On Thu, 9 May 1996, E. ALLEN SMITH wrote:

From: IN%"llurch@networking.stanford.edu" "Rich Graves" 8-MAY-1996 04:33:21.44

...

The fact that you're sending postcards is only a problem if you don't want them to be read. It's more the email I receive that I worry about, so all my friends use the address rich@alpha.c2.org now.

How would this help? Whoever's wanting to monitor you will just monitor rich@alpha.c2.org's incoming mail.

To do that they would need to crack one or more of the accounts with access to the alpha server, which would probably leave evidence, or run a packet sniffer nearby. Ironically, I am more confident of the security of alpha.c2.org than I am of my own machine. The threat profile is people who have forwarded mail with envelope and Received: headers indicating that the source is my mail spool to a mailing list. Twice. I know that I'm surrounded by insecure, non-firewalled UNIX boxes that could be running packet sniffers, and that is something I cannot fix unless I want to trade gloriously fast and reliable Ethernet connectivity for a modem. My correspondents do not have PGP and are not likely to get it. So, a public alpha nym helps in this (perhaps unique) case. rich@alpha.c2.org also works as a permanent address (knock on wood). -rich