Scientologists may subpoena anonymous remailer records

[Rogue Agent]

Timothy C. May (tcmay at got.net) wrote:
|At 8:12 PM 4/10/96, Steve Reid wrote:
[...]
|>I don't really know much about remailers, but I don't think there's much
|>to know... If I'm mistaken about any of the above, I'm sure someone will
|>correct me.
|
|Glad to oblige. I note also that Jim Byrd and Jim Warren are unclear on
|some details. (To Jim Byrd, that "alumni account at Cal Tech" that you
|mentioned was one of the Cypherpunks remailers at Caltech that our own
|pioneering Hal Finney runs.)

Incorrect.  The account was tc at alumni.caltech.edu, which is not the same
as Hal's remailer at hal at alumni.caltech.edu.  Just an odd coincidence they
were on the same machine. 

There's a whole saga about how CoS tracked the guy down, it's quite a
story.  Rather than go into it here and leave things out or confuse them
further, check out
http://www.cybercom.net/~rnewman/scientology/anon/penet.html for a clear,
concise explanation of the whole bizarre affair.  Check out Ron's "CoS vs
the Net" page while you're at it, at
http://www.cybercom.net/~rnewman/scientology/home.html. 

|Cypherpunks remailers account for something like 29 out of 30 of all the
|world's remailers, by site count, though not volume. Sophisticated users
|know that the Cypherpunks model is the only robust one; Julf's approach 
|has an ecological niche, but is highly vulnerable to the very subpoena 
|approach used recently (not "several years ago" as Jim Warren says).

It's also suceptible to hacker attack, as happened a few years ago. 
"Information wants to be free" is not a political statement, it's a fact
of nature.  One property of information is that it tends to spread.  If
you don't want the information to spread, don't store it.

        RA

agent at l0pht.com (Rogue Agent/SoD!/TOS/attb) - pgp key on request
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