From: IN%"tallpaul@pipeline.com" 10-MAR-1996 15:48:49.98
In other words, this or that person acts as a (perhaps temporary) remailer from their regular account, gets the material encrypted, and massages it in various ways before sending it out. The point is to increase entropy by creating the technological base for an enormous proliferation of remailer/anon tech at the lowest possible price.
Internationally know "elite" (in the good sense of the word) remailers are by definition known, and thus easy to monitor. Mixmaster etc sites popping up from the home computers in the rec rooms of suburbia are not.
I have been considering the problem of making sure that these non-elite remailers are actually used by enough people to defeat traffic analysis, be useful, et al. Just posting the location & key in a public place is good, but leads to the possibility of somebody cracking down (especially if it's in someplace like Singapore). The alternatives are: A. Send out the address in some form of reply block, along with the key. If someone wants to use the remailer, they include the reply block at the appropriate stage. Thus, the remailer decoding the reply block (probably an "elite" remailer) will know the address, but none others will. B. Send it to one remailer with a setup such that it will encrypt some percentage of messages coming through it with the key of the "stealthed" remailer and mail them to that remailer. Again, whoever operates that remailer will (if they look) know the location. This can also add length to chains even when others don't know the stealth remailer exists. C. Send it to one of the web-page or other automatic chaining facilities with their automatically using it in some percentage of the cases. Again, this trusts the maintainers of the chaining facility. In all of these cases, one would not want the stealth remailer to be the last one in the chain. But such remailers can still help make things more difficult for an attacker. -Allen