Whereas submissions to the PostSecret blog are curated by hand, the app was an experiment allowing any iPhone user to generate secrets instantly and anonymously. Warren says that users shared over 2 million secrets, and that "99%" of them "were in the spirit of PostSecret." The app launched in September, becoming the best-selling app in the U.S. and Canada overnight. It is now gone from the iTunes store, the Android version never arrived, and the PostSecret App website no longer loads.

"The scale of secrets was so large," Warren says, "that even 1% of bad content was overwhelming for our dedicated team of volunteer moderators who worked 24 hours a day 7 days a week removing content that was not just pornographic but also gruesome and at times threatening." In my experience, that 1% figure sounds a bit conservative. The chances of seeing something gross were pretty good on any given night.

Warren says that he had to remove the app from his own daughter's phone weeks ago. Bullies and creeps overloaded the app, and Warren and the moderators were unable to find a solution. At one point, the moderator team tried pre-screening 30,000 secrets a day, but they couldn't stem the tide of unsavory secrets.

Warren calls the now-defunct PostSecret app a "good faith experiment," but it's also an unfortunate lesson in the necessity of curation. It raised the privacy bar for app developers, but it opened up a Pandora's Box of backwardness in doing so. The app was rife with penis pics, vicious attacks and other disturbing messages. It was a valiant attempt to allow millions more to share their secrets, but for now, the PostSecret project will go back to its roots as a hand-curated blog.

Those who paid for the app can take comfort in the fact that their $1.99 supported an organization with good intentions.

Did you use the PostSecret app? What did you think of the experiment? How do you feel about the app shutting down? Share your thoughts in the comments.

"Google and Facebook would have you believe that you're a mirror," he said, "but in fact, we're more like diamonds." - multi-faceted. It was an appeal reminiscent of the one he gave at SXSW earlier this year, but it hit harder. Google Plus has since arrived, and Poole says it's even worse than Facebook for the future of online identity.

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we're re-publishing some of our best posts of 2011. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2012. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

Identity Is Prismatic

"The portrait of identity online is often painted in black and white," Poole said. "Who you are online is who you are offline." That rosy view of identity is complemented with a similarly oversimplified view of anonymity. People think of anonymity as dark and chaotic, Poole said.

But human identity doesn't work like that online or offline. We present ourselves differently in different contexts, and that's key to our creativity and self-expression. "It's not 'who you share with,' it's 'who you share as,'" Poole told us. "Identity is prismatic."

Choosing Our Own Identities

"We were on the right track at one point," Poole said. In the early days of the Web, its creators used their real names because they were the only people online. As the namespace got more crowded, people started using handles.

AOL Instant Messenger brought screen names to the mainstream. Poole said he agonized over his AOL handle, because he knew it would be a representation of him. That insight persists today at hacker conventions, where the real Web experts hang out. People there introduce themselves with their handles, because that's how they have chosen to identify.

"Twitter does the best job of this" of today's major social networks, Poole said. The platform itself uses handles and allows made-up answers in the real name field. Furthermore, "most of the apps allow multiple accounts. Facebook would never allow this, right?" He says Google Plus is the worst; you don't even get a vanity URL to distinguish yourself, and we all know how Google Plus handles pseudonyms: they delete the accounts.

Google & Facebook Are Eroding Our Options

Google and Facebook are "consolidating identity and making people seem more simple than they really are," Poole said. "Our options are being eroded."

Poole's bottom line is that there's a big market opportunity in this authentic, fluid kind of identity, which the big players are willfully abandoning. "You can incorporate identity without forcing your users to sacrifice something." Poole believes a Web network can validate an account using legitimate services without forcing the presentation of that user to be an over-simplification.

Creativity and self-expression are at stake, Poole says, and he's particularly concerned about young people. Facebook's new Timeline will lock people into their Facebook identities from birth.

Speaking at Facebook recently, Poole told its developers that they set the bar for identity, but he has since realized he was wrong: we, the users, do. "We're about to sacrifice something that's valuable, and it's special."

"I would ask us all to strive for this ideal when we design products, and as users on the Web, what we demand of services," Poole said. "Facebook and Google do identity wrong, Twitter does it better, and I want people to think about what the world would be like if we did it right."

Check out the Web 2.0 schedule and watch the events live here.

"Google and Facebook would have you believe that you're a mirror," he said, "but in fact, we're more like diamonds." - multi-faceted. It was an appeal reminiscent of the one he gave at SXSW earlier this year, but it hit harder. Google Plus has since arrived, and Poole says it's even worse than Facebook for the future of online identity.

