Do not taunt happy-fun-court.

[Anonymous]

Black Unicorn said:

There are a few cypherpunks probably listening to this who've been smacked
with subpoenas for running remailers.  I think you'll find that the
government is pretty persuasive to third parties like these.  The only
defense (which one administrator of a remailer I won't name was clever
enough to set himself up with) is to say (my paraphrasing) "I don't have
access to those logs or any of that data.  I don't keep such logs and I
never have because it's too much overhead and work."

--

I suspect I'm the remop being referred to here, so I'll comment:

That defense is valid because it is true. It isn't a contrived excuse for 
not keeping logs that I conveniently pull out of the wings to protect the 
anonymity of my users. Keeping logs really is too much of a resource drain 
on my system.

At some point I will probably begin keeping logs that expire after a 
period of several hours, so that I can identify and block spammers. I'm 
interested in your thoughts on this, Uni. Is the defense "I never retain 
logs longer than 2 hours; they are automatically deleted out of disk space 
considerations" as string as the first one? (This is how many remailers 
are configured. But even if the remailers all kept logs, if users are 
chaining their messages through multiple remailers, anonymity should still 
be preserved.)

Regardless, I haven't had the time to implement such a system anyway.

My point here is that, if you are going to be using the "off-shore
attorney" system of preserving your data, I think it would be helpful if
there was a legitimate reason for placing your information in the hands of
this other entity (other than protection from the US courts.)