more marketable -> market and governance efficiency (through statistic analysis).
• Behavioural advertisers and service providers use this data sets to "better" understand populations, providing more individualized services. "In the process, elaborate statistical inferences replace 'subjective' discussions, reflections or processes about societal needs and concerns, as the data has come to speak for itself."
• Processing of large amounts of user data historically linked with a "privacy problem", whose solution requires a limitation of these companies' power in using our data - this is true as long as the people are uniquely identifiable, so "data players" use anonymity for their own purposes: traceability is concealed, but the data set remains as useful -> "If this is somehow guaranteed, then the dataset is declared 'anonymised' and it becomes fair game. Inferences can be made freely from the dataset as a whole, while ideally no individual participant can be targeted."
• Such principles are enforced by law, as the European Data Protection Directive allows for this -"if the database is anonymised, the the data is set free". Markets are the only ones, then, constraining this "free flow of data".

"The Surrogates to Anonymity"

• Internet and any other type of anonymity -> removal of links between authors and contents. The content, then, becomes able to be claimed/subverted by others. The contents thus becomes very easily co-opted and even instrumentalised. "The hijacking of popular uprisings by a few that establish their power, the re-writing of full songs into chauvinistic hymns, the utilisation of anonymous cyberactions to introduce draconian security measures are examples of such de-contextualised anonymous messages".
• Data economy -> anonymised dataset as a mirror of a population. Corporations monopolising these get to dictate desired/non desired activities according to market and governance needs.

"Continuity, Articulation and Anonymity"

• "In its most powerful and at times even heroic moments, it is used to counter targeted surveillance by creating collective protections around individuals. Yet, we also need to recognise that the same strategy is concurrently used to create discrete, de-contextualized, and yet linked datasets, which are imminent to the data economy."
• These data sets are not anonymised to protect the participants - on the contrary, it removes their power to understand and question the ways in which they are used to control their access and relationship to networks - "with the intention to manage and manipulate our lives"

"Anonymity will remain a powerful means to achieve political objectives and disseminate collective messages. Hence, the technical instantiation of anonymous communications, must be a fundamental functions of our networks. However, especially in political contexts, the vulnerability of the anonymous requires that multiple strategies are available. Different communication channels can be used to create a continuity with activities that are initiated anonymously: these can be political statements that are explicit, precise, courageous, and authored, that build on the power of anonymous messages."