Identity Is Prismatic

"The portrait of identity online is often painted in black and white," Poole said. "Who you are online is who you are offline." That rosy view of identity is complemented with a similarly oversimplified view of anonymity. People think of anonymity as dark and chaotic, Poole said.

But human identity doesn't work like that online or offline. We present ourselves differently in different contexts, and that's key to our creativity and self-expression. "It's not 'who you share with,' it's 'who you share as,'" Poole told us. "Identity is prismatic."

Choosing Our Own Identities

"We were on the right track at one point," Poole said. In the early days of the Web, its creators used their real names because they were the only people online. As the namespace got more crowded, people started using handles.

AOL Instant Messenger brought screen names to the mainstream. Poole said he agonized over his AOL handle, because he knew it would be a representation of him. That insight persists today at hacker conventions, where the real Web experts hang out. People there introduce themselves with their handles, because that's how they have chosen to identify.

"Twitter does the best job of this" of today's major social networks, Poole said. The platform itself uses handles and allows made-up answers in the real name field. Furthermore, "most of the apps allow multiple accounts. Facebook would never allow this, right?" He says Google Plus is the worst; you don't even get a vanity URL to distinguish yourself, and we all know how Google Plus handles pseudonyms: they delete the accounts.

Google & Facebook Are Eroding Our Options

Google and Facebook are "consolidating identity and making people seem more simple than they really are," Poole said. "Our options are being eroded."

Poole's bottom line is that there's a big market opportunity in this authentic, fluid kind of identity, which the big players are willfully abandoning. "You can incorporate identity without forcing your users to sacrifice something." Poole believes a Web network can validate an account using legitimate services without forcing the presentation of that user to be an over-simplification.

Creativity and self-expression are at stake, Poole says, and he's particularly concerned about young people. Facebook's new Timeline will lock people into their Facebook identities from birth.

Speaking at Facebook recently, Poole told its developers that they set the bar for identity, but he has since realized he was wrong: we, the users, do. "We're about to sacrifice something that's valuable, and it's special."

"I would ask us all to strive for this ideal when we design products, and as users on the Web, what we demand of services," Poole said. "Facebook and Google do identity wrong, Twitter does it better, and I want people to think about what the world would be like if we did it right."

Check out the Web 2.0 schedule and watch the events live here.

According to the Tor Project's metrics, the network has had between 100,000 and 300,000 users per day over the course of the past few months.

Tor protects its users from surveillance known as "traffic analysis." Even if you encrypt your data, as the Tor website notes, traffic analysis can still reveal "a great deal about what you're doing and, possible, what you're saying" as it focuses on the header used for routing - something that discloses the source, the destination, the date and time, and the size of what's being send.

Tor obscures this traffic data. It works to anonymize your identity and activity by distributing your transactions over several places on the Internet, so that no single point can be linked to you or your destination - "a deliberately byzantine system of virtual tunnels that conceal the origins and destinations of data, and thus the identity of clients," as The New York Times describes it. In other words, rather than taking a direct route from the source to destination, data on the Tor network takes a random pathway through several relays, so that no one can tell where the data came from, where it's headed, or the complete path of the data. Each "hop" along the way is encrypted separately as well.

Tor doesn't solve all privacy problems online. (It doesn't try to.) It doesn't anonymize your visits to websites, prevent cookies or other tracking mechanisms, for example. But it does protect the traffic of your data along the way.

Flaws in the System?

According to a report this week in Wired, researchers at the University of Regensburg have found some vulnerabilities in the Tor network. "The attack doesn't quite make a surfer's activity an open book," writes Wired's John Borland, "but offers the ability for someone on the same local network - a Wi-Fi network provider, or an ISP working at law enforcement (or a regime's) request, for example - to gain a potentially good idea of sites an anonymous surfer is viewing."

According to the research, someone could run the Tor network, monitor how certain sites appeared when accessed through Tor, and develop a database of this sort of "fingerprint." Using pattern recognition software, it's possible to glean a match (with about 55% certainty) between a source and destination.

The article does add that there are some ways to help mitigate against this and muddy any results: requesting multiple sites at once, for example, would complicate the analysis. And with increasing attention to privacy issues - from the prying eyes of advertisers and governments alike - it's unlikely that this research will discourage people from using the Tor Network.

And yet...and yet... after spending the weekend on these "instantly personalized" sites, I have to admit... begrudgingly, mind you... that the experience itself is amazing.

