From: Jim Choate <ravage@ssz.com>
From: "Mark M." <markm@voicenet.com> And besides, the more remailers there are, the more difficult it is to do traffic analysis on remailer traffic. Actually, its the more remailers people chain messages through, but there are software packages that can do this easily. The more remailers there are, the longer remailer chains have the possibility of becoming.
If this is strictly true, why not simply run several instances of a remailer on the same machine. Then randomly chain them prior to sending them off site.
Or better still, run one remailer on the machine, and use it multiple times in the chain. It seems to me that one remailer on a machine is better than several because it will allow more mixing of messages. If two messages enter a machine and later leave, it may be possible to distinguish them if they went to different remailers and left with different From: addresses (or other header fields) as a result. If they had both gone to the same remailer it would be harder to tell them apart. I understand that there may be political reasons to have the machine owner and remailer operator be separate (although AFAIK the reasoning behind this is untested), but technically it seems better to have one remailer per machine based on traffic analysis issues. Hal