[deletia]

Now, dynamic rerouting is good for better delivery, but is bad for the trust in silence. Trust in externally unverifiable properties is _not_ transferrable. Just because I believe that my regular remailer is OK does not mean you do. The creation of these links of trust is not something that can be automated solely by the remailer operators. The end users of the remailers are the endpoints of this trust relationship. The end users must be involved, either directly or through some (legal) agent, in the manipulation of these relationships.

First, I must admit to being somewhat out of my depth here; this seems to be becoming a philosophical problem. With that shameful admission out of the way, let me bull ahead regardless. It seems to me that I can choose to trust in the fact that *your* trust in other remailers is well founded. This then becomes a third category of trust for a given remailer: trust that it will deliver (verifiable); trust that it will be silent (unverifiable); and trust that its operator has good judgement in choosing who to trust (unverifiable). These latter two are, and should be, the end users responsibility. Now, as I have mentioned in an earlier message (I'm being far too verbose today) I am proposing that dynamic routing be optional, though the default behavior, for reasons mentioned there. Thus, if I, as user, choose to allow dynamic routing (through omission - I must admit, I am becoming less fond of the notion of this as default behavior - it begins to smack of the heresy of "implied consent") I am expressing the third flavor of trust, just as by using the remailer at all, I am expressing the second variety. Of course, I still have to trust that a remailer will honor my routing requests. However, I believe this falls fair and square into the second category (trust in silence)

Any solution which tries to do this independent of the end user is broken, by definition.

-- Kevin ( I have no joke here, I just like saying "I trust a remailer if it is trusted by an entity I trust to trust remailers".)