From: "Robert J. Woodhead" <trebor@foretune.co.jp>
Possible low-tech solution: mail-list software where the moderator has the ability to screen messages from particular sites and/or accounts.
I think the problem here is the amount of time which would be taken by the moderator. If you were going to go this route, you might as well have a completely moderated list. This slows down list turnaround and is a lot of work for somebody.
Question: how easy is it to use public information (ie: out of the phone book), PGP and an anon-remailer to create a "Fake ID"
I'm not sure what you mean here. Perhaps you are talking about someone who posts saying, "Hi, this is Bill Gates, I just joined your list, and here's my PGP key, I'll just be posting through these anonymous remailers for now. Oh, and to prove it's really me, my annual salary is such-and- such, which you can confirm by reading the most recent annual report from Microsoft." This wouldn't fool anyone for an instant. Or, someone posts and says, "My name is Deadbeat, here is my PGP key, and I'll just be posting through anon remailers," then he does so for months on end. This also doesn't "fool" anybody, but does represent an ID which can get established and become as legitimate as other ID's on the net - in a sense, a "Fake ID"; this is what we call a digital pseudonym. Hal Finney