CNN.com on Remailers

[Meyer Wolfsheim]

On Wed, 12 Dec 2001, Faustine wrote:

> Back to remailers: this might have a boneheadedly obvious answer, but
> is there a role for non-publicized privately-run remailer networks to
> serve as a "privacy buffer" before putting messages thorugh the public
> remailer system?
>
> For example, if I had the hardware, software, phone lines, internet
> connections and time to run multiple autonomous mixmaster remailers
> out of my basement to route my own messages (and dummy traffic) around
> before funneling them to a public remailer, would there be any way to
> keep all-but-the-last box entirely shut off from view? Could you
> achieve this degree of anonymity from running Reliable? What would it
> take to keep a private remailer network truly private?

Perhaps I'm unclear on what you are proposing... but if this is really a
private system, as soon as the mail exits, it's obvious that it came from
you, no matter how much you mixed it around in your basement. So what's
the point?

> And what about the idea of surreptitiously installing this kind of
> private remailer network via piggybacking a stripped-down
> highly-anonymous version of remailer software onto other people's
> badly-maintained networks--free POP accounts to hold the traffic,
> maybe along with some sort of remote administration tool for
> maintenance. A tiny trickle of traffic has all the obvious problems,
> but is it possible that a "single user" scheme like this might be
> sufficiently under the radar to go completely unnoticed? Little
> invisible pinprick remailers that pop up all over the place, and
> dissappear almost as fast as they spring up. Mosquito Remailers? Just
> a thought.

It's been discussed here before. Ian Goldberg and others talked about
disposable exit hops, Steve Schear on temporary remailers, other people on
inexpensive, auto-configuring "remailer on a chip" designs that could be
surreptitiously introduced to random networks...

> p.s...and yes, I'm off to "Go Read the Archives"TM.

Unfortunately, you'll find that these ideas aren't new, and the answers to
their problems aren't easy.


-MW-