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a simple law could mandate that attribution chains presented as evidence (by either party) MUST recursively include a header reminding everyone about this law (so that ALL defendant, plaintif, their lawyers and the judge & jury if applicable), the law being for example: 1) the username must be introduced as " the <N>-character user name <username> at the <M>-character online platform <platform> ..." along with a cryptographic hash of the concatenation, of user name, service name, ... so that any alteration is easily noticed. 2) a histogram of usernames binned by Damerau-Levenstein edit distance, along with a tabular cumulative count so that everyone can comfortably read off how many other but similar user names this platform has less than 1 edit away, less than 2 edits away, less than 3 edits away etc... 3) the law should introduce a bet between law enforcement and corporations:
upon being requested for the other half of a forensic link (say an IP address, or an email address, ...), it must demand the exact number of characters, it must provide a list or at least a cumulative count of user names less than N edits away. if they are ever caught violating user privacy they owe money to the state, the individual, ... even if law enforcement demanded out of band cooperation. The corporation should financially feel the risk of prosecution / police making invalid requests, so they have an incentive to technologically think ahead of the police and their sloppy work. > In an adversarial system (which the US and Canada and UK are), the judge is not supposed to challenge evidence unless it's glaringly, obviously adrift from reality. So regardless of common law vs civil law systems, one could devise laws such that this type of errors could be made glaringly clear to anyone involved, by law. It's not like the first time humanity is confronted with misattribution. If a phenomenon has a word, its typically been happening for a long time. If the laws haven't been adjusted to learn from mistakes, it's not because they don't want to learn, but because they want to not learn. |