Tim Moors offers an interesting suggestion that a jury should be used to decide when a remailer operator should pierce the anonymity of an especially egregious poster. But I could see a way this could fail. If a post really is terrible, one might expect the poster to have taken some extra precautions. What if Tim's jury starts up, deliberates, argues, goes back and forth, and finally decides that the real email address of the poster should be revealed. When this is done, it may well turn out that the original email address was forged, or was another remailer which doesn't keep logs! This would mean that no replies to the message would have worked, but if the posting was harmful enough the poster might have been willing to give up the capability to receive private replies (he can always read followup postings on the newsgroup). In a case like this, all the effort on the part of the jury would have been wasted. We should also realize that, in a sufficiently bad case, there may well have been law enforcement involvement, anyway. If the harm is "real world" (not just something net folk would object to) then the jury activity may be superfluous, as court orders could have been used to force the remailer to reveal his mappings. I wonder, though, if Tim's jury could be married with Marc Horowitz's idea to have remailer operators support anonymous posting only from "approved" pseudonyms. Marc's idea was that people would literally buy approval of given digital pseudonyms (e.g. public keys). This approval would be granted by the operator(s) themselves, or buy some other agencies, and would be shown by a public log of signed pseudonymous public keys. Each message through the remailer would have to be digitally signed by one of these approved keys. (The approval process would be _completely anonymous_, that is, there would be _no_ correspondence between real identities and approved pseudonyms.) Then, if someone posted abusive messages, their approval could be cancelled. Their digital pseudonym (e.g. public key) would be removed from the list of approved "nyms" (I like Eli's shorthand). This way they could not post any more, at least unless they were willing to spend more of their hard-earned money to buy approval of another nym. This way we get the parallels to the postal service. If the approval agencies donated their earnings then this would not represent commercialization so it could even be done today. (Another thought along these lines would be to use Karl Barrus' digital bank to buy approval. I'm not sure this would work, but it's worth considering.) One weakness of Marc's proposal was what criteria would be used to yank approval of nyms. A person might be reluctant to pay real money for an approval certificate if he knew that it could be removed just because some blowhard complained about one of his postings. And remailer operators would be constantly forced to make judgement calls (as I gather Julf is today). Perhaps Tim's juries could serve this purpose. People would get their approval certificate removed only upon a jury's recommendation. The jury could even be specified in advance, composed of respected but fair members of the net community. If people had this kind of assurance that their posting privileges would be lost only under a fair system like this, they would be more willing to pay for an anonymous posting certificate. Hal Finney