Jim Choate wrote:
What would motivate an average consumer to use an anonymous remailer?
Clearly simple anonymity or writing nasty letters to Grandma anonymously are not going to motivate most folks irrespective of cost - they simply have no interest in such activities. So, the question becomes:
What besides raising hell anonymously, laundering money, and defeating merchant purchase traffic analysis are commercial anonymous remailers good for?
Okay, let's take a look at what remailers are actually being used for. Go to dejanews and type in the addresses of all the remailers you know of, count the number of posts to each newsgroup and add them up. Here are the top twenty newsgroups that I got when I did this little experiment: 10471 alt.anonymous.messages 7272 alt.test 6236 alt.hackintosh 4392 alt.binaries.mac.games 1326 misc.test 1253 alt.religion.scientology 1109 alt.sex.stories 1023 soc.culture.singapore 915 alt.amazon-women.admirers 877 soc.culture.iranian 770 alt.anonymous 622 fj.news.usage 573 alt.politics.nationalism.white 571 alt.sex.spanking 557 talk.politics.guns 543 alt.tv.real-world 518 alt.cracks 517 alt.drugs.pot.cultivation 512 alt.privacy.anon-server 498 alt.revisionism So what are remailers being used for? 1) Private communication in the form of anonymous message pools 2) Test posts 3) Discussion of Macintosh computers 4) Discussion of obscure religions 5) Sharing erotic fantasy stories 6) Avoiding censorship in Singapore 7) Avoiding censorship in Iran 8) Discussion of remailers themselves 9) Discussion of controvertial political topics (racism, guns, drugs) 10) Discussion about a TV show Note that this list does not include harassing Grandma, money laundering, and all your other delusional terrorist fantasies. Welcome to the real world.