At 8:43 PM +0200 8/3/01, Eugene Leitl wrote:
On Fri, 3 Aug 2001, Ray Dillinger wrote:
(2) The remailers themselves are not anonymous.
No, but to shut them down you have to know where they are, and to make your intent known to operators of such.
The remailers could reside in a state with a weak mutual enforcibility (Eastern Block successor states, Israel, developing countries). The remailers could be physically hidden in a large facility (of course, you could always whip up a firewall filter blocking them), or be connecting via 802.11b and successors. The remailers could be packaged as part of a well-behaved worm, thus overwhelming detection and enforcement capabilites.
Just so. And some of the recent "remailers can't work" critics (Dillinger, Farr) are breathtakingly ignorant of what was common knowledge in 1992. Worse, they haven't heeded recommendations that they get themselves up to speed. There is no sign that even the technologies described above (wireless, throwaways, worm-based, surreptitious, etc.) are needed to achieve excellent untraceability. A distributed set of remailers in N different jurisdictions is quite robust against prosecutorial fishing expeditions, though not as robust as we want against attacks by much more capable adversaries. Ways to increase robustness have been discussed many times. (Increase N, increase pool sizes at each stage, adopt constant-bandwidth approaches like Pipenet, throw in wireless and "rooms full of remailers" approaches, even adopt DC-Net methods as cores for sub-nets.) Dillinger and Farr have described only sophomoric attacks. Even the remailers of 1995-6 defeated the Scientologists. Crap about IP addresses being traceable is just obfuscation to cover basic ignorance of how remailer networks work. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May tcmay@got.net Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns