[cestith]

One potential solution here I suppose is to make deanonymization or contributing to it a serious crime. I doubt that will happen in most places, though, since it’s often the government that wants to do this to its own citizens.

[inigyou]

downvoted because the government doing stuff is communism

[tarpitt]

I don't have the ability to downvote, and I disagree that the downvote should be used, but I disagree with your disagreement about the downvote.

The proposal that seems to infringe on free speech, but mostly I take issue because there just isn't really a precedent for what such a thing would look like. What constitutes doxxing? It is easy to accidentally doxx someone by mentioning some offhand fact in conversation, because you may not know what series of facts can be connected to form a doxx. Typicially, people doxx themselves by accident, and someone else is merely pointing it out. I know I have many times. You live and learn.

There isn't really a right to privacy in the way that there's a right to free speech. Free speech is important to processes of public transparency and justice which I think this would interfere with. But it's also true that justice is blind and doxxing can interfere with a judicial process.

Also, if everyone is going to have access to super-stylometry tools in the future, which is the premise of the article that GP reacts to, it will be fruitless to uphold such a right because anyone can just run doxxyou.exe themselves. There's no need to spread doxx because it can be reproduced individually.

The term doxxing came from a certain hacker culture where it was implied that you connected some real-life identity to a criminal pseudonym. It essentially meant "snitching". So the idea that doxxing itself would be a crime is interesting. It's a reversal of the original meaning.

But it's also true that the public has discovered sybil-suseptible techniques (like swatting) where you can screw with ordinary people's lives by knowing their identity. Which is interesting because we live in a new culture of "share everything online" vs old the hacker ethos of "don't use your real name online". The attackers have become stronger and the defenders weaker.

[cestith]

Free speech repeatedly has been held by the US Supreme Court to include anonymous speech. There are also free association rights involved. https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/anonymous-speech/

While the protection of anonymity is not absolute and must be balanced against other factors, the same is true of free speech in general. You don’t have a right to defraud people, defame them, directly incite a riot, or to manipulate markets with false statements for example. You likely don’t have a right to create a deepfake and represent it as the words and actions of another person without their permission.

Deanonymization can be used for harassment, stalking, prosecution, ad targeting, serving civil lawsuits, criminal investigation, and any number of other purposes both benign and nefarious. It’s honestly akin to stalking itself when it’s done to a private citizen by a private citizen.

[inigyou]

probably means publicly identifying an individual

[tarpitt]

It takes many bits to identify an individual.

Let's say I offhandedly mention your email in this comment, for example, like we had an out of band conversation somewhere else. Then, someone takes that email and links it to another forum where they find your phone number. Then another person looks up that phone number in a phone book. Then another person finds your github account from the email associated with your PGP and finds where you work etc. Let's say a comment you wrote 7 months ago vaguely mentions something about where you live, which in combination with the previous information narrows it down to a single place.

At what point does that become doxxing and who is responsible? Pseudonymous people nessisarially, slowly leak small amounts of information about themselves when on the internet in order to engage in communication.

It is only when you collect "enough" bits of information that it becomes threatening doxx.

You could say publishing this collection of facts is the doxx. But the point of the article is that stylometry and AI tools can do this investigation for you. Anyone can trivially assemble the collection themselves.

I think ultimately, it's a matter of personal responsibility. It has to be. If you have perfect opsec, I can't touch you AI tools or not. And if I have perfect opsec and I'm doxxing you, then no laws will be able to catch up to me.

[inigyou]

Laws aren't cryptography. They aren't all or nothing. Making something illegal has a chilling effect on that thing, even if not 100% enforceable. It would be illegal to try to hack the NSA, so I'm scared to do it, even through Tor.

[inigyou]

... And even though it's hard to define whether any given action is or isn't hacking.

[cestith]

The article is about plugging in one or more pieces of writing and getting a name. That’s not leaking their phone number, their email address, their location, their associations, or other information and piecing together an investigative file on someone. It means that with AI, based on the idiosyncratic writing style of “tarpitt” on HackerNews, I could get your real name no matter the topics you commented about. It assumes only that you have other writings available somewhere that can be tied to your real name.

[cestith]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism