On Fri, 3 Nov 2000, Anonymous Remailer wrote:

Few points, in the wake of current ZKS-sold-out-no-we-did-not discussions.

First, do we all agree who the adversary is when ZKSs customer encrypts traffic ?

Is that the neighbor, the employer, the insurance company, ISP, Microsoft, her husband, or the government ? All entities on this list except one can be effectively neutralized with single-DES and free Anonymizer.com access. The government is the only one that can do decent multi-network tracing and break some ciphers. One needs ZKS because one wants to get protection from the government.

It seems to me that the list of adversarys is longer than you think. Don't forget we're living in a world where corporations are as big economically as small countries. The insurance company, ISP, Microsoft, and possibly employer can afford a DES cracker. The ISP is obviously on the direct path for interception, as is the employer if she's using the internet at work. Microsoft presumably has some nice backdoors built in as well. Although many of these entities have don't a burning desire to know what you're doing online, this isn't always the case, especially in a world where your ISP is also a content provider who wants to make sure you're not infringing it's copyright, your insurance company wants to know when you do a google search on "AIDS" and your employer wants to keep you from selling secrets to competitors.