Long-Lived Remailers

[Timothy C. May]

At 4:56 PM 5/20/96, Rev. Mark Grant, ULC wrote:
>With regard to the problems of remailers being shut down when we want
>long-lived addresses, wouldn't seperating the input and output be one
>possibility? That is (like Hal's Alumni remailer) you'd send mail to
>'remailer at anon.ai' and it would be forwarded via a disposable account
>elsewhere. All messages would appear to come from 'disposable at foo.com' and
>if that account was shut down a new one could be opened to replace it
>while incoming mail simply backed up at the main remailer account.

This is a very good idea.

It keeps the advantages of having persistent accounts (which other users,
chaining programs, etc. can use) while making it appear that the mail is
coming from another account.

"Security through obscurity," I hear you snort. Well, not really. The
_legal_ account is the one that an unhappy recipient sees on the "From:"
line. The Church of Scientology sees "disposable at foo.com" and fires off a
letter to foo.com requesting that foo.com cause this account to disappear.
So it does, but "transient at bar.com" picks up the slack.

An idea worth trying, of formally/legally separating the functions.

Of course, in some sense this is a special case of having disposable
accounts for "instant remailers" (see recent thread on this).



>The only potential problem I could see would be that the disposable ISP
>might have logs which could track the outgoing messages back to the other
>account. You'd also obviously need to open the disposable account
>anonymously or using an ISP who'd protect your identity.

Traffic analysis will be quite easy to do, of course, as all mail sent to
the persistent address comes out of the "disposable at foo.com" address.
Q.E.D.

(Hal, to use him as the example, could start using his own choice of
remailer hops to accomplish much the same result. We've talked about this
for a long time, too. If I ran a remailer, I think I'd route *all* traffic
leaving my site through at least one other remailer...kind of a "hot
potato" effect. Of course, if _everyone_ did this, an infinite loop would
result. Lots of interesting twists, though, as messages could be set to
"leak out" of the loops.)

But this scheme, here, and Mark's scheme, are variants on the idea of
trying to make the remailers less clearly-identifiable targets.

--Tim May

Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software!
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