more ideas on anonymity

[Theodore Ts'o]

   Date: Mon, 1 Mar 93 13:27:24 EST
   From: pmetzger at shearson.com (Perry E. Metzger)

   Now, on the issue of slander, the notion of anonymity
   is largely unimportant. If I had walked into the middle of the street and
   ranted for an hour saying that GM trucks are unsafe, that would be largely
   ignored, as most anonymous denunciations likely are. The issue is if a
   non-anonymous individual or entity with credibility, like NBC, says
   something that is false.

I don't know about that.  It is certainly true that non-anonymous
individual or entity with credibility, like NBC, can do the most amount
of damage when they slander someone.

But what about someone who sends 20 different mail messages, each
through a different remailer path so they have different reply
addresses, all of them detailing some similar (but false) story about
how some GM truck went up in flames aftering being hit lightly by a Geo
Metro?  Or suppose someone sends 20 messages (all different) about how
Perry Metzger stiffed him/her out of some amount of digital cash?  I'd
suspect you could do some real damage that way.  Not as much, perhaps,
as something like a faked demonstration tape broadcast on prime-time
evening news, but damange nevertheless.

							- Ted