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List:       politech
Subject:    FC: NYT: Pentagon considered plan to tag Net-traffic, limit
From:       Declan McCullagh <declan () well ! com>
Date:       2002-11-23 23:25:24
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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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