At 12:11 AM 3/4/96, Just Rich wrote:
However, I also have no doubt that Strassmann and Marlow are spreading disinformation and exaggerating their capabilities in an attempt to break the web of trust and incite a witch hunt. It won't work. The answer in any case is more use of remailers, not less. Just turn up the noise level. You already know that nothing is 100% secure, but you do what you can. It's a war of attrition.
Only the shadow and a few bureaucrats know whether spooks have infiltrated the remailer operators' web of trust. I'd imagine the payoff in suggesting the possibility would lie in breeding mistrust not among operators but, rather, among potential users: diminishing the use and propagation of remailers would lower the overall noise level, making case-by-case interception and cracking that much more manageable. But this hall-of-mirrors speculation is really just misguided FUD: improving protocols, more remailers, and expanding webs of trust are the prize to keep our eyes on. Ted