Very well put; I think a lot of people forget about this.

Tami has a good strategy in simply confusing trackers with multiple personalities and anonymity programs, but there are other strategies. There’s no reason for “multiple personalities” to talk to each other. There’s not even a reason to have a personality online at all.

I use Facebook, sure, because I don’t want to lose touch with people who only use it, and don’t answer their email. But my Facebook profile is tight–I have all of the privacy controls on the most private settings.

Aside from Facebook, I have a business personality online–one I blog with and produce with. But this is fine, since these media are completely controlled by me, and my association with them is preferred.

Another, and preferable state of mind is to adopt no secrets and have no shame–this removes the risk of exploitation entirely.

Obviously it is too complicated of a question to pick a microcosmic metaphor to represent the entire duality. But let me put it in these two ways.

1) You go live on a compound in the woods, free to run naked, take drugs, and avoid any oversight by the State. Until the day other woods-living bandits surprise you and kill you.

2) You conduct guerrilla warfare against the oppressive State, sniping guards at the local Moral Re-education Prision. Until the day the State develops a magnet-ray, rendering your rifle useless. You join a public protest against magnet-ray usage by the government, claiming it is State intrusion into the private electromagnetic sphere. Seperation of Current and State, etc.

Example 1 is the false Hobbesian duality metaphor that most people choose to represent “freedom”. War of all against all, or social contract. Either get with the program, or live in anarchy, buddy. You must pick one.

Example 2 is more of the real situation: a multiplicitous Foucauldian panopticon model, if I had to give it a name. The “social contract” we live with is a constant battle for power among an unlimited number of parties and pathways, whether with weapons, words, or technology. Every tool has a use and a weakness. You get a world-wide messaging service, you get a world-wide info sniffing portal. As technology advances, the old dualities between People and State, Control and Anarchy, bend and shift as certain sides gain ground, and implement different moral tactics to try and gain the upper hand, or prevent the other side from gaining the upper hand. You say ‘non-proliferation’, they say ‘missile gap’. You say ‘freedom of speech’, they say ‘child porn’. You say ‘privacy’, they say ‘safety’. But in the end, everyone is still struggling to control the everyone else. It’s not about find the safe position from which you can snipe anyone with impunity, its about doing what you can with what you can. If half of people are open to government censoring of the internet, it is because they think this outcome benefits them, regardless of whether we can call it “freedom” or not. It’s like how some americans think owning guns means freedom, and some americans think gun control means freedom.

It seems to me that rather than starting with “freedom” and working backward to what actions define it, we need to ask what action we are deploying the idea of “freedom” to defend? Are we demanding that the government leaves us free to be dissidents as an “inalienable right”? Or are we signing up to be dissidents because we feel the control of the government does not benefit us in a tangible way, and in order to be dissidents, we need to be secretive?

Regardless of the intellectual debate, I think it will remain that those “with something to hide” will go on trying to hide it however they can, and those “with something to discover” will keep trying to find it.