At 12:37 AM 2/7/96, Timothy C. May wrote:

But more seriously, any mil-info complex effort to demonize remailers must of course invoke one of the Horsemen. At this time, "Russian Mafia terrorists" is the putative focus of joint U.S.-Russian intelligence activities, and was even the plot of the latest James Bond movie.

Yup. <sigh> In essence, remailers and other anonymizing/pseudonymizing techniques democratize "deniability"--the MO of circumventing the law that states have arrogated to themelves. Institutional dynamics aside, the proverb that "A man reveals his character best when describing that of another" applies to governments, too, I think: we can expect governmental and paragovernmental anti-anonymity arguments to focus on the most extreme ways in which governments have used their power to modulate identity--i.e., law-breaking. I don't want to start up a Cypherpunk[TM]-approved PR debate, but I do think we (quote unquote) might do well to think a bit about some arguments that can sidestep the arguments we can reasonably anticipate. Plenty of folks have very recognizable nyms, so... nym as PO box, nym as a way of tracking who's tracking you (like misspelling your name this or that way when you know the organization you're giving it to will sell it), nym as backup (for when your mailserver's down [yeah, I know...]). Anonymity, after all, is only one of many possible uses for a remailer. No one could possibly require that your email address bear your first and last names in recognizable form--so what's so different about a nym? In terms of the fundamental issues, these are sidelights, obviously, but they could come in handy. US culture has a deep-seated mistrust of unstable identities (viz., the "con man") going back a century or more; fighting on behalf of unstable and multiple identities will be an upstream swim. But we might do pretty well arguing that remailers are more similar to than different from net.staples--nutty email addresesses, multiple addresses, etc. Sometimes the best way to win an argument is to refuse to have it. Ted