Anonymity and mass crowd

To stop the Israeli attack in Gaza area, one of the interesting tactics from the Palestinian is building a human shield: gather together as a bigger crowd when the attack is about to happen. The crowd is a mixture of the militant leaders to school girls. The action of gathering as a mass crowd deterred several Israeli air force attack since it can cause civilian casualty. (BBC News)

For me, this is one of the example of the idea of anonymity in the context of Israel - Palestine conflict. By gathering as a one big crowd, individual profiles blend into a bigger entity, the Palestinians. It gets hard to recognize who is causing the trouble and who is innocent. The individual anonymity is achieved by this action, and eventually prevents the adversary attack.

In anonymous networking system, the nodes are grouped together to lower the possibility to find clear target. If the group is bigger, it is better. It is hard to find who is doing illegal activities in the group even though the activity is coming out of the group. It is also unfair to accuse whole group as guilty because innocent individuals are involved and it is not fair. Mostly, the effort to find the target goes back to zero. The Palestinian movement of gathering together as a mass crowd to stop the Israeli attack is the physical representation of this idea in different context.