petard wrote:
Along these same lines, mightn't a TLA or similar induce someone downstream of them to spam the cypherpunks remailers and collect the identities of those who complain?
That's got to be the dumbest thing I've ever heard of. No TLA would do that. They'd simply watch upstream of each node. They can wait for outgoing messages and collect email addresses to their heart's content.... By definition, if you've subscribed to cypherpunks, you can expect all of the TLA's to at least know your email address. If anything, you can blame the slew of anti-SCO and non-SCO related virii for the lack of messages... If you were going to pull some half assed conspiracy theory, you might have come up with something more original - like "Maybe the TLA's are sending the virii so as to choke off the lists..." But that's dumb as well for far more obvious reasons: See, the cypherpunks is a gold mine for the TLA's. All they have to do is subscribe, listen, and wait. At some point, some poor dumb nutcase like Jim Bell will do something silly. The polyester suited knights will hit the champale and have a nice party on his ass... Man, the collective IQ's of the posters on this list has certainly been dropping lower and lower... sheesh!