Online Music Gets Personal, Too Personal?

Pandora's Internet radio is a service I usually partake in via its mobile application on my iPhone, not its regular website. But after the launch of the newly personalized Pandora, I had to take a look.

And it was worth it.

I immediately discovered which of my friends had the same musical interests as I do. My editor, Richard MacManus, for example, is also a fan of The Killers! Who knew? And apparently, a whole bunch of friends are getting into MGMT now.

But finding connections like these aren't the only types of discoveries you can make here. As social media user extraordinaire Robert Scoble found out, you can easily discover your friends' more embarrassing personal tastes too. Kenny G?, Scoble laughingly chides a co-worker after stumbling upon his decidedly unhipster musical interests.

These are precisely the types of things we want to stay hidden. Kenny G, for instance. But also our secret obsession with that attractive actor or actress, our fondness for pictures of cute kitties, our forays into celebrity gossip sites when we have a reputation for being intelligent thinkers, our secret Star Wars addiction and so forth and so on.

While there aren't "instantly personalized" sites showing you all these types of interests just yet, believe me, there will be. If Facebook has its way (And guess what? It will), your real identity, not just the public parts you've willingly shared in the past, will be revealed to anyone and everyone unless you take action to opt-out.

The Real You Can No Longer Be Hidden

This is precisely as it should be, Facebook CEO Zuckberberg more or less said. Earlier this year, he made statements regarding Facebook's new openness, claiming that if he built the social network now, he would make a lot of the data housed there more public by default. This would reflect the current social norms, he said.

But that's not exactly true. Facebook isn't reflecting social norms, it's attempting to create them.

That said, what an amazing creation it is. On Yelp, I can find the reviews my Facebook friends authored with just a click. I can see who else really digs that local sushi place. And I can do all this without going through the whole re-friending process that Web 2.0 sites have put me through in the past again and again.

I'm there, my friends are there, and I didn't have to do anything to make that happen. Frankly, it feels right. (Fellow ReadWriteWeb blogger Mike Melanson agrees.)

A Minute on the Lips...

But it's oh so wrong, isn't it? By giving into Facebook's vision for the Web, we're ceding control of our data, our likes, our interests, our "social graph" (a.k.a who we know, who we friend) - everything - to one company. Historically, one very, very closed company. We're definitely worried about the implications of that. You should be too.

But in the meantime, like that calorie-rich dessert we know we shouldn't eat, we're sampling Facebook's Web and secretly savoring its deliciousness. Why does everything that's so wrong have to feel so good?

Blast you, Facebook. Blast you.

But one of the things most trolls rely on is anonymity, a wall behind which they hide any information that could be used against them, including their jobs, locations, appearances and real names.
And anonymity is a not-so-slowly disappearing feature of the social web. What do you think: Will the rise of transparency and the fall of anonymity put trolls in the deadpool any time soon?

First, there's this interesting post from The Next Web. Last week, Zee Kane wrote this piece about a typical flame thread that became a bit too personal.

Kane observes, absolutely correctly, "If you've spent more than ten minutes on any blog, YouTube video or any site that permits anonymous commenting, you will have noticed some of the filth that many commenters come out with. Often it's completely incomprehensible; other times it's pure bile and frankly a test of what a human will not reply to."

When an anonymous commenter attacked the subject of the original post in the comments thread, the subject, one Hermione Way, decided to find out who the troll really was. Email addresses, IP addresses and the social web being what they are, Way soon had her attacker pegged and found out that his "anonymous" persona had been trolling and attacking some of the people he'd called his friends in real life.

This chain of events left Kane editorializing, "Privacy truly is dead." This is a theme some think we've been beating over the head lately at ReadWriteWeb, but it's as timely as it is true.

Facebook's game of footsie with privacy and user data has led to a string of well-researched, thoughtful posts by our own Marshall Kirkpatrick. Kirkpatrick has very well justified his position that Facebook's original brand promise to conceal and protect user data has definitely changed to a promise to make the site - and user data - more "open" and accessible to other users and search engines.

Kirkpatrick sees this as a broken promise, which it is, to a point. I also see it as an overarching trend of sociological behavior online.

Think about the days of You've Got Mail, that god-awful, AOL-based Meg Ryan/Tom Hanks flick where two real-world rivals end up being anonymous penpals via email with no idea who the other person is or what he or she looks like. That could never happen today. Username conventions have drastically changed over the past 10 years; more and more online identities are tied to part or all of a user's real name rather than a "handle" for anonymous chatting and posting.

