On Sat, 4 Aug 2001, Tim May wrote:
Entrance and exit mixes can easily be set to be Usenet or other Net-based public posting and reading places. Kind of hard for the U.S.G. or the F.S.U. to shut down a newsgroup replicated across the world in many places.
Yes, broadcasts and mixnets have different tolerance to different kinds of attacks, with benefits of synergy. But saying they're unassailable simply because they work fine, now, is short-sighted. AFAICS, it's likely a matter of priorities -- currently anonymity does not pose a significant threat to governments. If that changes, the heat will intensify, possibly to a point where means currently unimaginable could be employed (e.g. national firewalls, regulation of nonconduct, creative interpretation of laws on criminal collaboration, RICO, whathaveyou). Besides, what happens in the US currently has a lot of weight in the global Internet. Causing a netsplit between the US and the rest of the world is enough to severely harm most online services out there. Criminalization of online conduct in the US may be all it takes to make an anonymous online economy too cumbersome to hack.
I see no particular reason why it will suddenly become cheap ("repeat ad nauseum") for lawyers to shut down tens of thousands of Web sites, publishers, mailing lists, message pools, and Democracy Walls.
For remailers, mandatory filtering at the ISP level? For broadcasts, you track all the receivers and correlate to arrive at likely suspects.
Especially, by the way, if those entry and exit sites are in other countries.
If they can pass CALEA, they probably could force internet exchanges to filter remailer traffic, given favorable public opinion. All you need is a view of anonymity proponents as anti-state anarchists intent on protecting known dangerous criminals (thus, collaboration), and a couple of high profile trials where remailers successfully protect the identity of terrorists or child molesters. The fuss about Osama bin Laden and encryption/stego might well be the first step in such a campaign. As for foreign remailers, a number of governments might be pliable enough to overlook US originated DoS attacks on them after having been convinced that anonymity is a real threat not only to the US, but to each and every nation state. Now, the above is of course fiction, for now at least. But keeping such widescale attacks on the infrastructure part of the threat model is not, IMHO, a bad idea. The discussions on stego, disposable remailers, physical broadcast technology and the like are part of that, and serve to lay the groundwork in case shit one day does hit the fan. Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy, mailto:decoy@iki.fi, gsm: +358-50-5756111 student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front