On the morning of Thurs, 26-Nov-98 at 10:17:48 -0800, holist unwisely said:
"This is not too widely publicised", he went on to say, "but all insiders are aware that all e-mail anonymiser services in the U.S. are operated by the FBI."
Quite a few of the messages to cypherpunks seem to come from anonymous remailers in the US.
Comments?
Comment? COMMENTS? How about this, FUDSpreaderBreath: Stick Fischer and his claims up your ass. This is not too widely publicised <whisper, whisper>, I went on to say, but all insiders are aware that this kind of FUD is unadulterated ratshit. While there is no doubt _some_ official presence in the remailer network, the proposition advanced here is preposterous.
He went on to say it took them about ten minutes to discover with the help of their American friends which account the mail was originating from.
It would probably take more than ten minutes just to find the phone number of their FBI contact, much less find him at his desk and not humping some summer intern, much less expect that he would know a remailer from his no doubt ultra-tight asshole, much less have him run down the pointy-haired manager to give him permission to find and communicate with a suitably cleared propellor head, much less find that the remailer in question was, indeed, operated either by them or by their snaky friends over at the NSA, much less check their surreptitious logs for the offending traffic, much less find that that traffic indeed did not originate from another remailer _not_ under their control, etc. etc. Ten minutes, in bureaucrat time, is about what it takes to rub two brain cells together to make a realistic approximation of a human thought. By this time, action in the physical universe is still a long, long way off. This report is likely to be nothing more than a complete fabrication of the facts, even if the underlying case was real.
just before the Berlin wall came down, the two Germanies agreed to provide the FBI with direct access to the backbone of the German telephone network
Except that telephone networks don't have "backbones." More fantasy. And there was no single "German telephone network," and probably still isn't.
it is easier for the FBI to listen to German phonecalls than it is for the German authorities themselves), which, in addition to costing a horrendous amount of money, resulted in a bunch of data every day that took them two days to process.
Highly doubtful. First, it's not in the FBI's brief to be doing large-scale foreign-based surveillance of foreign telephone systems. Second, there is no reason to believe that the FBI would have a substantially easier time of processing large amounts of resulting data than would the Germans. The Germans know how to use computers, too, and being congenitally statist, they no doubt have more facilities in place closer to the sources of information than do U.S. authorities at home or abroad. This claim also ignores the fact that the FBI have their hands full right at home and don't have the resources to be conducting large-scale surveillance of the phone calls of entire foreign nations. Oh, sure, we see increasing extraterritorial operation by small numbers of FBI, but that doesn't equate to monitoring the entire German phone system(s) or a significant segment thereof and identifying some nitwit dialing in to AOL. Is AOL even _in_ Germany? If so, what is it called, GOL? Gassholes On Line? The idea that a state security apparatus would find an AOL account to be a significant obstacle is laughable.
So, Fischer said, it would have been hopeless if the fellow had not owed the German tax authority one and a half million Marks - the tax authority busted him (following the lines of their own, independent investigation), took his computer, and he was busted.
So we are to believe that after monitoring the entire German telephone system to identify who was calling in and using a particular AOL account, and successfully pegging him, the Germans were powerless to do anything, and had to call down their Tax Zombies to have an excuse to grab the guy's computer, which presumably then provided them with the "evidence" against him. Right. If the German authorities overhear in a bar that you might have forbidden literature, they will be there the same night, ransacking your home. How is it that with evidence that a certain person was the user of an AOL account they had identified as the source of extortionary messages, they were powerless to break down his door? I could admire the FUD spreaders just a teensy bit if they weren't so completely brain dead. They can't even invent a plausible FUD scenario. That the USG is operating one or more remailers is a no-brainer. That they are operating _all_ U.S. remailers is beyond the realm of reality. That the FBI has more than a casual hand in such things is not likely. Running remailers would be right up the NSA's, uh, alley, but maintaining a traffic watch on virtually _all_ remailers worldwide would be much more their style. Now _there's_ an opportunity for the spooks to have some real fun, though it's anything but certain they would be willing to "share," for a variety of reasons. The capabilities they have are protected as secrets even more than the information they gather. FUDBusterMonger It Ain't FUD til I SAY it's FUD!