On Fri, Dec 21, 2001 at 01:21:27PM -0800, Len Sassaman wrote:

In conclusion, I leave you with a question: if remailer users are reduced to a small number of high-paying remailer customers for whom anonymity is not a game, but a matter of life or death, could a mix-net be made to provide any sufficient degree of security? "No" is the easy answer. Say yes, and prove it.

Seems to me like a straightforward economic analysis. Rates a remailer operator will charge reflect his cost plus. If the rates become too high, the remailer will go out of business. If customers perceive their privacy is in danger because remailers are going bankrupt and the cloud is shrinking, the remaining remailers will lose revenue and, in extremis, again go out of business. Assuming that all users are using the network roughly equally and therefore paying roughly the same, this suggests there's a critical number of users necessary to keep a for-profit network afloat. But change the assumption about paying equally, and the critical number may approach one. "A small number of high-paying remailer customers" could bankroll the remailer network by providing direct subsidies to the remailer operators or giving out free can-be-used-for-remailing-only tokens to anyone who asks. There might be better ways to do this, but it's late at night and I'm getting pretty tired. But it seems like "yes" is the easy answer to your question. -Declan