I’m not sure I quite understand you, but I think you may be underestimating the protocol.
Wikipedia says:
In the original paper, Rivest, Shamir, and Tauman described ring signatures as a way to leak a secret. For instance, a ring signature could be used to provide an anonymous signature from “a high-ranking White House official”, without revealing which official signed the message. Ring signatures are right for this application because the anonymity of a ring signature cannot be revoked, and because the group for a ring signature can be improvised.
It seems to me that this should straightforwardly generalize from the White House staff to Evergreen professors, Megacorp employees, etc. The only requirement is that there are enough public keys available that you can put together a decent crowd to hide in. If you know someone’s public key, they cannot stop you from signing their name next to yours (which leaves both of you with plausible deniability).
If you run an organization, you can just require that all employees generate a key pair. Boom. Spiral-proof organization, right? The emperor of such an organization is less likely to end up walking around naked, right?
I’m not sure I quite understand you, but I think you may be underestimating the protocol.
Wikipedia says:
It seems to me that this should straightforwardly generalize from the White House staff to Evergreen professors, Megacorp employees, etc. The only requirement is that there are enough public keys available that you can put together a decent crowd to hide in. If you know someone’s public key, they cannot stop you from signing their name next to yours (which leaves both of you with plausible deniability).
If you run an organization, you can just require that all employees generate a key pair. Boom. Spiral-proof organization, right? The emperor of such an organization is less likely to end up walking around naked, right?
That’s the thing, this is all based on the assumption that the people running an organization want people to express themselves.
That is a very poor assumption in a lot of organizations. Silence spirals gotta start somewhere.