I was responding to Bill and Lance's comments in regard to forgery victims being set up as targets of retribution. I think references to "deplorable content" indicate some measure of judgement in regard to defining what is considered 'abuse' of a remailer.
This excerpt made clear for me the distinction: 1. There is a temporary problem with forgery & retribution, but this goes away when the populace gets a clue about authentication. In this case, technology and a little cultural learning solve a social problem. In practice, this cultural awareness could be encouraged by spamming the masses with letters from various interesting forged parties, e.g., irs.gov. Or spoofing a public news streams and messing with the stock market. I wonder if the recent classified government report on infohacking the infrastructure included these pranks? But enough gedankenpranking. Getting a copy of PGP integrated into everyone's grandmother's GUI email clients, so that this is widely used and understood by the masses, is the positive way to do this. 2. There is an everpresent truly social problem with people who want to control the configuration of other people's bits. This problem is solvable by a set of strongly-enforced rules (e.g., "Freedom of speech" -more generally, freedom of information storage and manipulation in any form) which would have priority over the behavior of the mobs (e.g., in the voting booth). In the US we're supposed to have this but there is some question ---perhaps we need to hold lawmakers personally criminally liable when they pass unconstitutional laws--- however the architecture is sound if implemented correctly. So in the future we'll not trust anything without a public key, censors will be laughed at instead of getting congressional time, and anonymity will be commonplace and as understood as digital signatures. I guess this list is pretty much an ill-tempered view of the future.. David Honig honig@alum.mit.edu --------------------------------------------------- If we can prevent the government from wasting the labours of the people under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy. -TJ