[FYI] Pentagon drops plan to curb Net anonymity

[Jan Meyer <jan@synflood.in-berlin.de>]

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http://news.com.com/2100-1023-966894.html

Pentagon drops plan to curb Net anonymity

A Defense Department agency recently considered--and rejected--a far-reaching
plan that would sharply curtail online anonymity by tagging e-mail and Web
browsing with unique markers for each Internet user.

The idea involved creating secure areas of the Internet that could be accessed
only if a user had such a marker, called eDNA, according to a report in
Friday's New York Times.

eDNA grew out of a private brainstorming session that included Tony Tether,
president of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the
newspaper said, and that would have required at least some Internet users to
adopt biometric identifiers such as voice or fingerprints to authenticate
themselves.

sieh auch:

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/22/politics/22TRAC.html

PENTAGON CONSIDERED PLAN TO END ANONYMOUS NET ACTIVITY
After the head of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,
wondered why it was not possible after the 9-11 terrorist attacks to trace
hostile Internet communications back to the origin, a series of technical
discussions were initiated, and those discussions led to a proposal called
eDNA: "We envisage that all network and client resources will maintain
traces of user eDNA so that the user can be uniquely identified as having
visited a Web site, having started a process or having sent a packet. This
way, the resources and those who use them form a virtual 'crime scene' that
contains evidence about the identity of the users, much the same way as a
real crime scene contains DNA traces of people." But the project was argued
against by a number of angry participants, such as security consultant Mark
Seiden who said: "Before people demand more surveillance information, they
should be able to process the information they already have. Almost all of
our failures to date have come from our inability to use existing
intelligence information." DARPA has decided to discontinue funding of the
project, and explained that it had been "intrigued by the difficult
computing science research involved in creating network capabilities that
would provide the same levels of responsibility and accountability in
cyberspace as now exist in the physical world."  (New York Times 22 Nov 2002)


Pentagon rejects internet ID tags
http://www.vnunet.com/News/1137049

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