Pay per use remailers and remailer reliability tracking.

[Anonymous]

On Fri, 21 Dec 2001, Faustine wrote:

> But could they defend themselves from the inside? Quite a 
> vulnerability. I'm sure any government agency out to compromise the
> system would be delighted to find all the constituent elements
> neatly-identified and run by "respectable" and "well-known"
> organizations. God, what more could they ask for.
>
> If the government put me in charge of subverting the remailer network, 
> I think the first thing I'd do is round myself up a nice batch of  
> friendly, respectable "professionals" with shiny impressive
> "professional" credentials (tailored exactly to match what "well-known
> organizations" are looking for) and infiltrate the hell out of every
> single organization running a node.

If the government put me in charge of subverting the remailer network, I
think the first thing I would do is round myself up a couple of 
"cypherpunks" (with anti-government, fuck-the-law attitudes) to gain the
respect of the operators of the most stable and popular remailers, and 
assume control of the remailer software development, infiltrating every 
node at the source.
 
> Meanwhile, everyone on the outside is lulled into a false sense of  
> complacency, because, after all, these 5-10 remailers are
> "well-administered and professionally maintained"-- surely we can
> trust these reasonably well-known organizations who have sufficient   
> legal firepower to defend themselves, can't we?

Proposing that the remailer network would benefit more from 10 reliable,
properly configured and legally secure remailers than 50 "mosquito
remailers" is a pure statement of fact. Mix-nets need stable nodes. You're
welcome to design a different system that allows anonymous messages to be
transmitted through short-lived temporary nodes, but I doubt it will be
anything like what we're using now.

The best way to ensure the mix-net is going to protect you is for you to
run a remailer. (Better yet, write your own remailer software). The
remailer network should never become an "old boy's club." Anyone with the
ability to maintain a stable remailer must be permitted to join.

Government involvement isn't necessarily a bad thing. I'd happily include 
both a remailer run by Hamas and a remailer run my the Mossad in my 
remailer chains.