On Wed, 12 Dec 2001, Faustine wrote:
Back to remailers: this might have a boneheadedly obvious answer, but is there a role for non-publicized privately-run remailer networks to serve as a "privacy buffer" before putting messages thorugh the public remailer system?
For example, if I had the hardware, software, phone lines, internet connections and time to run multiple autonomous mixmaster remailers out of my basement to route my own messages (and dummy traffic) around before funneling them to a public remailer, would there be any way to keep all-but-the-last box entirely shut off from view? Could you achieve this degree of anonymity from running Reliable? What would it take to keep a private remailer network truly private?
Perhaps I'm unclear on what you are proposing... but if this is really a private system, as soon as the mail exits, it's obvious that it came from you, no matter how much you mixed it around in your basement. So what's the point?
And what about the idea of surreptitiously installing this kind of private remailer network via piggybacking a stripped-down highly-anonymous version of remailer software onto other people's badly-maintained networks--free POP accounts to hold the traffic, maybe along with some sort of remote administration tool for maintenance. A tiny trickle of traffic has all the obvious problems, but is it possible that a "single user" scheme like this might be sufficiently under the radar to go completely unnoticed? Little invisible pinprick remailers that pop up all over the place, and dissappear almost as fast as they spring up. Mosquito Remailers? Just a thought.
It's been discussed here before. Ian Goldberg and others talked about disposable exit hops, Steve Schear on temporary remailers, other people on inexpensive, auto-configuring "remailer on a chip" designs that could be surreptitiously introduced to random networks...
p.s...and yes, I'm off to "Go Read the Archives"TM.
Unfortunately, you'll find that these ideas aren't new, and the answers to their problems aren't easy. -MW-