It's debatable which type of privacy is a minimal next layer out from
obscurity. In the responses to the combinatorial "privacy by obscurity", we
talked about targeting, classification of decoders, invertibility of the
encoder, etc. My guess is most of us dorks would want to leap to cryptography.
But I *think* [†] the most natural (understandable in layman's terms) 2nd order
privacy would be a category that spans anonymity, deniability, and ambiguity.
My 1st example would be authors who felt they had to shroud their messages to
avoid being killed by the church or state. And I'd also include futurists,
mystics, and cultists who want to hedge their predictions. (Note that a
scientist hedges their predictions for entirely different reasons than a
cultist hedges theirs. But they're still hedging.) Poets and novelists
purposefully broaden their target audience using encoding schemes that produce
ambiguous expressions. Subcultures and underground revolutionaries use
ambiguity and deniability to send messages to their in-group ("dog whistles").
If we buy into Lakoff's idea, Trump stumbles into this with his use of
language. Etc.
The technique involves anonymizing the *encoder* so that given any particular
expression, it's difficult to pin down which encoder was actually used to
generate that expression. (This is nothing more than the inverse problem for
gen-phen maps.)
So, the 1st order privacy (by obscurity) focuses on the combinatorial
explosion, given an expression how many ways can it be decoded. (The map is 1
to many, one encoder, many possible decoders.) The 2nd order privacy
(anonymizing) simply adds uncertainty to the classification of decoders. (The
map is many to many, implying some kind of [quasi]independence between the
paths from domain to range. [‡])
In order to pull this off, the collection of encoders (2 encoders is as high as
I can work with myself) has to be chosen such that the generated expression can
be *plausibly* decoded in only 1 way. So, e.g. I think Spinoza fails to meet
the criterion because it's just too debatable whether or not he really meant
God when he used the string "God". Should we throw him in the dungeon or not?
But someone like HP Lovecraft can be plausibly read *either* as a member of the
Freemasons *or* just a cool fantasy author. Or, Rachel Maddow can be read as a
lefty conspiracy theorist *or* a diligent detail-pointer-outer. The disjunction
has to carry through the encoders <-> decoders map to at least a plausible
extent. This partially defeats targeting and forces the hacker to use more
sophisticated decoding attacks.
[†] Extra emphasis for the word "think" this time. I'm still unclear on how to
compose these types of privacy to make this "holographic" principle strongest.
It should be clear how advocates of the principle (EricC and Nick) can defeat
the 1st order (by obscurity). As SteveS points out, targeting comes to mind.
Surveil the target, Frank, long enough (all the way back to 1st grade!) and
completely enough and you will be able to reconstruct his memory of anyone he
met in 6th grade.
[‡] I don't think 2nd order privacy is a many to 1 encoder to decoder map,
which is the way we think of anonymous trolls on the internet. It's possible
that 1st order privacy (1-many) has a many-1 map as some sort of dual ... maybe
that's a way to think about epistemology (how the person understands the world
where the world is the encoder and the person is the decoder).
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