it seems that anonymous remailing has split into two basic areas, each with distinct requirements and demands and problems: 1. private mail, sent to another email address 2. posts to Usenet or other forums such as mailing lists. now, interestingly, apparently most of the extremely heavy political backlash has come against (2), causing Hal Finney for example to advocate or suggest that remailers not be designed for posting but be limited to emailing to individual users somehow. (he didn't mention how mailing lists would be handled, but one might screen out email addresses that are "known mailing list addresses" or something like that) regarding (2), with scientology, I was trying to imagine how one could accomplish the same feature of distributing information anonymously in a "public place", but without giving the scientologists the ability to track a particular origination of the email, even remailers. Chaum's DC net idea is a useful approach. here I'd like to suggest another. some time ago someone had the amusing idea of cutting up the PGP binary code, UUencoded, and putting all the zillions of pieces in peoples signatures. each person would send mail to the signature server to pick up one of the 1/n pieces, and they would put it in their messages. frankly, I think this was a great idea that we could explore some more. in a sense, it stores data "holographically" over all kinds of different people's messages. imagine a system in which the scientology documents are stored in people's signatures, and someone writes software to go and recombine the documents based on finding signatures "out there". this could be applied to one newsgroup by having remailers post only tiny pieces of the material, but with enough on the newsgroup at any time to recombine them all with the software, but far too many pieces for the scientologists to attack all the remailers they are sent through. (people could post them through their regular email addresses). furthermore anyone posting a piece has a sort of minor plausible deniability. ("I just copied the signature from so-and-so as a protest, I have no idea what it refers to") == this all suggests to me the following idea. suppose that some document has been created that someone wants censored. how could net citizens protest this censorship? one scheme would be for everyone to put a tiny piece of the document in their signatures. if you get enough people to do this, it may actually be the case that at any one time, just because of the randomness of all the pieces available, the news server has enough messages archived for a program to scan the message directories and reconstruct the documents from all the pieces that are found. these "pieces" could even be stored solely in the netnews header fields. another idea involves the concept behind "spread spectrum". in this system, little pieces of data are spit out in different places, or channels, and the source and the reciever are scanning the exact same channel at the same time based on exact synchronization. I guess an analogy to usenet would be tiny pieces of data showing up in seemingly random newsgroups, but which are followed or "caught" exactly by the "reconstruction software". some interesting ideas related to steganography that some people might like to play with. == for a model of the scientology problem, it appears that what we have is a set of email addresses (S) and a public forum that essentially reaches some large subset of these people (S2). a person wishes to send out a secret document to S2, but he can't do so by posting to the forum, because then the censors "see" him and shut him down. but what he *can* do is send lots of pieces to a group of people in S, and each of these people individually posts their piece. (the censors have no control over mail sent between individuals, only that posted collectively). possibly, then, there is no single target of "who posted the material" for the censors to clamp down on, and the information eventually can be reconstructed by all S2. == key ways what I am proposing is different than some of the other "cut up the anonymous messages and recombine" proposals out there: 1. the recombination is not done by a remailer. it is done by anyone who can run software on the newsserver (i.e. reading the directories). the scientologists or "censors" cannot tell who is doing this. 2. the messages are not completely comprised of the data to be sent. the data could be stored in headers or the signatures of otherwise "legitimate" messages. note that the same scheme could be applied to web pages. you could store a document "holographically" in which pieces are obtained at all kinds of different URLs. it would be laughable for the censors to try to get court orders against individual pieces. and furthermore, the entire document is not stored anywhere "out there" in particular but recombined by anyone. the scientologists don't know who. note that I am giving the scientologists a lot more credit for their enmity than they deserve. they have mostly lost their war already in many ways, and they aren't a very serious threat to cyberspace in general, imho. they have shown an amazingly unabated aggression & zeal against remailer operators, however, something that could possibly be derailed with a little ingenuity.