We have to keep an eye on each others' knees here -- there's a tendency for a knee-jerk reaction not based on reality. Squabbling over what "crimes" or "antisocial acts" should disqualify one from being able to use anonymity is ***WAY*** missing the point. It is the people who have crossed one of those lines who need the protection the most! And, at least the US Supreme Court thinks it is in society's interest to protect them: The case is Talley v. California, 362 US 60 (1960), in which the Supreme Court invalidated an ordinance which prohibited the distribution of any handbill not bearing the name and address of the person who prepared it. The Court rejected the state's claim that the ordinance was necessary to help identify those responsible for fraud, false advertising, or libel. According to Tribe, the Court reasoned that "a ban on anonymous pamphleteering falls with much greater force upon individuals and groups who fear majoritarian disapproval and reprisal -- upon dissidents and upon the unpopular -- than upon those with widely approved messages to deliver." To quote a cypherpunk who usually has more sense:

I believe unpopular opinions ought to be protected [as long as they don't encourage illegal or violent actions]. Once we get in the opinion-censoring biz, it's a steep slippery slope.

I inserted the [ and ]. He forgot to note that he's *already* advocating opinion-censoring, and yes, he's already sliding down the slope. John Gilmore PS: There is no way to enforce rules on the content of messages sent through encrypted anonymous remailers. Think about it for a minute. All there needs to be is *one* remailer anywhere in the world, which will send any message to the final destination. Anyone can send an encrypted message to the "freedom-loving" remailer, via their local remailer. Even if the inputs to the freedom-loving remailer were tapped, the messages that arrived there would already be anonymous (headers stripped) and encrypted. Since what passes through the rest of the "freedom-hating" anonymous remailers is encrypted, they can't see the content anyway. You could prohibit encrypted messages through your freedom-hating remailer, but (1) that's easy to circumvent, and (2) what would be the point of your running a remailer?

Umm.. Isn't all this talk about anonymous remail abuse really beging for an pseudonymous/anonymous certificate service? j'

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Eric Hughes writes:

Eric> There has been a huge conflagration on the pem-dev list Eric> lately concerning naming issues, X.500, etc. I am Eric> somewhat disturbed by what I see as a fundamental Eric> mentality of PEM: the desire to lift intact all existing Eric> political, economic, and social relationships into the Eric> electronic domain. That doesn't surprise me in the least. There's a paradigm shift going on in the networking community, but it's difficult to tell which way it's going to land. The US, in have a very open, almost anarchic protocol development process based highly in meritocracy, built the core of the Internet while everyone else in the world was working to start passing 128-byte X.25 packets, and trying to decide how much to charge per packet. The unfortunate reality is that the same people overseas have found the "golden goose", and are trying to figure out how to domesticate it. The U.S. Government and the industry marketeers aren't helping, either. I see a growing bureaucratization of the standards process which may well not advance development much. Eric> ...Identities in the electronic world are expected to Eric> map to entities in the real world. I think a lot of this is a combination of the "One lifetime phone number would be great" phenomenon, and a lack of imagination regarding pseudonymity. I think that we should start writing RFCs for any and all applicable technologies and throwing them into the arena. At best, we might get stellar contributions, at worst, we might slow down the juggernaut that is the ISO. Eric> I agree with Tim that we have made good progress. But Eric> we need more than simple remailers. We need people to Eric> use remailers, and we need to make that easy to do. We Eric> need key distribution mechanisms. We need better Eric> meeting spaces than mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups Eric> and private mail. We need markets and contracts. I think that remailer authors should seriously consider spec'ing out their technology and publishing RFC's as soon as possible. The development of on-line markets seems to be one of the best-kept secrets on the Net. I only know of a handful (if that) of companies actively working on such things, but they're not known outside of their own backyards. Laissez faire, ---Strat