From: hughes@ah.com (Eric Hughes)

I point out this doesn't help if you don't know where the first remailer is. What I was specifically referring to was public education. Were remailers ubiquitous, there would be a chapter on them in each of the latest rage of 'how to use the internet' books. They could be a well-used service, like archie.

In fact, they are not. There are numerous reasons for this, some of which are self-referential (as in, there aren't a lot of remailers yet) and some of which are not. For example, there's no FAQ for comp.mail.remailer, because there's no such group. Why shouldn't there be?

There is alt.privacy.anon-server. BTW, while reading some postings in that group just now I noticed that yesterday was the first birthday of the jarthur remailer's key. Happy Birthday! Actually, I don't think most people are interested in remailers yet. Most people can't even use encryption. I view encryption as being a first step towards privacy, with remailers being a second step, protecting the destina- tion of a message like encryption protects its contents. Also, without encryption the protection provided by a remailer is not very great. OTOH, I could see someone arguing that remailer use, even without encryption, is an important privacy technology in its own right, as we have seen with anon.penet.fi. The privacy provided by that system may not be defensible against a powerful agency which can tap network links, or even for hackers who can forge mail, but it is enough for most people, most of the time. Eric spoke of transaction costs in using the remailers, but to me the biggest problem is obvious: there is no system that I know of that allows me to send or post a message pseudonymously, such that no one person knows the mapping of my pseudonym to my true name. I know that a lot of people have been talking about new systems lately, so maybe I am wrong about this. Ray's proposal would allow it, with his virtual encrypted addresses, but that is not running yet. I think this is the biggest barrier to using pseudonymous communications. Another thing worth noting is that pseudonymity has a terrible reputation on the net. Look at the complaint we saw here from Stewart Brand a few days ago. And unfortunately, it does seem that most anonymous postings are of very low quality, at least in the groups I read. Perhaps we need a concerted effort to make high-quality anonymous/pseudonymous postings in order to improve the reputation of this technology. Maybe then the books will start writing about it. (The recent newspaper article posted here was as favorable a treat- ment of the topic that I have seen.) Hal