At 5:48 PM -0700 8/3/01, Ray Dillinger wrote:
If the law wants to take this thing down, they will not be attacking the strongest point -- ie, trying to trace individual messages.
Instead, they will attack the weakest point -- trying to drive remailer operators out of business and thus destroy the infrastructure you need. That is the threat model I'm concerned about, and given that network monitoring is now automatable and cheap, it is entirely do-able.
The "cops" won't be driving remailer operators in various U.S. states "out of business." Even in these sad times where democrat expediency seems to be winning out over constitutional rights, this battle will have to be fought in the courts, probably all the way to the Supreme Court. And we know that virtually no readings of the First Amendment give local courts the say over what people can mail to each other, outside of certain types of porn and suchlike. This has been discussed many times here. Do you have some new insights, or are you just now discovering the notion that government may try to apply pressure on what people mail to each other?
As long as there is one uncompromised node in a chain subversion doesn't guarantee a matchup of "from" and "to" but it improves the odds.
So what? A move by the g8 to protect the "global infrastructure" of the Internet, (polspeak for protecting their ability to control what the sheep think) followed by laws passed in individual countries, would force remops to operate solely in "rogue states", and messages to and from them could be screened out pretty simply.
Handwaving. The First Amendment will not likely be abandoned because some Marxists in France concluded that there should be limitations on what people mail to other people. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May tcmay@got.net Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns