At 10:51 AM -0700 8/3/01, Ray Dillinger wrote:
On Fri, 3 Aug 2001, Tim May wrote:
and wait for the next time something happens if you're on DHCP, or they may have to get the cooperation of one or more other governments if your login trail runs outside their jurisdiction -- but ultimately, it's traceable.
You apparently don't even understand how even simple remailer chains work.
Hello, earth to Tim. (1) You can send anonymous mail by sending it through a remailer, but (2) The remailers themselves are not anonymous.
Are you dense? Do you understand the concept of nested, encrypted text blocks? While the remailers may be "non-anonymous," this certainly does not mean that an external attacker can know the mapping from N arriving messages (encrypted) to N' departing messages (also encrypted, but not the same pattern). Do we have to draw a picture? Do you think that knowing the locations of, for example, all of the remailers in the world means that messages can be traced through the network? Have you even _thought_ about these issues which were explained a decade ago? Do you know about DC-Nets?
(3) If the remailers *were* anonymous, they could not operate because then the users would not know where to send their mails.
Actually, this is false. Pipenets and Blacknets don't require knowing locations/identities of nodes. Using alt.anonymous.messages is increasingly common. Go look at it if this is new to you. Left as an exercise, though oft-discussed here in past years, is how to post messages untraceably to it and how to read messages untraceably. (I used a variant of this for Blacknet in 1993.)
As long as the remailers themselves are traceable, make no mistake: they exist only because the lions have not yet passed a law against them.
You cannot have encryption technologies advancing and leaving the law behind, so long as any vital part of the infrastructure you need is traceable and pulpable by the law.
You haven't even bothered to think about the technical issues, have you? --Tim May -- Timothy C. May tcmay@got.net Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns