FITUG e.V. Förderverein Informationstechnik und Gesellschaft

FC: NYT: Pentagon considered plan to tag Net-traffic, limit anonymity

------- Forwarded message follows ------- Date sent: Sat, 23 Nov 2002 18:25:24 -0500 To: politech@politechbot.com From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> Subject: FC: NYT: Pentagon considered plan to tag Net-traffic, limit anonymity Send reply to: declan@well.com

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

November 22, 2002 Agency Weighed, but Discarded, Plan Reconfiguring the Internet By JOHN MARKOFF

The Pentagon research agency that is exploring how to create a vast database of electronic transactions and analyze them for potential terrorist activity considered but rejected another surveillance idea: tagging Internet data with unique personal markers to make anonymous use of some parts of the Internet impossible.

The idea, which was explored at a two-day workshop in California in August, touched off an angry private dispute among computer scientists and policy experts who had been brought together to assess the implications of the technology.

The plan, known as eDNA, called for developing a new version of the Internet that would include enclaves where it would be impossible to be anonymous while using the network. The technology would have divided the Internet into secure "public network highways," where a computer user would have needed to be identified, and "private network alleyways," which would not have required identification.

Several people familiar with the eDNA discussions said such secure areas might have first involved government employees or law enforcement agencies, then been extended to security-conscious organizations like financial institutions, and after that been broadened even further.

A description of the eDNA proposal that was sent to the 18 workshop participants read in part: "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."

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