Traceable Infrastructure is as vulnerable as traceable messages.

[Tim May]

At 10:51 AM -0700 8/3/01, Ray Dillinger wrote:
>On Fri, 3 Aug 2001, Tim May wrote:
>
>>>and wait for the next time something happens if you're on DHCP, or
>>>they may have to get the cooperation of one or more other governments
>>>if your login trail runs outside their jurisdiction -- but ultimately,
>>>it's traceable.
>>
>>You apparently don't even understand how even simple remailer chains work.
>
>Hello, earth to Tim.
>  (1) You can send anonymous mail by sending it through a remailer, but
>  (2) The remailers themselves are not anonymous.

Are you dense? Do you understand the concept of nested, encrypted text blocks?

While the remailers may be "non-anonymous," this certainly does not 
mean that an external attacker can know the mapping from N arriving 
messages (encrypted) to N' departing messages (also encrypted, but 
not the same pattern).

Do we have to draw a picture?

Do you think that knowing the locations of, for example, all of the 
remailers in the world means that messages can be traced through the 
network?

Have you even _thought_ about these issues which were explained a decade ago?

Do you know about DC-Nets?

>  (3) If the remailers *were* anonymous, they could not operate
>       because then the users would not know where to send their mails.

Actually, this is false. Pipenets and Blacknets don't require knowing 
locations/identities of nodes. Using alt.anonymous.messages is 
increasingly common. Go look at it if this is new to you. Left as an 
exercise, though oft-discussed here in past years, is how to post 
messages untraceably to it and how to read messages untraceably.

(I used a variant of this for Blacknet in 1993.)


>    As long as the remailers themselves are traceable, make no mistake:
>they exist only because the lions have not yet passed a law against them.
>
>    You cannot have encryption technologies advancing and leaving the law
>behind, so long as any vital part of the infrastructure you need is
>traceable and pulpable by the law.
>

You haven't even bothered to think about the technical issues, have you?


--Tim May


-- 
Timothy C. May         tcmay at got.net        Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns