On Fri, 21 Dec 2001, Faustine wrote:

But could they defend themselves from the inside? Quite a vulnerability. I'm sure any government agency out to compromise the system would be delighted to find all the constituent elements neatly-identified and run by "respectable" and "well-known" organizations. God, what more could they ask for.

If the government put me in charge of subverting the remailer network, I think the first thing I'd do is round myself up a nice batch of friendly, respectable "professionals" with shiny impressive "professional" credentials (tailored exactly to match what "well-known organizations" are looking for) and infiltrate the hell out of every single organization running a node.

If the government put me in charge of subverting the remailer network, I think the first thing I would do is round myself up a couple of "cypherpunks" (with anti-government, fuck-the-law attitudes) to gain the respect of the operators of the most stable and popular remailers, and assume control of the remailer software development, infiltrating every node at the source.

Meanwhile, everyone on the outside is lulled into a false sense of complacency, because, after all, these 5-10 remailers are "well-administered and professionally maintained"-- surely we can trust these reasonably well-known organizations who have sufficient legal firepower to defend themselves, can't we?

Proposing that the remailer network would benefit more from 10 reliable, properly configured and legally secure remailers than 50 "mosquito remailers" is a pure statement of fact. Mix-nets need stable nodes. You're welcome to design a different system that allows anonymous messages to be transmitted through short-lived temporary nodes, but I doubt it will be anything like what we're using now. The best way to ensure the mix-net is going to protect you is for you to run a remailer. (Better yet, write your own remailer software). The remailer network should never become an "old boy's club." Anyone with the ability to maintain a stable remailer must be permitted to join. Government involvement isn't necessarily a bad thing. I'd happily include both a remailer run by Hamas and a remailer run my the Mossad in my remailer chains.