Here's a few answers:
- Proving beyond reasonable doubt that you were the person using a web service merely because of your IP address is almost impossible if you have a good lawyer (see some current RIAA cases) and enough money. Wireless access points and trojans, as well as the possibility that someone else was using your computer, make it very difficult to establish that you yourself were accessing content by IP address alone.
- IP address is not everything and many people don't realize this. Take a look at
this. I bet your browser will be unique or close to unique. This combined with the IP make it rather likely that it can be established that a specific computer made the request. It still doesn't mean that you were the one using your computer, though.
- PoA says that your IP can be traced back to your identity. That's not true; it can be traced back to a specific computer in certain cases (and not all cases by far).
- If PoA wants to ensure anonymity, they'd have to purge IP records as well as ANY logs related to that transaction (server logs, application logs, anything that contains HTTP request information).
- If you want to make a post that is reasonably anonymous, download and boot from one of the various linux boot CDs and access PoA from there using a free wifi connection (like at a coffee store). This is still not perfectly anonymous because there could be security cameras at that store (better park your car outside), etc., but it's going to take a lot of effort to trace this back to your computer and it will be incredibly hard to establish your identity as the person making the web request.
....and so on. This is a complicated topic
-Felix
