On Sun, 19 Nov 1995, Greg Broiles wrote:
I think adopting a submissive or apologetic stance with respect to the operation of a remailer is a mistake. What we do is protected by the First amendment, supports a 200+ year tradition of anonymous political speech in America, provides a valuable service to a worldwide community, and can help avoid the very abuse they are accused of facilitating. The child who was the
[extremely lucid comments clipped to save bandwidth] Agreed, wholeheartedly. The above paragraph would be a perfect candidate for wide disemination across the net. The facts are that to eliminate the "abusive" mail would require crippling the remailer system to an unacceptable degree. Therefore we as operators are in a position of being forced to either tolerate messages that we may disagree (strongly) with, shut down the remailers, or resort to inadequate 40bit encryption and psuedo-anonymous Penti.fi remailing. (no offense to Julf intended..) I see nothing submissive or apologetic about pointing this fact out in a focused and organised way. In fact, making this fact plain might actually limit the number of people using the remailers to harrass other users. If general oppinion is that remailer operators accept and condone /all/ forms of communication, without regard for it potential effects, why shouldnt the spammer take advantage of our generosity? Certainly being PC should not be the primary consideration in any undertaking, but the united states (and other nations) have well paid and well organised spin doctors working to convince the public that cryptographers and remail operators are "bad" people who's only purpose is to aid pedophiles and other criminals in carrying out their dastardly deeds. Ignoring the political implications of operating a remailer is simply foolish. Public oppinion is going to be an important consideration when the laws come to the table. Sure, we could move the remailers off shore, but why do that unless we have to? The idea of being a "cryptorebel", or an underground warrior for peace and privacy is certainly romantic, but i'd like to think that it doesnt have to be that way. Then again, i didnt need propaganda to convince me that I needed privacy. Maybe im just strange..