-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Wei Dai writes:
Anonymous e-mail that goes through a chain of N remailers will cost at least N times as much bandwidth and have N times as much latency as normal e-mail. But e-mail is hardly the state-of-the-art of network communication, while anonymous e-mail IS the state of the art for anonymous communication. How long will it take for the technology of anonymous video conferencing to develope, for example? By then, of course, those who are not concerned with anonymity will probably have things such as full sensory virtual interaction.
At a very basic level, anonymous (not pseudonymous, like the remailers are) messages are *cheaper*, because they carry less information; they do not need to send the bits which identify the sender. This conversation seems to elide distinctions between low-level anonymity (where source information is simply not transmitted) and high-level anonymity, where source information is transmitted but is not used for social or political reasons. Anonymous remailers are considered "anonymous" because (some of us) agree that we won't treat the "From:" line as indicating the real author of the text below. We agree this because we know how remailers work; we know that (probably) the person who wrote the message isn't the same person as the owner of the "From:" address. When we say a message is "anonymous" we mean that its real author should not/cannot be connected with the text of the message. We could just as easily agree on an "Identify-Author:" header field by which authors could indicate whether or not they wished to be speaking "on the record" when they wrote the message. A multi-hop message where the "From:" line changes with each hop costs almost precisely what a multi-hop message would cost without the "From:" line changes. Folks feeling detail-oriented can calculate the cost of the CPU time to strip header information vs. the cost of sending that header information to the next hop. I don't care about the answer, so I'm not going to. Anonymous video conferencing is available now; go to Kinko's, pay cash for the use of their video conference room. Or, ask/convince the recipient to consider the conversation "off the record". Current remailer operators experience a cost in that they receive some amount of hassle and exposure to liability by running remailers; but this is merely a "cost" shifted from one person (the author) to another, the surrogate author. This may look like a cost of anonymity but it's more accurately described as the cost of being provocative or rude or illegal. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBLw8j133YhjZY3fMNAQGB5QP9HCgA2QiHLPVupVgOeU/Tez5SH8Ie3ch3 nSJreSYl3a97blPr/aI1Yx577EQuCwrHoyZKWWpVc/8u728i10gTbJPbavzpDBOw i3JawSt4+d/tMWBfLzYHzdrVALIcTZeGnmLLbfgzWzzC8NUDsDG/ppDB7sDq2ktf NiwvDeQzoYk= =oU42 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----