Bill O'Hanlon writes:
I half-expect Eric or Tim to jump in here to point out that this is one of those situations where you have to define who your enemy is, and to make sure that your efforts apply to the situation.
Well, if they won't, I will :-) You have to define your threats, or at least think about them a bit.
I run a remailer on a home Unix machine via a phone line UUCP feed. [...] block the following foes: my service provider and any node upstream of it, thieves/misguided law enforcement types, and phone taps. Encrypting something that I receive in the clear over an insecure line isn't useful.
It's still useful - it lets you protect yourself against attackers who seize your machine but aren't actively wiretapping. For instance, the thugs who raided Steve Jackson Games, etc. Wiretapping is a lot of work, and takes a better argument to a fancier judge than simple search warrants. Even if you are wiretapped, it lets you protect messages that got there before the wiretap started - it's not surprising to have messages stick around for a week in a uucp environment, and there are all your UUCP databases. There's also a legal problem to be addressed, since nobody's established whether remailer operators are common carriers or co-conspirators or RICO-racketeer (probably depends on the quality of lawyers you can afford.) Encrypting your disks makes it *much* harder for them to examine your system until you've had time to get a lawyer and do things in front of the judge instead of on their own in some back room. Bill Stewart