On Saturday, August 4, 2001, at 12:32 PM, jamesd@echeque.com wrote:
-- On 3 Aug 2001, at 20:59, Ray Dillinger wrote:
the point is, that's enough. Both endpoints on such a packet's route are participants, obviously. If they want to shut it down, and they have seen such a packet, they have two people they can shut down. Repeat ad nauseam, and the infrastructure is destroyed.
This assumes a unity and cohesion that lawless states are rarely capable of. If a government is so oppressive that it is doing that, government officials will have probably already stolen the wires for the copper, and will not have the technology to figure out what is going on over the ether.
Entrance and exit mixes can easily be set to be Usenet or other Net-based public posting and reading places. Kind of hard for the U.S.G. or the F.S.U. to shut down a newsgroup replicated across the world in many places. Also, "repeat ad nauseum" still carries costs. Even the lawyers in Washington can't easily shut down publishers like "The Progressive" or "The New York Times." It costs a lot of money to shut down a publisher. I see no particular reason why it will suddenly become cheap ("repeat ad nauseum") for lawyers to shut down tens of thousands of Web sites, publishers, mailing lists, message pools, and Democracy Walls. Especially, by the way, if those entry and exit sites are in other countries. --Tim May