By accident I was listening to this discussion with Walter Isaacson concerning Leonardo DaVinci while I read your post. So I read the article you mentioned while listening to the following:
https://www.pri.org/stories/2018-01-...ter-impresario
I agree with Isaacson. We would never agree to anonymity in our direct personal interactions. Let me give you some examples:
- Would you drop your children off at a school where the teachers wore masks and hid their identity? Of course not.
- Would a bank give you a loan if you walked in wearing a mask with no identification? No!
- When I visit customer offices as part of my work (I’m in technical sales), I must show my driver license or other photo identification (such as a passport) at every government office, government contractor office, and all but the smallest commercial offices.
- If anyone could send through your email provider’s SMTP sending server (which is called an open relay), a spammer could send many thousands of spam and malware messages per hour using a bot and they could not be stopped (since they would be anonymous). This happened in the early deployment of email, but open relays now are not allowed due to their misuse and the fact that the owner of the serve can’t charge for running the server.
- If the EMD Forums allowed anyone to post without setting up an account with a password, the deluge of spam would make this website unusable.
- If someone could anonymously make a claim to law enforcement about you and that was all that was needed to convict you, or law enforcement couldn’t identify someone they arrested while committing a crime, our system of laws would fall apart.
Bill