Umm.. Isn't all this talk about anonymous remail abuse really beging for an pseudonymous/anonymous certificate service?
Well, yes. There has been a huge conflagration on the pem-dev list lately concerning naming issues, X.500, etc. I am somewhat disturbed by what I see as a fundamental mentality of PEM: the desire to lift intact all existing political, economic, and social relationships into the electronic domain. Naming is done in the ISO way, that is, subordinated to existing national boundaries. Individuals are expected to be registered in the naming hierarchy. Identities in the electronic world are expected to map to entities in the real world. Does this not seems fundamentally limiting to the potential of the electronic world? I agree with Tim that we have made good progress. But we need more than simple remailers. We need people to use remailers, and we need to make that easy to do. We need key distribution mechanisms. We need better meeting spaces than mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups and private mail. We need markets and contracts. If we wish to re-envision the world, we must do so while there is time to implement it. Let us proceed quickly. Onward. Eric