Did Shutting Down Silk Road Make the World a More Dangerous Place?

Both of your points are hyperbolic claims with no warrant.

> Communication mediums are the safest thing in the whole wide world.

Even though this is a strawman, since my arguing to the contrary does nothing to support that anonymity is or isn't a natural right, you're still completely wrong. Perhaps I can't literally shoot someone with a computer, but all kinds of violence is inflicted by communication. You can harass, threaten, and blackmail simply by communicating. The internet has been used to inflict sexual abuse, aid hate crime, and transmit child pornography. It can also be used to steal, commit fraud, and induce an unsafe panic (think of shouting fire in a crowded theater). These are all non-physical but violent acts; incidentally, anonymity aids in perpetrating every one of them. Saying that the internet is inherently safe, much less the safest thing in the whole wide world, is patently false.

> History is very clear on this: the biggest enemies of justice have been governments and state sponsored entities, every single time.

Perhaps you can add up the numbers and claim that more suffering has been inflicted in total by governments (in the course of wars, or whatever, some of which were more justifiable than others) rather than isolated individuals. You'd have a serious sampling bias, though, because we generally owe recorded history to the presence of a government, and people seem to have preferred throughout recorded history to form governments rather than live as individuals. So while this is a nice setup for an anarchistic manifesto, unless you are seriously willing to give up government and then move to Antarctica (which has pretty bad Internet, I'm told), it doesn't really make sense for this discussion.

But the Silk Road wasn't truly anonymous because buyers had to disclose their address to at least one person. It's surprising that so many people were willing to send their addresses to anonymous criminals who could, at any time, turn into DEA informants. Furthermore, vendors must mail the package; seeing as how it's not terribly hard to see where packages come from, many vendors are probably vulnerable to simple surveillance of some mailboxes in a region.

These people were only getting away with it because law enforcement lacks the resolve and infrastructure to prosecute small scale buyers. To put this another way, we could hold them accountable, or at least introduce risk associated costs into the system, but law enforcement choose not to. (After browsing SR enthusiast forums, it starts to seem as if the whole community is predicated on the common belief that buyers are immune from risk... it's delusional!) If I'm wrong, and it's not so easy to bust these people, then I'm sure we'd just legislate a solution.

I'm getting at this: Real world actions do not automatically become anonymous because they're coordinated online. That's not my most brilliant observation, but the consequence is that, aside from digital crimes (DDOS, website defacement, copyright infringement, child porn), internet anonymity doesn't generally enable us to significantly screw up the so-called meatworld with complete unaccountability unless we're exploiting the government's technological time-lag.

So when I talk about internet anonymity, I'm trying to speak of our right to communicate anonymously. That's it. I think the same is true for most people.

Finally, I just want to add that "natural rights" have no scientific basis in our current understanding of the universe. Objectively, cultures confer rights to their members; it's probably an adaptive mechanism involving many factors. In a strict materialist and scientific world, "natural right" is a broken concept.

"Where do you derive this supposed natural right for anonymity on the internet?"

From the natural right to free speech. Anonymity systems rely on people transmitting particular messages in particular ways, whether online or offline. When someone makes an anonymous statement to a newspaper, they do so with the assistance of the reporter who writes the article -- that reporter is repeating what someone else said, and not publishing the person's name. Tor, anonymous remailers, and related systems all operate on the same principle: by running a Tor relay or a remailer, you are agreeing to repeat the contents of a message without its headers.

"Whether we like it or not, governments are ultimately the overseers that permit networking infrastructure comprising the internet to be built"

True, but only on a technicality -- the government also allows us to have computers in the first place. The truth is that we do not need the government to "allow" the Internet; the Internet would be a lot slower without the government allowing fiber and coax to be put along public streets, but we could have built an Internet of point-to-point wireless links without having to ask permission (using only ISM bands, IR, and optical systems, for example). The government could outlaw such things, but that does not mean that the lack of such laws is an allowance, unless you think that all your rights are things the government allows (how dare you breath without thanking the government for allowing it?!).

> there is no intrinsic right to anonymity

wouldn't the opposite be against individual liberty?

> the liberty of selling contaminated meat

That's not liberty. That's criminal behavior that stems from criminal thinking. If government has any legitimate function at all, it's to prevent injustice from criminals and other predators.

When government becomes the seat of criminality and predation, quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

> He's right, and you're wrong.

I parse this as, "I agree with him, not you" as these are all just our opinions anyway.