Let's make JonDonym!

Philosophy and technology

Do we need JonDonym? The question seems to be out of place, since this is the blog of the company which co-develops that software. But nevertheless, if we have a look at western democracies just a very small minority of people is using services like JonDonym and the majority does not miss anything at all surfing the Web. So, do we need JonDonym?

It is getting obvious that the increased networking and with it the IPaddresses of users are playing a more and more important role in everyday life. But due to the fact that a lot of personal information is involved both private companies and states are very interested in using it for their own purposes. This may lead in the private sector to some trouble but if we imagine the vision of an authoritarian society, it becomes a nightmare which can be mitigated, at least in the Internet, with the help of JonDonym. Because only with strong anonymity would exist in antidemocratic states the opportunity at all, that people are organizing and informing themselves in the Internet in order to be able to resist under these circumstances. Looking for critical reports or the virtual meeting of people with the same kind of interest without anonymity would be the same as (successfully) trying to punish oneself in these times.

But would JonDonym be helpful under such tragical circumstances at all? Could the anonymity of the individual not be neutralized in this future with the help of the crime prevention interface, which can be activated in all mix servers? Eventually there could be severe punishment of visiting critical webpages with the consequence that users (visiting such a webpage a second time) could be unmasked by law abiding JonDonym-services, couldn’t it?

Well, the obvious answer to these questions would be to operate the single mixes in law contexts which are as diverse as possible. We are doing that already and it would help in the outlined scenario as well since the distribution of the mixes guarantees that visiting one particular webpage is not a problem at least in one law context. And the user can only be unmasked if all mixes of a cascade are working together. The less obvious answer is that a lot will depend on the guts of the providers and developers in especially problematic situations. They will need courage to refuse the execution of laws which are clearly illegitimate. In order to avoid such a difficult situation everybody as a citizen must be engaged. And as developers we have the task to make JonDonym still more resistent against attacks which try to neutralize the anonymity of users surfing the Internet. Even if we achieved a lot on our way towards that goal there remains something to do and the help of critical users is appreciated. In this sense: Let's make JonDonym!

Georg