The same is true of avatars. However posed or candid, more of us are using real photographs of our own faces on the web rather than cultural icons, cartoons or some graphical represenation of our personality.

Today, anonymity represents the far, sketchy outposts of the web, much like the Reaver-filled edges of space in Firefly. Those who inhabit that space might be more likely to engage in account-cracking, cyberbullying, mob behavior and other activities that run the gamut from unkind to actually illegal. The illusion that their anonymity protects them from discovery and possible prosecution is often just that - an illusion.

Of course, anonymity can be great for freedom of speech purposes. Several of our favorite sites lately, such as Formspring.me and Quora, provide opportunities for the anonymous asking of questions in a safe environment. But I've already experienced a bit of trolling on those sites, as well.

What do you think: Is anonymity linked directly to trolling behaviors? Is the social web trending away from anonymous profiles and posts? Will less anonymity lead to fewer incidents of trollism? Let us know your opinion in the comments.

FormSpring.me, on the other hand, has tapped the very essence of what makes the social web so addictive. This new application, a free and social-side project, nearly has all the requisite puzzle pieces to go completely viral.
It's fun, engaging and slightly game-like, and it encourages the behaviors users love to indulge. It's only missing one critical element:

First, the site is user-to-user Q&A. This is the kind of formula that has populated the Web with masses of UGC on sites such as Yahoo! Answers and Wiki Answers. It's also the basic formula behind such highly praised startups as Aardvark, which allows users to ping one another across networks to get answers about specific topics. Q&A between end users is a growing trend on the web, without a doubt.

Second, the site allows one user to anonymously ask questions of another user. Anonymity has bred some of the most interesting and varied experiments of the social web. Very often, a lack of links to users' true identities leads to bathroom-wall-of-the-Internet content such as 4chan or YouTube comments. But while anonymity breeds trollism and is actually a dying phenomenon online, having a thin veil between the asker and the answerer of a question can act as a confessional booth in a way, allowing for more frank communication or the posing of some very interesting, controversial questions that might otherwise be considered impolite or risky.

Finally, one of the most enduring trends of the social web, from its inception to the present day, is our deep and insatiable love of self-reference. The provocative beginning question for the site is, "Ask me anything," which users then tweet or post to Facebook. Answering questions all about you, your preferences, your past, your thoughts, your wishes and hopes, your regrets, what you eat and where you live - nothing is more intoxicating to the average social media user. From our first LiveJournal entries to mid-2000s MySpace chain surveys to our latest tweets, we clearly love talking about ourselves. The way that FormSpring.me caters to this inherently human attribute is by giving us the impression or illusion that someone, somewhere actually cares about what we think and do enough to ask us and expect an answer.

So, when you combine the power of a Q&A site with the magic of an anonymous commenting system and the addictive qualities of navel-gazing with the expectation of being noticed, you basically have on your hands the social web app of the year just waiting to happen.

And if it weren't for back end - which is likely built on Ruby on Rails, according to a few sources we've consulted today - FormSpring would have not only a money-making enterprise app but also a blockbuster social app. [Note: Some commenters say the site is likely not built on Rails. If you've got programming experience, take a look at FormSpring.me and let us know what you think in the comments.]

Although the concept is fascinating, the implementation is transparently shoddy. It seems like a hastily put-together weekend project along the lines of a Startup Weekend or Rails Rumble one-off. In fact, several developers we consulted said the site bears all the marks of a Ruby on Rails product, including rampant database scalability errors. ActiveRecord is a Rails class for accessing databases, and it's been shown in past applications to be unscalable. Concurrency issues mean that a small group of geeks or judges can have a grand time with your app, but the second it catches on with the social media crowd and then - god help you - general Internet users, the app's database is unable to handle that volume of traffic over a period of seconds, and end users start seeing error messages and abandon ship like so many faithless rats.

And since FormSpring.me is in all likelihood a side project from a single staffer or a couple employees (the company blog doesn't even mention the offshoot), it might not get the executive attention for further development or resource allocation. After all, without a revenue model, why would an enterprise-focused company waste time and energy on a social application?

Speculation aside, FormSpring.com support tech Ryan Dillman writes, "Eventually, we plan to rewrite the FormSpring.me code from the ground up using the same type of database as sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc., so that we can handle the load. In the meantime, the millions of calls to the database cause frequent issues during peak times."

