CDR: Re: New email could confound law enforcement

[Ken Brown]

Harmon Seaver wrote:

>  if your using a linux box, you have your own sendmail
> server, so,
> of course, all linux boxes can send email peer-to-peer. 

Or any other system. You can get smtp servers for windoze or anything
else.  Setting up peer-to-peer email between known hosts (even with
windows on them) is well possible & there are loads of programs out
there that do  it already. The program described seems to be some sort
of directory service - a sort of encrypted chat server that tells you if
your friends are online right now. And of course holds your mail when
they aren't. As you both need to be subscribers, I can't honestly see
the difference between using it and using one of the many existing
conferencing systems to send encrypted mail to other users of the same
system. (If AOL/Compu$serve have rules against using their system for
encrypted messages, I bet Cix or the Well don't, & even if they did
there are hundreds of little geeky servers or old BBs out there still,
or you could set up your own)

> a really nice thing
> would be a mail client that did automagic crypt, plus a mixmaster
> component to hide the
> true name of the sender or receiver running on linux.

Well, you could write your own :-)  But I think you would be reinventing
the wheel.

>  A netscape plugin
> that did this would be
> very, very nice, if NS ever became truly opensource. Or some other client
> that handled
> html mail well.

You probably don't even need a plug-in. It should be possible to set up
a single-purpose server that does nothing but take mail from one address
& send it onto another, encrypted - in other words a crude remailer.
Then run that on your own computer (which could be Windows if you
wanted)  and set your Netscape (or whatever mail client you like) to use
your own machine as a server for outgoing mail. So you carry on using 
your mail client and it doesn't care that it has been told to use a
server on the same PC it is on. Then the server encrypts the message &
does a peer-to-peer connection with the other guy's server. I would
expect that some of the mail that comes onto this list originates like
that already.