From: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@athena.mit.edu>

Date: Mon, 1 Mar 93 13:27:24 EST From: pmetzger@shearson.com (Perry E. Metzger)

Now, on the issue of slander, the notion of anonymity is largely unimportant. If I had walked into the middle of the street and ranted for an hour saying that GM trucks are unsafe, that would be largely ignored, as most anonymous denunciations likely are. The issue is if a non-anonymous individual or entity with credibility, like NBC, says something that is false.

I don't know about that. It is certainly true that non-anonymous individual or entity with credibility, like NBC, can do the most amount of damage when they slander someone.

But what about someone who sends 20 different mail messages, each through a different remailer path so they have different reply addresses, all of them detailing some similar (but false) story about how some GM truck went up in flames aftering being hit lightly by a Geo Metro? Or suppose someone sends 20 messages (all different) about how Perry Metzger stiffed him/her out of some amount of digital cash? I'd suspect you could do some real damage that way. Not as much, perhaps, as something like a faked demonstration tape broadcast on prime-time evening news, but damange nevertheless.

I doubt it. As people get more and more used to the capacity to do such things, its likely that such anonymous accounts will be more and more untrusted. Perry