Mats Bergstrom wrote:
On Tue, 17 Jan 1995, Name withheld on request wrote:
wonders to what end remailers are being put by people who are worried about being "sold out".
The fundamental principle here is that an e-mail message is just so many bits of 1's and 0's. It can never, in it's own capacity, steal, molest or kill. It is therefore not unethical to run a no-log 'fortress remailer' and auto-delete ALL complaints, without exception. It might not be feasible to do so if one wants to stay out of jail, but hope- fully this will change with the rapid increase in country domains and the soon-to-come digicash market. Discussions of programming to make fortress remailers work and to make them easily exportable to African Linux-boxes are interesting. So are discussions of expected repercussions on society. Ethical discussions of what is abuse or not are better left to the clergy.
Here comes the clergy! :-) I'm sure that when your hypothetical remailer comes up and I decide to spam you with your own words (now I wouldn't do that, now would I? ;-), your sysadmin will be comforted by knowing that it's only ones and zeros filling his hard disk. He would be especially comforted if I spammed postmaster@wherever.you.are rather than your own account in a move to protect your own anonymity. Advocating a remailer such as you describe is only possible in a world where anonymity is considered the supreme good, a goal to achieve no matter how many other ethical rules we break. In the real world, however, there will always be problems with "acceptable use" and "abuse", along with the additional problems with establishing policy and so on.