Many parts of Twitter are built on Scala, and Facebook's database abstraction layer was developed in-house. If that kind of userbase - millions upon millions of users accessing the site around the clock - is what FormSpring is preparing for, they're going to need a much more robust solution that's much closer to bare metal than whatever they're currently running.

And we do suggest they find one. FormSpring should consider monetizing and quickly scaling such an addictive little application before someone else does it next and better.

So, to take the site's "Ask me anything" query and pose it to the site's creators, do you plan to seriously devote resources to create a stunning and addictive social app, or is this experiment destined for the digital dustbin?

Ask us anything - or give us your frank opinions - in the comments.

A vulgar comment was made by a reader of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's website on Friday on an article about the strangest things you've ever eaten. The headline was practically asking for a juvenile response and, thanks to the anonymity of the internet, that's exactly what happened. In the comments section of the article, one user posted a single word response referring to a part of a woman's anatomy. Of course, the site's moderators quickly deleted the comment but it soon reappeared - obviously this juvenile was intent on having their say.

But this time, instead of just deleting the comment in question, the site's director of social media, Kurt Greenbaum, did a little sleuthing too. He found that the commenter's IP address was coming from a local school...and that's where this story starts to get interesting.

Greenbaum contacted the school and made them aware of the situation. In his defense, he probably thought he was simply tattle-telling on a naughty student who would learn a valuable lesson about internet anonymity and would have to sit through a week's detention or something of the like. Instead, he cost a school employee his job.

Yes, as it turns out, the commenter in question wasn't a juvenile after all, just someone with a juvenile mind. Greenbaum learned of the firing when the school phoned him back six hours later to report their findings. They had confronted the employee and he had resigned.

Crossing the Line? Or Justice Served?

The question being hotly debated now is did Greenbaum go too far? Or did the commenter get what they deserved?

Mathew Ingram, the blogger and communities editor for Toronto's The Globe and Mail, writes on his personal blog that his paper's site has seen hundreds or even thousands of comments, most of which are much worse than the one Greenbaum saw, but he would never - and has never - contacted someone's workplace about them. He calls Greenbaum's actions "over-the-top" and apparently, many commenters on STLtoday.com's website agree, calling out Greenbaum over this incident.

And yet Greenbaum seems to show no remorse, responding to one commenter who accused him of hating moderating so much that he decided to get someone fired by saying: "Yeah, you caught me! I made him log on to his computer at work, visit STLtoday.com's Talk of the Day, read the item, type a vulgarity and hit the 'submit' key."

Sixteen pages of comments now follow that initial interaction, and the majority of them seem to agree that Greenbaum crossed a line, save for the occasional concerned parent who didn't like the idea of this vulgarity-posting person hanging around their children instead of doing his job.

Lesson to Be Learned: Watch What You Say!

We can't blame Greenbaum for the sleuthing bit - any blogger will tell you they've been tempted to hunt down the identities of nasty commenters from time to time. But calling someone's work? That's just wrong.

Yet while Greenbaum may have been seriously misguided to do what he did, this should be another sobering reminder to anyone trolling the net that what you type may come back and haunt you one day. There's no such thing as true anonymity on the net these days, and thanks to new technologies like Facebook Connect, the days where you can hide behind a made-up web handle may be numbered. In fact, Facebook itself may even owe its success to how it forces users to post with their "real" name and identity notes blogger Kent Newsome. "With a name comes accountability, and there is a direct correlation between accountability and behavior," he writes.

That may be true, but the fact of the matter is that the STLtoday website allows anonymous comments. When you make that choice, then you have to expect that some of them will need moderation - it's just part of the job. Regardless of the site's policies about vulgarity, phoning the employer seems like an over-reaction to the incident. But that's just our opinion. What do you think?

But instead of continually pointing out the problem, maybe it's time for the innovators in our community to start thinking up solutions. Here's one we just thought up...let us know what you think.

The pseudo-anonymity of the internet - or at the very least, the ability to write something cruel without having to face the person eye-to-eye - often leads people to express themselves in ways that are far from how they would behave in real life. In the past, this typically led people to hide behind pseudonyms and screen names so they could post whatever they wanted without fear of repercussions.

That's why I recently proposed that some communities put an end to online anonymity, thinking that if you removed the masks from people's identities, they would start behaving properly. Of course, this led to a lot of debate in the comments. Obviously, I never meant that anonymity needed to be banned from the internet entirely - the world isn't ready for that! - but there are some places where it doesn't serve much of a purpose. (Tech blogs, for instance.)

