The Privacy Project: Pierre Delecto, QAnon and the paradox of anonymity

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October 29, 2019

By Charlie Warzel

Opinion writer at large

The idea that Mitt Romney might be lurking in every corner of the internet is pretty tame. But at scale, confusion blurs reality and injects doubt into any conversation.Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Lately I've been thinking a lot about Pierre Delecto. Pierre isn't a real person — he's the fake persona made up by Senator Mitt Romney for his secret Twitter account, which was recently uncovered after some expert online forensic work by Slate's Ashley Feinberg.

Anonymity online is nothing new — arguably it's a newer concept to browse the internet and comment under your real name, rather than use a screen name or pseudonymous avatar. And there's plenty of historical precedent for powerful politicians hiding behind names — from Carlos Danger back to John Adams's 25 pseudonyms, including the super-metal name Vindex the Avenger.

But Pierre's outing comes at a contentious time for privacy and anonymity. At present, unknown individuals are having an outsize impact on politics. Donald Trump's impeachment inquiry is a result of the testimony of an anonymous whistle-blower; the next highly anticipated political book is an account of the Trump White House written by the anonymous author of the 2018 Times Op-Ed "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration." Head to a Trump rally or a fringe online community and you're likely to stumble upon devoted fans of QAnon, the cultish conspiracy plot. QAnon is two years old this week, and despite numerous debunkings and false prophecies, the chatter continues. Online, journalists and political campaigns fend off anonymous trolls posing as real citizens. Hashtags are hijacked, discourse is poisoned — all by faceless figures.

Even the dog responsible for cornering the recently killed leader of ISIS enjoyed the freedom of classified anonymity, until the Very Good Girl was identified via presidential tweet.

Yet our anonymity is also being threatened like never before. The surveillance state — once the provenance of the government — has expanded to include our favorite technology companies. Our phones beam our exact location coordinates to apps and advertisers every few seconds. All of our browsing behaviors, searches and consumption patterns are mined and monitored. In China, surveillance has become all encompassing; here in the United States, consumers retrofit our physical world with microphones and cameras and give them cute androgynous names. Under the guise of security, the widespread use of facial recognition technology could destroy the very notion of anonymity in public. Not even our biological makeup is safe from exposure as genetic testing threatens to jeopardize not only our privacy but also the privacy of our ancestors and relatives.

The scale and impact brought about by technology are confusing and troubling. Social media's initial pitch offered the freedom for the anonymous to speak and for their words to have unprecedented reach. "The world is round, but the World Wide Web is flat," I remember hearing tech executives say in the ancient days of … 2012. Dissidents rejoice!

But the internet is as good a tool to restrict speech — to flood the zone with so much low-quality information that the marketplace of ideas becomes a landfill where it's impossible to separate the good from the garbage. This strategy, as state actors and garden-variety trolls showed in 2016, puts a strain on the democratic process. These virtual wars, fought by anonymous entities, are everywhere. It includes bots, juiced viewership metrics from click farms, counterfeit websites and videos posted by faceless pop-up scammers and manipulated public comment processes, at government organizations like the Federal Communications Commission, impersonating real Americans.

This fakery has a lasting, disorienting impact, as New York magazine's Max Read described last year: "Everything that once seemed definitively and unquestionably real now seems slightly fake; everything that once seemed slightly fake now has the power and presence of the real."

I felt this acutely after the unmasking of poor Pierre Delecto. Looking through Senator Romney's tweets, I was struck by how much they looked like the dozens of anodyne mentions I get from faceless accounts every day online. Over time, platforms like Twitter conditions users to dismiss random mentions from pictureless users with a handful of followers. Now I wonder whether those angry anonymous comments I'd been wading through were cathartic outbursts from the secret accounts of frustrated lawmakers.

The idea that Mitt Romney might be lurking in every corner of the internet is pretty tame. But at scale, confusion blurs reality and injects doubt into any conversation. Those yelling Trump supporters on Twitter? Russian bots! Authenticity becomes indistinguishable from fraudulence, and as Read wrote, it produces "the uncanny sense that what you encounter online is not 'real' but is also undeniably not 'fake,' and indeed may be both at once, or in succession."

Which is why our current moment feels so peculiar. We seem on the cusp of multiple technological frontiers — all of them exhilarating and terrifying. Quantum computing supremacy, which Google may have achieved this month, may make all previous encryption obsolete. Surveillance tech may destroy anonymity. And yet much of the technology that allows us to operate in the shadows may very well undermine institutions like democracy that only function properly when we have a shared understanding of reality.

It's hard to gain purchase in this moment. Technologies that are meant to give us unprecedented freedom may very well bolster the most oppressive leaders and propaganda; technologies that feel oppressive may very well protect us. And everything in between. We live in a world where access to almost any person or piece of information is just a few keystrokes away. And yet so many people feel so distant and so many truths feel unattainable.

It may be why issues of privacy and privacy legislation feel so confounding right now. In 2019, it's both easier and harder than ever to be anonymous.

NYT archive

From the Archives: Anonymity in The Times 1901-2011

This week, I thought I'd add a few Times pieces that have grappled with the subject of anonymity throughout the years. The first is a Sunday Review piece from 1901 titled "The Modest Author," about the joy of unsigned written work. Here's the gist:

He reaches the discovery that, on the whole, it is pleasenter to blush unseen than to be advertised. There is perhaps a tinge of the morbid in his declaration that one of the purest forms of literary happiness is to be found in being ignored and in having one's work credited to another.

A 1905 piece talks about anonymity in journalism, quoting Winston Churchill, a member of Parliament at the time, to suggest that English newspaper articles should carry author bylines, like French newspapers did at the time:

It was a great pity that individual journalists had not the same influence at home. It was certainly not because we did not possess writers of equal capacity. He ventured to think that anonymity had a great deal to do with it. If more articles were signed, individual journalists would acquire a greater weight and authority in the politics of the country.

Fast forward to a 1994 piece titled "Computer Jokes and Threats Ignite Debate on Anonymity." There are untold historical gems in here, about "digital cash" and sending email bombs:

Many Internet experts contend that the most troublesome identity issues lie a year or two down the road. As more and more daily business is conducted over computer networks, with orders placed and goods paid for on-line, the opportunities for forgery and fraud will escalate. But so will the need for an electronic currency, a legal tender offering the same liquidity — and anonymity — as cash does today.

And this very prescient quote:

"We've tolerated anonymity until now because it has not been that big a problem," said I. Trotter Hardy, a specialist in intellectual property law at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va. But Professor Hardy sees trouble spinning on the global computer web known as the Internet.

"Anonymity is power," he said, "and I think it will be abused on the Net."

Finally, there's this fascinating 2011 debate on anonymity from The Times's Letters department, including experts at the A.C.L.U. and the Anti-Defamation League. A few highlights:

Ugly insults are just one small part of all the free speech that anonymity makes possible, and it's not worth closing the door on all that speech to make the world more polite.

And:

This is not a matter for government, given the strictures of the First Amendment. But it is time for Internet intermediaries voluntarily to consider requiring either the use of real names (or registration with the online service) in circumstances, such as the comments section for news articles, where the benefits of anonymous posting are outweighed by the need for greater online civility.

The whole piece is well worth your time to watch the argument evolve.

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