A really weird idea of totalitarianism

According to Helsingin Sanomat, Jaron Lanier warns that anonymous Internet leads to totalitarianism.

That's a weird idea. I think rather the opposite: the official tendency to require that everyone must be authenticated, everyone must be trackable - these are things I traditionally associate with totalitarian regimes. In the German Democractic Republic, typewriters needed to be registered. Not just typists. Now some seem to be willing to have a system where you give your fingerprint or iris scan or a DNA sample before you can log in. The fingerprint could then be compared against the prints collected for biometric passports (which were, when making the law require them when applying for passports, never ever going to be given away to police use.)

Is Jaron Lanier a bit nuts, or is he just being seriously misrepresented by HS? I suspect the latter.

Jacob Söderman is a n00b

HS tells us that Jacob Söderman compared new Finnish legislation to Nazi Germany. Söderman has been well respected, but apparently he is quite unaware of the 1990 Godwin's Law.

If you do reductio ad Hitlerum too soon, you sound really newbie. This applies even in the parliament.