People still hated the idea.

As a blogger who writes every day using my real name, it's hard to sympathize with the need to post tech blog comments anonymously. Everything a blogger writes, we're held accountable for. Why shouldn't other community contributors be treated the same?

But as it turns out, there was a huge flaw in my reasoning in that post. I focused on whether or not someone should use their real name when posting, but that's not the issue at all. It's not really anonymity that's to blame for the troll-like behavior we're seeing in online communities, it's the lack of accountability.

That's why (some) people seem comfortable posting mean-spirited comments on sites like FriendFeed using their real name and their real identities to do so. You see, when you post on FriendFeed, your comment quickly disappears into the site's "real-time flow" of information. Someone watching the stream sees it only momentarily, before it's replaced with others. Even within the "angry mob" threads themselves, a single comment easily gets lost among hundreds of others.

So although the comment is attached to a real name, it's a single needle in a haystack of opinion. There's no way to see, at-a-glance, what that person's commenting history was like. Were they usually nice and this angry post was an exception? Or did they make a habit of trolling? There's simply no way to know.

What's the Solution?

We don't have any answers yet, just ideas. But maybe it's time that we started focusing on solutions instead of pointing the finger at the web services...as if somehow FriendFeed itself (or Digg or YouTube for that matter) are to blame for this shameful aspect of human behavior.

Jason Kaneshiro of Webomatica proposes that FriendFeed implement threaded comments with the ability to rate comments up or down. While I agree that would be a good first step in helping the community moderate the vitriol, it certainly doesn't stop hateful comments from occurring in the first place (just look at Digg!).

Perhaps what we need is a rating system for the personalities of community participants. Think of it like eBay's "star" ratings, but instead of grading a seller on how quickly an order was shipped, etc., you'd rate each others' contributions to a community.

Imagine how this could work on FriendFeed, for example. People could rate others' comments and the aggregation of the communities' ratings would give overall insight to that person's personality. Was the comment insightful? Kind? Spammy? Mean? Were you helping a newbie feel included? Were you answering a question or participating in a poll? Do you tend to leave positive comments about X company while being negative about Y? The list could go on and on.

The system should also show not just how a single comment was rated, but what that person's overall rating is along with a history of their contributions.

If participants knew that their every action, whether "anonymous" or not, was adding up to paint an overall picture of who they really were, would this be enough of an equivalent to the kind of accountability we have in real life? The sort of accountability where people are judged on their behavior over time, and not for a single uttered statement?

Rating systems are hardly a new idea - many online communities use badges and other methods for rewarding helpful participation. But rating systems that extend beyond simply rewarding good behavior to publicizing the bad, too, don't really exist today...at least when it comes to comments and communities.

It's hard to imagine exactly what a system like this would look like, but that's where UI designers would need to flex their muscles and create something that didn't take away from the overall experience while also encouraging people to rate comments both positive and negative, not just the ones they hated.

Is this a terrible idea? If so, we know you'll set us straight. That is, after all, what the comments are for. But if you think it's awful, at least be so kind as to suggest a better alternative.

Image credit: flickr user takingthemoney

The editor, Thomas Mitchell, received the subpoena after his paper covered the prosecution of business owner Robert Kahre in a federal tax fraud case. He is quoted as saying that anonymous speech, including online comments, is "a fundamental and historic part of this country," but that his publication might cooperate if specific crimes or threats were a factor.

U.S. Assistant District Attorney J. Gregory Damm's name appears on the subpoena. He was also the prosecuting attorney for the case which was the subject of the original report.

Comments from the article in question call Damm "a socialist, fascist Mormon" (which is a radical contradiction in terms) and a "Nazi moron," which is a lovely example of Godwin's law. Another comment reads, "The sad thing is there are 12 dummies on the jury who will convict him. They should be hung along with the feds." On the same website, comments of an antisemitic, extremist nature exist and occasionally abound.

Thanks to Rex Dixon for sending this news our way.

With IPREDator's VPN, you can stay anonymous on the net. Your internet traffic will be encrypted and protected - even beyond what a typical VPN offers. This way, law enforcement can't catch you when you download the latest episode of your favorite TV show...or when you get involved in other criminal activity, for that matter. And it's that last bit which is a bit troubling, we have to admit.

For years, The Pirate Bay has been one of the top hubs for sharing copyrighted files illegally, much to the chagrin of the RIAA, the MPAA, and other content owners who see the site as one of the reasons why their businesses aren't making money like they used to. That may or may not be the case - it's just as likely that the content-producing industries have failed to adapt quickly enough to the entity that is the Internet, a global force that leaves no traditional business model untouched and, yes, sometimes destroyed completely.

