The Difficulty of Source Level Blocking

[Theodore Ts'o]

   From: tcmay at netcom.com (Timothy C. May)
   Date: Tue, 15 Feb 1994 11:38:54 -0800 (PST)

   It's broken in the larger sense that Eric mentioned: costs are not
   incurred by posters. This is not just a problem with remailers, but
   with the growing numbers of "Make.Money.Fast" and "Allah is Coming!"
   sorts of posts. Think about it.

I've heard this assertion made a large number of times --- that if the
poster had to pay for the cost of a posting, that all of our problems
would go away (or at least a lot of them would).

I'm not convinced they would; perhaps it is time to start exploring this
assumption.  Digital postage solves the problem that it becomes
expensive for someone to flood a mailing list or a newsgroup with 10,000
annoying messages.  But all it does is disenfranchise the poor; the rich
would still be able to make themselves a nuisance.  How do you defend
against someone like Detweiler if he has the resources of a Donald
Trump, or a Bill Gates?

Also, how much do you charge?  For example, Detweiler's Blacknet posting
only went to some 20-odd newsgroups, and yet it was able to do a lot of
damage.  If you charge $1 a message, then for a mere $20, he was able to
cause a lot of damage and consternation on the net.  If you start
charging $10 a message or more, legitimate users will be hurt, since
they will now have to pay this large amount of money.  And in the long
run, it still doesn't work, since Detweiler wasn't even being very
efficient.  For example, he could have sent a GIF image containing kiddy
porn or bondage pictures to soc.women; then the sh*t would have really
hit the fan.  A single message can do quite a lot of damage.

Digital postage alone does not solve the accountability problem.

						- Ted