-------------------------- In order to preserve anonymity and thwart traffic analysis in chained remailings, it would seem useful to include a very BUSY remailer in the chain, and try to ensure that the message arrives at the busiest time of the day for that remailer, from a traffic standpoint. Hitting a remailer at a slack time when, let's say, only one message arrives over a period of several hours would seem most unwise. Can some of the major remailer operators make available some "sanitized" traffic stats of average traffic by hour and day of the week? The vox.hacktic.nl remailer sounds useful in this regard, since it apparently uses a UUCP link, and batches up accumulated messages, both incoming and outgoing. When are the "best" times for chained traffic to arrive there? Can someone familiar with remailer software answer something? When a message is encrypted, using the "Encrypted: PGP" header, will everything after the end of the encrypted message itself be ignored? I ask, because this seems like a good place to introduce "padding" into the message length to thwart detection of identical messages, assuming that such extraneous material wouldn't screw something up. What's the best strategy for utilizing a given group of remailers in a chain? Which ones would be most advantageous as the FIRST link in the chain, since this is the one link that has direct address to the originator's address. How would "someone", hypothetically, follow the chain backwards? Let's say that a message traveled down the chain A -> B -> C. Couldn't someone with enough clout ask "C" where a certain message (based on header data) originated, find out it was relayed by "B", ask "B" for the source, etc. and trace it all the way back to the source? What, if anything, would prevent that? For the sake of argument, let's assume a worst-case scenario: a chained message to "president@whitehouse.gov" containing a seemingly credible threat to harm the President of the United States, or perhaps a chained message, ultimately posted to Usenet via a mail-to-news gateway, containing the first part, with more installments threatened, of certain highly classified U.S. military secrets. IOW, a scenario where powerful agencies are motivated enough to invest considerable resources in tracking the culprit down. While we might agree that in those two cases, the persons deserve to be caught, what's to prevent a President or other highly placed federal bureaucrat from MISusing those same resources on something less critical, such as tracking down and persecuting someone who anonymously posts "Clinton is a prick" or "Clipper sucks"? ----------------------------