Tim May writes:

...

It would be nice to see at least one example of something nasty that could be done with an anonymous remailer in the next few years where you couldn't get the same effect at the corner phone booth or dropping a letter in a public mailbox.

Are you dense, or just ignorant?

Consider the broad class of two-way communications, whether for information buying and selling, extortion, espionage, arranging contract killings, etc. Are these sufficiently "nasty" for you?

Get real. There's no way these are going to be serious problems in five years. For one thing, they all depend on an established anonymous cash infrastructure for payoff off the crooks, buying the intelligence, etc. There's very little chance that such a system will come into existence soon (look at all the progress in the last five years), and even if it did, any problems with criminal use will be blamed on the cash system, not the email delivery.

Now consider that both the "corner phone booth" and "dropping a letter in a public mailbox" are untraceable only in _one_ direction. Two-way communication is not untraceable.

Two way anonymous communications have been around for years. Dead drops are a commonly used technique, likewise public postings in classified ads and similar places. It's nothing new and there have been no laws to ban this capability.