There are a lot of reasons why The Pirate Bay became so popular. Not only is using the site easy, it also provides digital content for download when it is not possible to locate it legally. For example, in between the time a movie leaves the theater and the time it's released on DVD, there is no other place to watch it. Enter The Pirate Bay. Or pre-Hulu, if you missed a TV show, there were few places to see it. (And since Hulu is U.S.-only, the rule still applies). Even when legal marketplaces like iTunes arose, content owners still greedily held onto their product, making The Pirate Bay once again the place to find what you could not access through the "proper" channels. Today, that's still the case as some shows are missing entirely from iTunes and for others, the current season is nowhere to be found. Plus, sometimes the pirated content is even of better quality than the legal download.

Initially established back in 2003, The Pirate Bay quickly became the go-to site for finding any file on the net, many of which are copyrighted. Still, the site's operators claim what they're doing is perfectly legal. Now on trial for copyright infringement charges in Sweden where the company's servers are based (verdict expected April 17th), a Pirate Bay spokesperson Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi has claimed that 80 percent of The Pirate Bay's downloads are for content that's legal to share online. The defense for the legality of The Pirate Bay is somewhat like that old saying, "guns don't kill people, people kill people." Just because The Pirate Bay provides the infrastructure that points to where files are hosted, are they to blame when it's used to point to illegal content? That's perhaps a moral issue to debate at another time, because today's news is about The Pirate Bay's new anonymizer, IPREDator.

Going Anonymous with IPREDator

The VPN service IPREDator is being launched tomorrow (according to the homepage) in response to the introduction of IPRED in the E.U., a directive which stands for "Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive." With IPRED, law enforcement and copyright holders can request the names of suspected copyright infringers which they can then threaten and/or sue.

The easiest way to avoid detection, of course, is to become anonymous and that's precisely what the IPREDator tool allows for...and does so quite well, too, based on what's being said about it.

Although the concept is not new - other anonymizers like the onion-router project Tor have been around for some time - a tool provided by and pushed out by The Pirate Bay will likely gain the attention of a much larger swath of internet users than those ever did. Why's that? It's simple - The Pirate Bay tracks 50% of all public torrents on the net. In other words, they're huge. They also announced back in November that they had reached 25 million peers, a number not necessarily equivalent to number of users, but that refers to another computer on the Internet sharing a file you want to download. But again, huge.

Making it Easier for Criminals to Hide, Too?

This is where the copyright witch hunt has brought us: in order to access the content we want, we have to become anonymous and hide our identities. Because people just want to watch a TV show or see a movie, they have to play a ridiculous cat-and-mouse game with the authorities who somehow equate downloading a file with stealing a car.

That's not to say that some people don't abuse the system and have gotten into the habit of never paying for anything, but a lot of people just casually use The Pirate Bay and other similar sites. The system arose to fill a void in the marketplace, just like any other black market does. Without a legal alternative, The Pirate Bay could succeed and it did.

Yet here we are, only a day away from the launch of a tool that is surely going to be used for much more than just torrenting. An anonymizer as easy to use as The Pirate Bay itself, affordable at only €5 per month, and made available worldwide will become the scourge of law enforcement everywhere, especially once it's put to use for much more dangerous purposes than catching up on the latest episode of "Lost." And how did we get here? A failure to adapt. Instead of concentrating on providing new ways to market, distribute, and sell content, content owners have spent entirely too much time fighting the inevitable future.

So now we have yet another tool that will make things easier for the terrorists, the child predators, and the other online criminals to use to hide behind along with those oh-so-dangerous downloaders. We can't help but wonder if that's really a good thing.

It's strange, too, because in all other aspects, the Internet seems to be moving towards a place of openness and accountability. Thanks to the movement of Web 2.0, social networking has become the norm on many sites and new tools like OpenID, MySpace ID, and Facebook Connect are letting people log in and authenticate with sites as themselves - not with some anonymous handle they can hide behind. This authenticity has been a great thing for net as it becomes harder for anonymous trolls to leave hateful comments that disrupt the normal flow of online discourse. In short, the internet has the potential to become a more civil and therefore, more engaging and productive place.

