Summary: Encrypting the cypherpunks list make no difference in the security of information dispersal, but may make a large difference in local security and as a spur to software development.
It would be nice, however, to set up crypto I/O connection OPTIONS to the list, as an incentive for lazy people like me to figure out how to get PGP and mail filters set up.
Yes!
Michael, here is a word from your friendly neighborhood list maintainer. I don't have time to work on this, and neither to the people who run toad.com. So it's not going to happen on toad for a while. The good news is that it doesn't have to. You yourself can write the code! The code for the existing cypherpunks remailer is all you need to get started. Here's how. You subscribe to cypherpunks and then forward the list mail, encrypted, to all the people who have subscribed with you for an encrypted version of the cypherpunks mail. With the cypherpunks remailer, you can do all this with your own account. It is a pretty good skeleton for the creation of email servers out of user accounts. You don't need your sysadmin's cooperation to get it running, although you may need their blessing to keep it running. You can implement a listserv type operation if you want, with automatic subscribe/unsubscribe and add all the options you want to it. You'll have to deal with the bounce messages, of course, but you can rwrite software to deal with that. Someone who wants to provide digest service can to a similar thing for digestification. There have been lots of people over the course of the list history who have wanted encryption and digests. I would suggest that those who want them convince someone to run a secondary service to provide them with these services. Eric