That leaves the question what kind of organization might give their members ring signatures.
A ring signature is computed from your own private key and whatever public keys you can find. It’s not something your employer gives you. An employer could fire you for having a public key I guess, but that doesn’t seem like a hard crux for what I’m asking about here.
Some academic organizations might have values that are compatible with having their members being able to speak anonymously while being able to identify as members of the organization.
Well, imagine being a professor at Harvard, and being able to publish a statement that says,
Skub is probably fine. Anti-skub activists are caught up in a moral panic.
Signed: ChristianKI of Harvard University OR Alice Abramson of Amherst University OR Bob Benson of UC Berkeley OR Carol Cook of Cornell University OR...
Shouldn’t this cause a marginal emboldenment of the not-anti-skub contingent at any of those universities? Any skub-tolerator who reads the statement could think, “well clearly I’m not the only one”. If they read two such statements with no overlap of names, they could think “well, clearly there are at least three of us”. I can immediately see practical issues wit this, but is there some strong theoretical argument for why this can’t scale up to the point at which it substantially impacts the level of silence?
Okay, I got it. It seems like your citation of Wikipedia is obfuscating as it doesn’t describe what’s required for calculating the ring signature when you suggest that it provides clarification.
It seems a key question that’s not answered in the Wikipedia page would be whether you can reuse existing private/public keypairs.
If you can reuse existing private/public keypairs, this solution should be able to scale in communities that do publish keys for communicating in an encrypted way with each other.
A ring signature is computed from your own private key and whatever public keys you can find. It’s not something your employer gives you. An employer could fire you for having a public key I guess, but that doesn’t seem like a hard crux for what I’m asking about here.
Well, imagine being a professor at Harvard, and being able to publish a statement that says,
Shouldn’t this cause a marginal emboldenment of the not-anti-skub contingent at any of those universities? Any skub-tolerator who reads the statement could think, “well clearly I’m not the only one”. If they read two such statements with no overlap of names, they could think “well, clearly there are at least three of us”. I can immediately see practical issues wit this, but is there some strong theoretical argument for why this can’t scale up to the point at which it substantially impacts the level of silence?
Okay, I got it. It seems like your citation of Wikipedia is obfuscating as it doesn’t describe what’s required for calculating the ring signature when you suggest that it provides clarification.
It seems a key question that’s not answered in the Wikipedia page would be whether you can reuse existing private/public keypairs.
If you can reuse existing private/public keypairs, this solution should be able to scale in communities that do publish keys for communicating in an encrypted way with each other.