Blanc Weber makes many excellent comments and raises good questions in the post titled "Re: Virtual assasins and lethal remailers" dated 9/18/94. I would summarize the gist of that post as questioning the value or even possibility of attempting to predict social dynamics. Today, Hal Finney writes:
Anonymous remailers as presently constructed will be almost completely ineffective against any significant government attempts to surveil email traffic.... ...Instead, anonymous remailers are clearly targetted against non-government traffic analysis, generally local associates, system operators, employers, supervisors, and so on.
I think that here is an excellent example of how a consideration of social dynamics can lead to suggestions for action today. Even if we cannot really hope to control or predict the reactions of society, this shouldn't excuse us from doing what we can. In this particular case, Hal points out that it is really the relative insecurity of remailers today which makes them unthreatening to the government and society at large. If cypherpunks successfully deployed a network of remailers which used message padding, message reordering, etc. so that they were secure against even government level monitoring, then we could expect to see the government/society to become quite alarmed by them and attempt to regulate and control them... probably successfully. Anonymous remailers certainly are useful and valuable even in their current form. I perceive that many cypherpunks would not question the assumption that making them even more secure would obviously be a desirable thing. Yet it might be precisely this course of action which would most quickly lead to the rapid imposition of controls on their use. Doug ___________________________________________________________________ Doug Cutrell General Partner doug@OpenMind.com Open Mind, Santa Cruz ===================================================================