Remailer Stats (was: Swiss Bank in a Box)

[Tim May]

On Tuesday, December 25, 2001, at 12:37 PM, jamesd at echeque.com wrote:

>     --
> On 25 Dec 2001, at 6:00, Ryan Lackey wrote:
>> A population of even 10k is certainly well within FBI (or
>> even my personal) resources to investigate, at least to a
>> cursory level. Given that most likely a lot of those users
>> are located at large and "compliant" ISPs or mail
>> providers, gaining access to their normal outgoing mail
>> feed, connection logs, and identity information is just not
>> that hard.  Especially if you're willing to break the law.
>
> The best is enemy of the good enough.  If the enemy can
> identify me as a member of a population of ten thousand, this
> is a fairly major improvement on identifying me as a member
> of a population of one.
>
> So, remailers are not wholly bullet proof.  We would like
> them to be better.  They are still pretty good.
>

And importantly, _suspicion_ is not enough for conviction or even search 
warrants. (In most cases.)


Remember that when the Church of Scientology got the Finnish courts to 
force Julf to reveal the nym that was bothering the Church, the trail 
led back to a conventional CP remailer at C2Net, which kept no records. 
The trail went ice cold there.

We can all get paranoid and say that our use of remailers puts us into 
the "Group Under Suspicion," but, as James says, even the existing 
network of remailers does a good job of killing traceability.


--Tim May
"Ben Franklin warned us that those who would trade liberty for a little 
bit of temporary security deserve neither. This is the path we are now 
racing down, with American flags fluttering."-- Tim May, on events 
following 9/11/2001