Seeking Anonymity in an Internet Panopticon - collective anonymity vs. individualized anonymity

[coderman@gmail.com (coderman)]

https://cryptome.org/2015/12/anon-v-panopticon.pdf

'''
We believe the vulnerabilities and measurability limitations of onion
routing  may  stem  from  an  attempt  to achieve  an  impossible set
of goals and to defend an ultimately indefensible position.

Current tools offer a general-purpose, unconstrained, and individualistic
form of  anonymous  Internet  access.   However,  there are many ways
for unconstrained, individualistic uses of the Internet to be
fingerprinted and tied to individual users.  We suspect that the only
way to achieve measurable and provable levels of anonymity, and to
stake out a position defensible in the long term, is to develop more
collective anonymity protocols and tools.

It may be necessary to constrain the normally individualistic
behaviors of participating nodes, the expectations of users, and
possibly the set of applications
and usage models to which these protocols and tools apply.

Toward this end, we offer a high-level view of the Dissent project, a
â??clean-slateâ?? effort to build practical anonymity systems embodying a
collective model for anonymous  communication.
'''