-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Andrew Lowenstern asks:

Is this even technically possible? That is, wholesale monitoring of disparate portions of the net from a single access point. Given the distributed and dynamic properties of the Net this would seem impossible. To monitor the entire remailer network an attacker would have to setup packet sniffers upstream from each and every portion of the Net that contained a remailer, wouldn't they?

Given the current state of computer security, this should not be too difficult for an organization such as NSA. For each remailer, just hack into a computer on its local ethernet and put it into promiscious mode. Each time an e-mail passes by, have it send the header to some monitoring center using an UDP packet.

I suppose an extremely resourceful attacker could monitor traffic at crucial points (i.e. transcontinental feeds, points on the NFSnet, CIX, etc...), but there are so many private connections linking networks that it would be very difficult indeed to sniff out every bit of remailer traffic. Is having every bit of remailer traffic necessary for traffic analysis? Or would having a good percentage of it be sufficient?

Complete monitoring should not be neccessary, having a larger percentage of the traffic just makes the job easier. Wei Dai -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBLygz8jl0sXKgdnV5AQFv3wP/USeKOwPBn12m1hC9RPOgwi1Zt4wB+T5J RWM3fYAvpK4gGUB2xOGrSLDh68DNDgSghjwqacBTkEsn+5ENBXd9rrQOjmaMeipI rJuxYSJTiNKhlGro3yY2UW3FScKYks3mi6eJ9G+g5rOOIHqCKtAhkSQJkHeCJOM3 3m2ObHv1gMs= =xmaK -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- E-mail: Wei Dai <weidai@eskimo.com> URL: "http://www.eskimo.com/~weidai" =================== Exponential Increase of Complexity =================== --> Big Bang --> atoms --> complex macromolecules --> biological evolution --> central nervous systems --> social learning --> symbolic communication --> computers --> internetworking --> close-coupled automation --> high-bandwidth brain-to-net connections --> artificial intelligence --> distributed consciousness --> group minds --> ? ? ?