CircleID

Privacy is a balance. Well, actually it's an all out tug-o-war between conflicting interests. Unfortunately, it's usually the legitimate users who have the most to lose.

I suspect that the average cybercriminal only uses anonymous registration because it's checked by default. It's not like they provide anything remotely truthful to anyone, ever, so what does "anonymity" gain them? And giving law enforcement easy access to false data gains us what, exactly? The net benefit appears to be that it won't even take a court-signed warrant to obtain the personal details of those crooks who are stupid enough to provide them. I wonder whether the police, armed with easily-obtained and mostly-false data, are going to start knocking on the doors of identity theft victims. If not, then they're probably not catching the hypothetical genuinely idiotic criminals either. Bear in mind that victims of identity theft may be suspected of child pornography in this case: the exception is made only in cases of "immediate risk to children or the Internet".

You're a sensible guy, Suresh: cut it out with the alarm bells. Explicit anonymity has the superficial appearance of aiding crime, but none of the substance. This is classic security theatre, and I challenge you to provide a strong argument to the contrary if you're in earnest about the danger (although probably not in this comment thread, specifically—that would be getting off-topic).

I'd care less about the police angle, except for the fact that Trademark interests have come along for the ride. Damn typical, that. It's like the whole "think of the children" angle is the nose of the camel in the tent, and corporate interests are the head behind the nose wishing to gain access. Security theatre is bad enough in and of itself, but it looks like it's a pretext for preferential treatment of corporations in this case. Corporations have legitimate interests, of course, but I fail to see why they should be given preferential treatment with regards to access. In fact, given their track record of attempting censorship in the name of Trademark enforcement, such preferential treatment seems positively corrupt, and contrary to other legitimate public interests.

Ah, but lobbying is a very Western, Democratic form of corruption, isn't it?