That's why being anonymous, especially so anonymous that your IP isn't even traceable, sounds like we're backtracking instead of moving forward. Although we understand the reasons behind the IPREDator project (and a bit of the anarchist in us supports it), we have our concerns. Is downloading really that bad of a crime? Will this technology be used for more harm than it is for protection from the copyright cops (just like like Tor is)? Sadly, that is, in fact, possible. And we're sorry to see that it's come to this.

Being "Fake" Is Now A Crime

A precedent-setting case, the Lori Drew MySpace trial, has just come to an end. If you're unfamiliar, this was a case where an overprotective mom established a fake online identity to bully her daughter's rival. The judge's ruling has now criminalized the act of creating a fake persona online. In the case of Drew, most would agree she deserves the punishment she received. However, the aftershocks of the ruling could very well impact the online identity creation process for years to come if it's not overturned.

"If this verdict stands, it means that every site on the internet gets to define the criminal law," stated senior legal policy analyst Andrew Grossman for the Heritage Foundation. "That's a radical change. What used to be small-stakes contracts become high-stakes criminal prohibitions."

Authenticating The "Real" You

To address the needs of sites wanting weed out fake personas, users will have to be authenticated in new ways. Here, companies like Facebook, Google, and others are already in position to offer a solution for making sure people are who they say they are. Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, and Yahoo's Open Strategy, have all been busy trying to grab land on the new frontier of identity management. All of them want to be your de facto online identity provider.

No matter who wins, though, it's anonymity that loses. For the sites that move to these types of authentication methods, no longer will their users be able to create disposable usernames and passwords so they can troll around harassing others and leaving juvenile comments. Instead, all participants are themselves online  - and subject to the same standards for behavior that you would expect to see if you encountered them in a real-life public situation.

The Psychological Impacts Of One Identity

Even the utopian plans of OpenID, which MySpace pledged to support, is being embraced by other big names like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and even President-Elect Obama. With this federated identity, one set of credentials can follow you around the net, providing access to hundreds of sites. Although everyday computer users may not understand the technicalities of OpenID, the psychological impact will become apparent.

To the technically unsophisticated, the concept that you are one set of credentials, one username, one person across numerous sites will start people thinking that their activities can be traced, that they are not as anonymous as before...regardless as to whether or not that is true.

The User Data Overlords

Finally, there is Google, the company we joke around as being "our new overlords." The reality is that we have, in fact, turned over vast amounts of our personal identity to this company in exchange for free webmail with pretty themes, snappy web browsing experiences, free analytics tools, more. As Allen Stern noted this weekend, "Google Knows Where I Am and Everything I Do." (If you want to jump even deeper down that rabbit hole, take a closer look at Google's User Data Empire). 

The terrifying vision of our future that Orwell imagined in his masterpiece, 1984, has been surpassed by miles. Big Brother staring at us through TV screens is nothing - instead, we've managed to create a world where we blindly, willingly, hand over our data and personal identities to a publicly traded company because they promised us they were trustworthy. And like the Eloi people in H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, everything we need is provided to us - up until the time we become the dinner for the evils that lurk just below the surface.

Struggling To Adapt

In many ways, our society will struggle to adapt to the changes imposed by the lack of anonymity. Those embarrassing Facebook photos you got tagged in this weekend could lose you your job and prevent you from getting a new one. But how can we draw the line between what's public and private when so many of us have already decided that it's socially acceptable to shove cameras and video recorders in people's faces (without asking!) and publish the captured images to the net immediately?

The only way to prevent reputations from being damaged in the process is to always "be on your best behavior" in public. Frankly, that's no fun. No more wild boys nights out? No more getting silly and stupid with your friends? No - not unless you're willing to live with the consequences of having it plastered online in the morning.

When we reach the point where online anonymity has ended, instead of getting to be who we really are, the fact that we've become so aware of the fact that we're always being recorded, photographed, tracked, and traced, will have actually created a slightly altered personality instead. Like reality TV show contestants, the act of being observed will change our behavior. Our personal brand image will become our public identity and therefore our identity.

Not All Bad, Just Different

The truth is, giving up our online anonymity may not be all bad - we'll have a convenient, portable friend graph, for example. We can burn our notebook filled with our usernames and passwords. Our search data will be easily accessible from one place. But for the convenience of a simple login, searchable personal data and web history, and social networks filled with friends, we'll have exchanged a bit of who we are in the process. We'll pay for our services on the new internet with our identity and personal information. When the companies we sold ourselves to use it for their own benefits, our outrage will come too late. We'll only have ourselves to blame.

Image credit: iPhone with transparent screen, edans