Uh, sorry to ask, but why is he still on cypherpunks if his abuse stems from knowledge gained on this list?

____ Robert A. Hayden <=> hayden@krypton.mankato.msus.edu

First, the BlackNet piece dates from last fall, when Det was still on the list (he asked to be removed in November or thereabouts). Second, he may be subscribed under one of several aliases. I think not, though. Third, apparently someone is forwarding to him some or all of the posts. Probably just some, would be my guess. --Tim May -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power:2**859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available.

Derek Atkins writes:

I disagree. While I can honestly say that I don't like most Detweiler posts, I feel that he is showing us the possibility of how remailers can (and are) being abused. I think censorship is the wrong answer. I think there needs to be some accountability, even if it is anonymous accountability.

It's really not censorship for Hal or any other remailer operator to say _his_ machines, accounts, reputation, etc., will be used to mail death threats to whitehouse.gov, for example, or mailbombs to newsgroups and mailing lists. (I'll concede that I sometimes use the word "censorship" in this same sense Derek was using it, as in "Apple is censoring its employees." I suppose we need a word for this sense, the non-government censorship sense.) But semantics aside, "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch," and part of the evolutionary development of remailers and anonymous systems will include various "non-ideal" intermediate stages. Until we have digital postage, for example, the recipient of Detweiler's mailbombs has to pay for them. This is a contributing factor that points to the need to filter at the input to the remailer. (Note that this filtering is not happening at Detweiler's machine, or with armed goons going to his house to stop him, etc.) In Chaum's DC-Net, "disruption" is the problem he devotes most of his attention to. Not the basic idea, which is explicated in the first few pages of the paper ("The Dining Cryptographers Problem," Journal of Cryptology, Vol 1 No 1, 1988), but the implications of a malicious disruptor intent on shutting the DC-Net down. What we have in Detweiler is just the first instance of such a disruptor in our (limited) version of a DC-Net. With all due respect to my colleague Derek, with whom I agree in many ways, saying we don't believe in censorship is not an answer. Derek's further comments about some kind of receipt that comes back....I'll have to think about that further. My hunch is that that may break the total anonymity (that we strive for as a principle) and should be avoided. I'd recommend we all go back and look at the DC-Nets paper. This paper, by the way, was scanned in and OCRed by the "Information Liberation Front" (another one of Detweiler's faves) and is available, last time I checked, in the Cypherpunks archives at soda.berkeley.edu.

But I feel censorship is *always* the wrong solution, unless it is done at the end-point. I.e., I can *choose* not to read posts from detweiler, or an12070, but that is my choice. I do not think anyone has the right to say to me that I *cannot* read his posts. It should be my perogative. Maybe we should change our systems to allow for anonymous accountability?

Yes, but Hal has not obligation to accept messages from known disruptors, any more than you have an obligation to "never censor" people by keeping them out of your house. Long term, users will have to learn ot have "positive reputation" filters, or to hire their own screeners or moderators, but in the short term, Detweiler's mail bombing of dozens of lists with posts about Nazis, BlackNet, kiddie porn (I predict this next), and tax evasion will almost certainly result in most of all of the remailers being shut down by legal pressures. No simple solutions. --Tim May -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power:2**859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available.

Derek Atkins <warlord@MIT.EDU> writes:

I'm not sure that I really meant to have a receipt, more or a return-path. Maybe even a cryptographiccally secure return path. I think a question is: who are we protecting against? Are we protecting against the remailer operators? Or are we trying to protect from a third party?

I think that we are trying to protect against 3rd parties. With the X-A-R-P:/X-A-S-P: scheme I posted, each remailer *could* log who it came from and who it was going to -- it's optional. But, (with the appropriate delays and padding to prevent traffic analysis), a third party would not be able to figure that out.

To me, this is like NEARNet saying that they have no obligation to accept packets from a known disruptive user. No, I don't believe that that is the answer. Then again, I don't think that a remailer should run out of an account, but rather on a machine, but that's a different story. I consider a remailer a service, and as such, the service should be available to all comers. (With digital postage this paradigm makes much more sense). I do not think of it like a home.

I would argue that you are correct. Anonymous remailing is a new service. It should have new servers that run on a well-known port (so that any user can start one up) and hacks could be put into most of the current mail agents to support using an anoymous remailer. We don't even have to follow RFC 822 in the format of our messages, though I think we should.

I also agree that positive reputation is important, but I think that is much more difficult to implement than a more secure anonymous system.

Yes. The easiest way to build a reputation is to assign some unique public/private key pair to each anonymous user and require all remailed messages to be signed. Then, you as a user can choose to ignore or read messages from that id. Additionally, it does allow for the server daemon to reject postings from "abusive" ids or simply not forward the posting, but rather a notice stating the ID and subject line of the message, making it available in a public place like anonymous ftp or gopherspace for those who *do* want to read it. The really nice thing about this is that it won't prevent people from having their anonymity, but it will cut down on the actual damage that abusers can do.

To reiterate: I do think that something needs to be done, but I think we should analyze what we are trying to accomplish rather than rushing off and saying "just don't service this abusive customer".

I agree. I think anonymous remailing should be as close to universal as possible. If there *is* a way to service everyone, I think we should do it. Resorting to non-service of "abusers" should be the last resort. Jon Boone | PSC Networking | boone@psc.edu | (412) 268-6959 | PGP Key # B75699 PGP Public Key fingerprint = 23 59 EC 91 47 A6 E3 92 9E A8 96 6A D9 27 C9 6C

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- On Mon, 14 Feb 1994, Timothy C. May wrote:

Derek Atkins writes:

...

I disagree. While I can honestly say that I don't like most Detweiler posts, I feel that he is showing us the possibility of how remailers can (and are) being abused. I think censorship is the wrong answer. I think there needs to be some accountability, even if it is anonymous accountability.

It's really not censorship for Hal or any other remailer operator to say _his_ machines, accounts, reputation, etc., will be used to mail death threats to whitehouse.gov, for example, or mailbombs to newsgroups and mailing lists.

While it is not censorship as such, it rather seems against our stated goals as cypherpunks to advocate such filtering...not because of what it blocks from our own sites, but it _does_ affect those downstream. To give an example of why this is important, last July (June?) the University of Canterbury in Christchurch New Zealand began filtering all alt.sex.* newspostings from their site. Well this in itself was perhaps harmless, the topology of NZ's corner of the net is such that as a result _all_ net-sites in the entire of NZ's South Island lost these newsgroups. While I'm not saying that the University were outside of their rights, we must keep the wider issues in view at all times. Another key point is that we not let our own personal feelings interfere with our political actions. I'm sure most of us here were offended by the suggestions in the heat of the anonymity debate that all anonymous postings to newsgroups be killed...yet here are cypherpunks advocating the filtering of all Detweiler and Detweiler-seeming posts. Sure, the guy's a prick, but should we let him turn us into fascists? Jim Wise wisej@acf4.nyu.edu jaw7254@acfcluster.nyu.edu -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3 iQCVAgUBLWGRGTS8O1DgkhNpAQGr7AP7BLMG7DQa85fgqN2XKQalmxAZjjnsT+RT b+i1d3C+Lr8lYu4DAidXF1aIoCdpDoyQieEioKiWFe51GLPn8CxjlREZH0v3jmWe B6i1d0bXcvWEH/iZdo6RKW4L4FZ+ri4EsDBSHFk3Zj3IxAWmKYTGGKcqtN/mmFaJ h9rnWul2XxU= =47Ss -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----