CNET NEWS.COM - Pentagon drops plan to curb Net anonymity. A Defense Department agency recently considered--and rejected--a far-reaching plan that would sharply curtail online anonymity by tagging e-mail and Web browsing with unique markers for each Internet user. The idea involved creating secure areas of the Internet that could be accessed only if a user had such a marker, called eDNA, according to a report in Friday's New York Times. eDNA grew out of a private brainstorming session that included Tony Tether, president of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the newspaper said, and that would have required at least some Internet users to adopt biometric identifiers such as voice or fingerprints to authenticate themselves. [ ... ] On Wednesday, Defense Department undersecretary Pete Aldridge defended the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program to reporters, saying "there are no privacy issues" at stake with a prototype under development. DARPA was just creating a system that would be turned over to police and intelligence agencies for operational use when complete, Aldridge said. "The purpose of TIA would be to determine the feasibility of searching vast quantities of data to determine links and patterns indicative of terrorist activities," Aldridge said. "This is an important research project to determine the feasibility of using certain transactions and events to discover and respond to terrorists before they act." For the last few years, the federal government has fretted about Internet anonymity, which can exist in a weak form when people connect from behind firewalls or through large Internet providers, or in a strong form when technologies such as anonymous remailers or Zero Knowledge's now-moribund Freedom network are used. [Privacy Digest]
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