At 10:14 AM -0500 11/2/00, Adam Shostack wrote:
On Wed, Nov 01, 2000 at 07:08:06PM -0500, Tim May wrote:
| By the way, I've been curious about this "we spend time and energy | maintaining relations with law enforcement" point for a while. In | numerous comments I've seen this mentioned. | | Why do you spend any of your valuable time talking to law enforcement/
Because if we don't, then they get confused about what we're trying to accomplish, they forget that privacy has lots of valuable uses which are not the collapse of governments and tax revenue, and try to ban what we're doing. And then they go talk to Parliment to get laws passed. We see that as a bad thing.
Indeed. But it sort of undermines the argument we heard a few years back that the main reason ZKS was locating in Canada was because of Canada's greater freedom in crypto matters! Many of us thought this was jive, of course, as Canada was only nominally more free in certain areas involving crypto export...and this largely because it was choosing to go a different way than its usual puppetmaster to the south. Once the Canadian government decided that unfettered strong crypto was dangerous, it would likely move swiftly and without the 200+ years of First and Fourth Amendment cases to deter the outlawing of strong crypto. While Canada has not banned strong crypto, EU countries seem to be moving in that direction. And if strong crypto is not affected by law in Canada, just what does "try to ban" mean? I wonder if Jim McCoy and his associates working on Mojo Nation are being called on by legislators and cops? My guess is not. Maybe there's still time for ZKS to pull up stakes and move to the Caribbean. Or to cypherspace.
Feel free, if you know what the market wants. I'm curious if you'll be running a node yourself?
Not in the near future. I have only a 28.8 dial-up connection out where I live, in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Too far from the CO (Central Office) for DSL, though this may change next summer. No cable modem service. I looked into DirectTV/DirectPC/Gideon satellite service, but this still requires a dial-up line for half of the session, which rules out 2-way serving of pages or Freedom traffic. If I had fast Internet service, I might even be willing to buy one of the ZKS-packaged Windows or Linux machines. As you all know, I favor Macs. OS X looks like a good platform, as it is of course based on Mach/BSD/etc. (BTW, I suggest you look at current Mac OS support plans in this light.) Some friends of mine have installed the Freedom server. One of them tells me that since ZKS is unaware of the traffic flowing, as per the basic design goals, that he is working on running other traffic and still being paid for it. (I'll ask him tonight what exactly he means by this...)
Actually, I'm unconvinced that even pipenet style padding is sufficient. Looking at the work on traffic analysis thats been done, we're in about 1970. We have one time pads (dc-nets), and some other stuff, but we don't have a DES to analyze. We have an adversary who has spent a long time learning how to do this well.
I don't disagree with this. I'm not saying much more robust systems are not needed. What I'm saying is that there's a "disconnect" between which types of nyms are allowed by ZKS, in terms of the T&C and the blather about cancelling nyms for abuse, and the threat model. Little girls surfing to the Barney site are not going to face sophisticated correlation attacks. As Lucky said, there's an interesting issue of whether ZKS has missed its market. Not strong enough, or not "allowed," for the most extreme users of pseudonymity, but too strong and too expensive for the vast bulk of the target audience. I have other problems with the rate model which I hope to discuss soon in more detail. Basically, charging $50 a year for "all you can eat" is a crude model as compared to pay-per-use services. And this poor rate model arises because, naturally enough, ZKS wishes to make money. Great, but it's still a crummy rate model. Paid remailers solve the problem in more than one way. First, no prepaid nyms are needed. Only digital cash (for the tokens or "stamps") is needed. Second, those who use the services more, pay more. Third, rate competition for remailing. Fourth, no centralized infrastructure is needed. Fifth, no point of attack. Sixth, no need to "jawbone" with lawmakers in Latvia, Germany, Canada, California, Zambia, or wherever. Seventh, robustness is in the hands of those who distribute remailers. Eighth, a low-cost expansion curve. No need for a centralized company with high burn rates. Incremental addition of boxes. (Not sure if N of the remailers have been compromised? Add more hops. Hop stuff through your own controlled remailers. Use temporary fire-and-forget remailers hosted on other machines. Expand the universe of nodes. More chains, more hops.) I can't help thinking that a tiny fraction of what ZKS has spent could have ironed out the relatively small problems with paid remailers, with making Mixmaster clients more robust, etc. The key ingredient to incentivize remailer box operators has always been digital cash. Digital cash means the "buy five nyms and then use the system as much as you want" model is not needed. It means no centralized nexus is needed. Mojo Nation looks to be headed in this direction. (I assume everyone knows that Mojo can be spent on remailings?) --Tim May -- ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, "Cyphernomicon" | black markets, collapse of governments.