-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Disclaimer: Please take this as a work of science fiction, a short monologue by the character in a novel. It is meant to stimulate discussion and to express concerns that have recently turned from vague to clear, in my mind. I have great respect for the people out here, but I can not help myself. I very much want a secure network of remailers, but I fear the problem is the design, inflexible and non-private, of the internet itself. This is dedicated to those such as Phil Zimmerman and Pr0duct Cypher, individuals who seem to see the larger picture, that which involves humanity, not just internet culture 1994. -=New Secure Remailer Service Announcement=- For discussion purposes only until I post my mailbox address and buy that 128/256MB drive ;-) ! Ultimate in remailer technology. Only slightly slower than many Cypher remailers, but much less traceable. Up to 250MB at once. Encrypt your message with the (possibly anonymous) public key of a friend or contact, signing it with your anonymous secret key. Encrypt that, along with the friend's postal address, with my public key. Put it on a new DOS or Mac floppy, or 128/256MB Optical Disk, avoiding finger prints and DNA on the postage stamp. Send it with a fake return address from a pubic mailbox to my yet to be announced post office box. I will decrypt the forwarding address on my PowerBook, not at home, and mail it from various Manhattan street mailboxes, with no return address (or one you send me). I will then securely overwrite the file from my hard disk. Of course, you can include an anonymous encrypted return address as part of your message to the recipient. The cost is $5 cash, plus $1/MB of encrypted message to cover the CPU time. Express mail would in fact be AS fast as the serious Cypher remailers, but would cost you $20 since I have to pay in cash at a post office, or get a money order to use FedEx, and then make up a fake return address if you leave one out. Until a new generation of internet remailers are produced, I make claim to my remailer service being much more secure. There is also no need keeping logs to protect my liability, since no one knows that my remailer was where it came from. One of the most serious weakness of any internet remailer is that you tell someone spying on the recipient exactly which remailer site a piece of mail came from, as well as when. I asked about faking internet mail but was told that this was "frowned upon" for internet mail. Too bad. REALLY too bad. With mine, it could be any individual in NYC, and the time of day doesn't mean much. It thus involves a lot more than a few keystrokes on the assumed NSA internet logging database to trace it back to the sender. Fairly obvious and fairly illegal spying on me and the other manual remailers out there would be required, as well as opening mailboxes before the mailman arrived. A TEMPEST attack on a PowerBook in public in different locations just isn't going to happen very often. Bugging my PowerBook isn't possible since I always carry it with me (and know what it's insides look like in detail). Secure encryption being available to the common man is what will change the world. I'm not yet convinced that internet remailers will have a similar influence unless they are able to resist the presence of full site-to-site monitoring by the government and hackers, a thing which should thus be assumed by their designers. Cryptoanarchy doesn't mean the internet. It means encryption. Given that snail mail encrypted remailing is already possible, the reason for a new, secure remailer generation isn't really security but is speed, convenience, flexibility, and cost. The same reasons for ANY use of the internet. But current serious remailers are neither fast nor convenient, and they don't have a BILLION messages going through them a day to mix your secret messages into, like postal mail DOES. They tag mail as having BEEN remailed as well. Even when ALL e-mail is encrypted you haven't done anything for anonymity until all e-mail is also REMAILED, with no logs or remailer sites appearing in the headers. E-mail is free now. Remailing needs to be free too, or what advantage has it over snail mail, given that it does the same thing? The only way I can see all mail being remailed, assuming it is already all encrypted, is if every personal e-mail account was itself a remailer. I don't see this happening unless the Cypherpunks themselves write the software for the "data highway". Otherwise I will never trust remailers since as I've said to others, I can't SEE the wires. PGP is what's happening. Digital money too. But the INTERNET, even with (centralized) remailers is just a Big Brother nationwide wiretap. So don't use wires. What is my liability, if I am a remailer and the authorities intercept a message to a gangster? None, since they don't know I remailed it. Can any internet remailer be so lucky? I could say I don't KNOW if I remailed it (no logs), even if they find a return address as encrypted in my public key; "Any one of dozens of Manhattan snail remailers could have sent it." However, if your return address IS encrypted with my public key, law enforcement can, most likely LEGALLY, demand my pass phrase. Of course they'll only know the return address using the pass phrase and secret key of the receiver. Again though, this situation is BETTER security than internet remailers, since the pass phrase for the remailer is in my head, not plain text in a perl code. They can't secretly download my memory, or at least not YET ;-). Breaking into your remailer site without a trace is conceivable though. I'd find it similarly attractive but more rewarding than dumpster diving. Commercial sites are easiest, especially small high tech companies. Are these sites TEMPEST secure? Tempest based on simple radio receivers is primitive compared to what modern spectroscopy could conceivably do, even at a distance. I'd imagine ACTIVE spectrosopies could do much more or you could actively induce a current in a given direction at a given frequency. How about having your CPU mail me its secret key and pass phrase? Things like this are only getting easier, fast. VERY fast. Another reason to not trust fixed-location centralized remailers. I don't even like the idea of personal accounts on a Unix machine. Every laptop should be an internet node, and an encrypted remailer. Only when central remailers are no longer there to attack will we have safe anonymity without using snail remailing. Hell I can't even get more than three fucking e-mails in response when I ask for INFORMATION about the existing remailers. I thank Eli and Hal, but I guess the NSA doesn't hand out info on the dozen Cypherpunk remailers IT is running. Zero knowledge (yup), reputations (lowsy or non existent except for anon.penet.fi), information markets (selling remailer pass phrases and sendmail logs), anonymous networks (snail mail only), collapse of governments (yes, but not using the existing nationwide wiretap, er... internet). Fuck, I'm sounding like Detweiler. But I'm ranting for MORE cryptoanarchy. Another internet-like standardization such as that of e-mail headers, has very sadly crept into PGP itself, weakening it as the secure encryptor. PGP 2.3a still has no "random data block" output format, in which the ONLY way to even KNOW it's a PGP message is to successfully decrypt it. I asked about this on alt.security.pgp, generated little interest, but was told a future version may have this option (just gossip). I say it should be the STANDARD. Internet-like standards should NOT be the guiding force behind CRYPTOGRAPHIC standards. Get the fuck off the internet, and write me a real encryptor. How can steganography work if it's so easy to figure out if what is extracted is an encrypted message? Given the upcoming non-voluntary second generation Clipper, steg will have to become the norm. And don't port PGP to the Mac and Windows, port it FROM them; over 100 million strong and growing. "Five to one baby." News of the revolution will not be posted. Thanks for PGP. Thanks for the CPU. Like those Cypherpunk T-shirts though! Boot up and slam dance. Kewl! Nice sig! If my remailer, the ONLY acceptably secure encrypted remailer that exists, catches on, I may add a modem feature, involving pay phones. I've already written the needed secure code (none). And remember, security begins with people, not technology, always has, always will. -=Xenon=- P.S. gosub disclaimer. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3 iQCVAgUBLVM1wwSzG6zrQn1RAQF8kwP/YetocN9urSgB4X9u70ZABFeLawEkwu56 jFDWZgDG+Z/81vFkVWTC7gvfDDB4Rjy0qeEhuq187zeRJ3fKCRPkkHz7swDV3V+o RA9waKWz7tdxglkW98bJIKpC9rYp4lvtxPWgtAsLTs6b9tJqvXmp2S+OcjcyV6sE gKI25vPg5Ww= =zjED -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----