accept PGP-encrypted messages, but I was thinking of making a.w a special case where id's aren't allocated at all, and every message would just come from "an000000" or something. Is this a good idea? Pros are that it would make it very hard to track down the real poster, cons that it would be impossible to tell the different posters from each other, thus not enabling informers to earn good or bad reputations, unless they include key signatures or something.
I like the idea, but would this make it impossible to respond anonymously and/or privately to a whistleblower? I couldn't write back privately to compare evidence if I didn't want to go public with my information yet (assuming that I had a similar interest, of course). Of course, if they have included a public key I could post an encrypted message to them, but is the idea to create a newsgroup where much of the traffic could conceivably be encrypted E-mail? But, on yet another hand (I feel like I'm in _A Mote in God's Eye_), if a regular informational posting in a.w discussed these issues, a whistleblower would be warned to post a publik key, a nom de guerre, and (maybe) a regular anon ID, if they wished, or to join an anon pool. To repeat: I do like the an00000 idea. But I think people may want E-mail response. Seth <seth.morris@launchpad.unc.edu> (Yay, I finally figured out +clearsig=on ! Now I need an option to add a oublic-key block to a message before signing automatically!)