CDR: Re: Anonymous Remailers

[Ralf-Philipp Weinmann]

On Thu, 5 Oct 2000, Sampo A Syreeni wrote:

> On Wed, 4 Oct 2000, David Honig wrote:
> 
> >This of course regresses the problem to the exit nodes.  But it encourages
> >more anonymizing infrastructure.
> 
> One variation of the original proposal would be to only allow egress to
> addresses known to lay in a jurisdiction different from the one in which the
> remailer resides. I know, the problem is nontrivial with all the dotcom
> addresses and such around. Does doing a DNS lookup and working on IP
> addresses help?

Nope. Unfortunately it does not. Deriving the geographical location from
an IP address and a DNS name is not always feasible. There are a couple of
big ISPs (UUNet/Worldcom comes to mind) which have allocated huge chunks
of IP space which then get re-allocated to their regional providers in
different countries. Of course there is some scheme involved in this process
which could be reversed to get to the geographical location, however it will
not always be readily apparent how it works.
What one could do however is have the remailer pass on every message which
has a recipient address that is *known to be in a jurisdiction that is different
from the remailers*. You will not be able to reach each and every target
then, but at least it's better than nothing.
On the other hand I remember that the Curch of Scientology was able to
have an impact on anon.penet.fi despite the fact that this remailer was outside
of US jurisdiction. Maybe we have to come up with a list of "incompatible"
jurisdiction systems to avoid this sort of thing from happening again.

Cheers,
-Ralf

--
Ralf-P. Weinmann <rpw at uni.de>
PGP fingerprint: 2048/46C772078ACB58DEF6EBF8030CBF1724