Tim wrote:

But, as with Kirchoff's point, the attacker is going to get the design eventually.

If getting the design "eventually" were good enough, why the keen interest in putting in a large order for the beta? There's a reason. Maybe in the long run, it's right to view any objections as being little more than irrelevant, moralistic hand-waving. But I don't find the "they're going to compromise it anyway so why not make a buck when we can" line of reasoning particularly satisfying.

The security of Freedom should not depend on even having access to the source code, else ZKS would be lying when they claim that even they cannot trace a message back to the sender. (Something which some may doubt...)

Do you?

Either way, the prospects for "dissident-grade untraceability" are fairly bleak.

You pontificate as if you know something about our field, when you clearly know very little. Get some education if you plan to pontificate like this.

You call that pontificating? My saying "Either way, the prospects for "dissident-grade untraceability" are fairly bleak" is either interesting enough to address, or it isn't (for whatever reason.) Going for the gratuitous ad-hominem regarding whatever queer notions you happen to have about what I know or don't know is quite beneath you.

A mixnet of the N extant remailers offers pretty damned good untraceability. Needs some work on getting remailers more robust, but the underlying nested encryption looks to be a formidable challenge for Shin Bet to crack.

I'm sure I don't need to tell you a thing about the centrality of a secure implementation. Likewise, I'm sure you know that being a "formidable challenge" never prevented anything from being broken before, and it never will. All place-in-the-pecking-order issues aside, roughly how long do you think it's going to take before "dissident-grade untraceability" becomes a reality? If anyone deigns to show me why the prospects are better than "bleak", I'd love to be proven wrong. ~Faustine.