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Original Paragraph:

Put all of these technologies together and we may end up with a world where your realspace identity is entirely public, with everything about you known and readily accessible, while your cyberspace activities, and information about them, are entirely private--with you in control of the link between your cyberspace persona and your realspace identity.

Source: http://patrifriedman.com/prose-others/fi/commented/Future_Imperfect.html#Put_all_of_these_technologies_together_and_we_may_

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[Fri Oct 29 15:44:34 EDT 2004-302] jomama:
The link between my cyberspace identity and realspace I've already done...at multiple levels, creating multiple shielding. It's not that difficult anymore.

I expect my realspace identity is public knowledge now.
[Wed Apr 26 03:15:35 PDT 2006-115] Raphael (NOSPAMraphfrk@netscape.net.NOSPAM):
That is not necessarily true. With enough effort the link between the cyber indentity and real identity of everyone can be determined.

The most basic example is that if you watch everyone's computer monitor and keyboard, you can pick up their passwords when they log onto sites.

Ultimately, for any secret communications, the person must decrypt the information at some point. Even something like neural implants which encrypt/decrypt the information as close to the brain as possible might not be safe as the signal that goes to/from them from/to your brain would be clear and thus (potentially) hackable.

It may end up in an arms race with tech being developed on both sides. Powerful organisations (both government and private) are likely to expend effort breaking publicaly available privacy tech and also ensuring that their privacy tech isn't breakable.

Exactly, where the balance falls would likely depend on the cost of circumventing the privacy tech and the cost of the privacy tech itself. If it is expensive to break the privacy tech, then it is not likely to happen on a large scale. Likewise, if secure privacy tech is expensive, most people won't bother and then there won't be a crowd to hide amoung. In that case, breaking the say 0.1% of the population that use the privacy tech might be worth the effort.
[Sun May 21 13:03:01 PDT 2006-140] Daniel Nagy (NOSPAMnagydani@epointsystem.org.NOSPAM):
There's one crucial problem with this, admittedly very attractive, vision: using computers is for now and will stay for a long time a real-world activity. If a camera is watching all your keystrokes (or recording all you brainwaves -- there's no difference until one learns to preform the arithmetics required for public key crypto in mind), then the secrecy of your cyberspace identity is moot.
One can imagine some implant, which would do the public key crypto within humans so that they can control it without any useful side-channel information that can be detected and recorded by outside devices, but that raises the issue brought to public attention by the fiasco with 2004 S-class Mercedes: it used a fingerprint scanner for identification, which lead to several owners losing their thumbs to carjackers.
In my experience as an information security professional, I have seen far more breaches of security due to stolen keys and passwords than those involving attacks on cryptography itself. It does not matter how difficult it is to break the crypto; it is the link between the human being and the device performing cryptographic operations on the human's behalf that is most vulnerable.
Barring a breaktrough in training or genetic engineering that would enable humans to do crypto in mind, this weak link will remain an obstacle to David's vision.

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