On Tuesday, December 25, 2001, at 12:37 PM, jamesd@echeque.com wrote:
-- On 25 Dec 2001, at 6:00, Ryan Lackey wrote:
A population of even 10k is certainly well within FBI (or even my personal) resources to investigate, at least to a cursory level. Given that most likely a lot of those users are located at large and "compliant" ISPs or mail providers, gaining access to their normal outgoing mail feed, connection logs, and identity information is just not that hard. Especially if you're willing to break the law.
The best is enemy of the good enough. If the enemy can identify me as a member of a population of ten thousand, this is a fairly major improvement on identifying me as a member of a population of one.
So, remailers are not wholly bullet proof. We would like them to be better. They are still pretty good.
And importantly, _suspicion_ is not enough for conviction or even search warrants. (In most cases.) Remember that when the Church of Scientology got the Finnish courts to force Julf to reveal the nym that was bothering the Church, the trail led back to a conventional CP remailer at C2Net, which kept no records. The trail went ice cold there. We can all get paranoid and say that our use of remailers puts us into the "Group Under Suspicion," but, as James says, even the existing network of remailers does a good job of killing traceability. --Tim May "Ben Franklin warned us that those who would trade liberty for a little bit of temporary security deserve neither. This is the path we are now racing down, with American flags fluttering."-- Tim May, on events following 9/11/2001