Paul Ferguson asks: "What are cypherpunk priorities?" Here's my list, in order: Technical track: 1. More remailer usage. You can't start rearranging the order of incoming and outgoing messages until you have messages to reorder. Right now routing is still hard, even using a script. Thus priority 1 implies number 2: 2. Outgoing rewriting systems integrated into mailers. Until one can say To: cypherpunks in their mailer and have this turned into a double-hop, fully encrypted message on the way out, I don't think you'll see a huge amount of traffic. 3. Mixing remailers. Until mailers mix, they are extremely vulnerable to network monitoring. Mixing is rearranging the order of incoming and outgoing messages, with a known lower bound on the number of messages it could have been rearranged with. Mixing also requires message size quantization, since reordering is only significant among messages of identical length. Note that this requires a significant volume of traffic per remailer. While this is a high priority, its implementation is not imminent. 4. Positive reputations. The very simplest reputation is a signature claiming identity. Deployment of signature-based communication fora is the first step. Political track: 1. Understand the nature of anonymity now and in the future. We are trying to improve the world, not just change it. It is therefore necessary that we try to the limits our ability to understand the effects of the social changes. 2. Making our arguments public. Once we have convinced ourselves, we have to convince others. This means public participation in conferences such as CFP, in the editorial pages of newspapers, in the IETF meetings, in Usenet newsgroups, and, if necessary, in courts. And a word of advice: Arguments are more effective the fewer shared assumptions between the parties there are. In particular, while you can convice another libertarian with a libertarian argument, you can't convince a socialist with one. Nevertheless, both libertarians and socialists desire open societies and personal privacy. We must base our arguments on deep shared culture if they are going to succeed. 3. Going international. There do and will exist national restrictions on various and different aspects of privacy goals. One can go around many of these restrictions by going around the nation involved. Knowledge is extremely difficult to contain, so let us make more of it, everywhere in the world! 4. Fighting restrictions on cryptography. In the US, that means getting actively engaged in fighting key registration ideas. This means preemptively writing your elected leaders _in advance_ of a specific issue. It also means writing about export restrictions in cryptography. In France, that means raising public awareness on cryptography restrictions and the eventual effects that will have on the open society there. In all countries, it requires vigilance. 5. Increasing awareness of privacy issues. Most think they have nothing to hide. Most also hate it when they get extremely detailed junk mail about their own lives. Teach the defense of privacy. Eric