Bill O Hanlon:
In that case, even if I were to keep logs, all that anyone would know from a message is that a particular user used a remailer, or that a particular cleartext message had a certain remailer as its jumpoff point. Not both.
They'd learn both if they had snooped the entire remail chain (which is the equivalent of collusion). Going back and retrieving logs for all the the links, after the snoopers have discovered an important message they want to trace, is both an easier and a more likely attack than wiretapping all the links in real time in anticipation of an important message -- unless the remailer operators snoop-proof their logs. Also keep in mind that, given the lack of a good user interface, there is currently too little properly encrypted and nested remailer traffic to create anything approaching a true digital mix. Jim Hart hart@chaos.bsu.edu