At 4:56 PM 5/20/96, Rev. Mark Grant, ULC wrote:
With regard to the problems of remailers being shut down when we want long-lived addresses, wouldn't seperating the input and output be one possibility? That is (like Hal's Alumni remailer) you'd send mail to 'remailer@anon.ai' and it would be forwarded via a disposable account elsewhere. All messages would appear to come from 'disposable@foo.com' and if that account was shut down a new one could be opened to replace it while incoming mail simply backed up at the main remailer account.
This is a very good idea. It keeps the advantages of having persistent accounts (which other users, chaining programs, etc. can use) while making it appear that the mail is coming from another account. "Security through obscurity," I hear you snort. Well, not really. The _legal_ account is the one that an unhappy recipient sees on the "From:" line. The Church of Scientology sees "disposable@foo.com" and fires off a letter to foo.com requesting that foo.com cause this account to disappear. So it does, but "transient@bar.com" picks up the slack. An idea worth trying, of formally/legally separating the functions. Of course, in some sense this is a special case of having disposable accounts for "instant remailers" (see recent thread on this).
The only potential problem I could see would be that the disposable ISP might have logs which could track the outgoing messages back to the other account. You'd also obviously need to open the disposable account anonymously or using an ISP who'd protect your identity.
Traffic analysis will be quite easy to do, of course, as all mail sent to the persistent address comes out of the "disposable@foo.com" address. Q.E.D. (Hal, to use him as the example, could start using his own choice of remailer hops to accomplish much the same result. We've talked about this for a long time, too. If I ran a remailer, I think I'd route *all* traffic leaving my site through at least one other remailer...kind of a "hot potato" effect. Of course, if _everyone_ did this, an infinite loop would result. Lots of interesting twists, though, as messages could be set to "leak out" of the loops.) But this scheme, here, and Mark's scheme, are variants on the idea of trying to make the remailers less clearly-identifiable targets. --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."