Traceable Infrastructure is as vulnerable as traceable messages.

[Tim May]

At 5:48 PM -0700 8/3/01, Ray Dillinger wrote:

>If the law wants to take this thing down, they will  not be
>attacking the strongest point -- ie, trying to trace individual
>messages.
>
>Instead, they will attack the weakest point -- trying to drive
>remailer operators out of business and thus destroy the
>infrastructure you need.  That is the threat model I'm concerned
>about, and given that network monitoring is now automatable and
>cheap, it is entirely do-able.

The "cops" won't be driving remailer operators in various U.S. states 
"out of business." Even in these sad times where democrat expediency 
seems to be winning out over constitutional rights, this battle will 
have to be fought in the courts, probably all the way to the Supreme 
Court. And we know that virtually no readings of the First Amendment 
give local courts the say over what people can mail to each other, 
outside of certain types of porn and suchlike.

This has been discussed many times here. Do you have some new 
insights, or are you just now discovering the notion that government 
may try to apply pressure on what people mail to each other?

>>As long as there is one uncompromised node in a chain subversion doesn't
>>guarantee a matchup of "from" and "to" but it improves the odds.
>
>So what?  A move by the g8 to protect the "global infrastructure"
>of the Internet, (polspeak for protecting their ability to control
>what the sheep think) followed by laws passed in individual countries,
>would force remops to operate solely in "rogue states", and messages
>to and from them could be screened out pretty simply.

Handwaving. The First Amendment will not likely be abandoned because 
some Marxists in France concluded that there should be limitations on 
what people mail to other people.

--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