CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts -- This week's Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference seems almost fated not to succeed.
The annual gathering of the privacy digerati has been plagued by everything from a hotel under construction to poor management and a nor'easter that may be the worst storm the area has experienced in decades.
Blizzard conditions and high winds have snarled air traffic in the northeastern United States, closing airports, frustrating motorists, and preventing hundreds of would-be CFPers from showing up in time for the tutorials scheduled for Tuesday.
In response, conference chair Deborah Hurley rescheduled Tuesday's events for later this week and organized an informal, impromptu discussion instead.
The surprising thing: It worked.
As snow fell outside the windows of the first-floor hotel conference room, about 40 people who braved the wind and weather spent a cozy afternoon debating what identity means online and how to protect anonymity against government and corporate snoops.
Ian Goldberg, Zero Knowledge's chief scientist, said that anonymity should be viewed on a sliding scale, from complete anonymity to pseudonymity to complete disclosure.
Goldberg said that engineers should design protocols with as much anonymity as possible, since it's easier to release information than to take it back. "We should try to design them with as low (disclosure) as possible, even lower than we think we might need," said Goldberg, who last night drove through the storm with three colleagues and arrived at 1 a.m. EST.
Zero Knowledge holds some key patents in the area and last year launched a "NymIP" effort designed to spur the development of protocols that might use the company's technology or expertise.
Stephanie Perrin, a former Canadian bureaucrat who became Zero Knowledge's chief privacy officer, suggested using a different persona during different social encounters: "Splitting up their personalities into different nyms may be a good way to do things."
Dave Del Torto of the CryptoRights Foundation said that, as a consultant to law enforcement organizations, he learned that police see anonymity as a boon to criminals. CFP participants, he said, should not "disrespect" that point of view.
The first-day discussion capped months of management and logistical snafus: People who submitted proposals for panels never received responses, construction kept the Hyatt Regency's only bar from opening, and the conference website was briefly offline on Tuesday.
An announcement sent to hundreds of attendees exposed their e-mail addresses -- a poor showing for a conference devoted to privacy -- and topics this year lag months behind the news, rather than anticipating it. Free-market points of view are nearly absent from the agenda, leaving libertarian and conservative attendees grumbling.
But CFP is still widely regarded as the most influential privacy conference in the world. When the rescheduled kickoff of the conference takes place at noon on Wednesday, MIT's Ron Rivest -- the R in RSA Data Security -- will talk about the "current issues in cryptography."
Following Rivest is a panel discussion about the Council of Europe's controversial cybercrime treaty and electronic voting technology.
CFP continues through Friday.
