[Air-L] "Online anonymity: Right or threat?": a CRCC symposium

[Thais Sardá]

*Online anonymity: Right or threat?*
A one-day symposium organized by Centre for Research in Communication and
Culture (CRCC), Loughborough University (UK)

Loughborough University, February 8th, 2017, 1-6 pm
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/crcc/events/eventslist/online-anonymity-right-or-threat.html

Whenever we navigate the Web, we leave a trace of our movements through our
IP address, which can in turn be used to establish our identity - for
instance, by cross-checking it with a user’s Internet subscription. By
using software such as VPN and Tor, however, it is possible to avoid
leaving such traces, becoming anonymous in the web. A lively debate among
policy-makers, security professionals, hacker communities, and human rights
associations has recently ensued regarding the question if such anonymity
is acceptable and in which form. On the one side, advocates of online
anonymity point to the right to privacy and the potential risks of an
ever-reaching surveillance state; on the other side, its antagonists
emphasize the presence of close links between anonymity and criminal
activities online.
This half-day symposium aims to encourage dialogue between scholars,
institutions, stakeholders, and the wider community about an issue of web
governance that will be of crucial importance in the next years in order to
build the civic society of the information age.

Convenors: Mark Monaghan, Simone Natale, Thais Sardá and Nikos
Sotirakopoulos

*Programme*

1:00-1:10 – Welcome
John Downey (director of the Centre for Research in Communication and
Culture) and symposium convenors

1:10-2:00 - Timandra Harkness (presenter of BBC Radio 4 series,
FutureProofing), Title to be confirmed

2:00-3:00 - Tim Jordan (University of Sussex), “Anonymity: A Complex Right”

3:00-3:30 - Break

3:30-4:30 - Judith Aldridge (University of Manchester), “Drug-trade and
anonymity in cryptomarkets: harms and benefits for users and sellers”

4:30-5:50 - Round table with Dave Elder-Vass (Department of Social
Sciences, Loughborough University), a representative of Open Rights Group (
https://www.openrightsgroup.org), and Russell Lock (Department of Computer
Science, Loughborough University)

5:50-6:00 - Conclusions

The event is free and open to the public. It will take place in
Loughborough University campus (room TBC). Please register here:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/online-anonymity-right-or-threat-tickets-30038040588

For information, please contact Thais Sardá: t.sarda at lboro.ac.uk

*Conference abstracts*

*Anonymity: A Complex Right *
Tim Jordan (University of Sussex)
Why should we consider anonymity to be a right? This paper will begin by
establishing the core arguments about anonymity as a right by following the
two examples of Snowden and Manning. This will outline the issues that
arise around anonymity considered as essential to personal security (both
in terms of creativity and whistle blowing) against the ethic of taking
responsibility for one’s utterances. This paper will explore this
understanding of anonymity as a right by focusing on communication and
anonymity to argue that the kind of communicative practice being assumed
within the security/creativity versus responsibility debate is one in which
the physical body is held to be the author of communication. This will be
based on research into 19th century letters. However, this form of
communicative practice is only one kind and a different form of practice is
created online. Here the body is largely absent and the
identity-markers—such as, email address, knickname, handle, etc.—are
unstable and changeable. I will present research on online games and 4Chan
to demonstrate that internet based communication functions for hearers or
receivers to stabilise and authorise communication through the style of
someone’s communication; meaning that on the internet you have to be heard
before you can speak. This understanding of communication will be used to
explore the meaning of anonymity. Anonymity is then presented as a complex
right. The first rights are familiar and complex: security to utter and to
be creative versus the responsibility to ‘own’ one’s utterances. However,
the presumption of the body as the basis of identity that is made in this
opposition, obscures a more fundamental reason anonymity is a right,
because the nature of anonymity online is consonant with and necessary to
the way internet communicative practices function. This means anonymity is
essential to existence online and so forms a second kind of right.

*Drug-trade and anonymity in cryptomarkets: harms and benefits for users
and sellers *
Judith Aldridge (University of Manchester)

Cryptomarkets represent an important drug market innovation by bringing
buyers and sellers of illegal drugs together in a ‘hidden’ yet public
online marketplace. Policy responses so far are generally based on the
assumption that their rise will only increase drug harms. But is this a
valid assumption? This paper examines the effects of drug markets on
various forms of harm, alongside emerging evidence on the operation of
cryptomarkets, to assess anticipated harms and benefits. Cryptomarkets may
increase both the amount and the range of substances that are sold by
increasing drug quality and reducing price. The effects of these
anticipated changes for the drug users are complex, with macro-harm at the
population level likely increasing, but modified by improved access to
quality and safety information that may be used to reduce harm at the
individual level. Harm can be understood also in the form of transactional
risk (e.g. violence), and risk of arrest. How these risks differ across
drug market types will be assessed, and how cryptomarket users seek
particularly to reduce the risk of apprehension and arrest when effectively
operating ‘in plain sight’ of law enforcement will be considered. Drug
cryptomarkets are characterised as ‘illicit capital’ sharing communities
that provide expanded and low-cost access to information enabling drug
market participants to make more accurate assessments of the risk of
apprehension. The abundance of drug market intelligence available to those
on both sides of the law may function to speed up innovation in illegal
drug markets, as well as necessitate and facilitate the development of law
enforcement strategies.

***
Thais Sardá
Ph.D. Student - Surveillance, online privacy, and Tor Network
Department of Social Sciences
Loughborough University
Email: T.Sarda at lboro.ac.uk
About my research:
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/socialsciences/staff/phdstudents/sarda-thais.html
-- 
Thais Sardá
(+44) 7903 625175
thaissarda at gmail.com