why market to Joe Sixpack?

Adam Shostack adam at homeport.org
Thu Nov 22 07:44:17 PST 2001


On Wed, Nov 21, 2001 at 11:51:04PM -0500, dmolnar wrote:
| Declan's comment on operating a physical remailer for suitably valuable
| cargo, plus some of Tim's recent comments about integration, made me think
| of the question in the subject line. So far I see at least three possible
| answers.
| 
| 1) Make lots of money.
| 
| 2) Spread awareness (that "funny feeling in the stomach" recently
| discussed) and save our fellow man. Make the world safe for privacy.
| 
| 3) Ensure that cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies have uses
| besides "Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse," so that they aren't banned.
| 
| anything else?

Ensure that the anonymity set is large enough to make analysis hard.
With small sets, you lose to simple correlation attacks.  (For
example, Alice sent messages to the MIX at these times; Bob got
messages at these times.  That Alice operates a node is scant
protection, it simply means that some set of messages come out
uncorrelated with input, and are thus correlated to one of the 40-odd
remailer operators.)

To Sandy's point about costs, yes, its nice for the stuff to be cheap
to use, but Tim is right that people fly to Geneva to get privacy.
(There's a recurring story that the Mass state police used to drive up
to the cheaper New Hampshire state liquor store on the border to note
plate numbers of people driving north to save on the rediculous direct 
and indirect taxes that Mass puts on booze, until such time as the NH
state police arrested them for loitering.  Do IRS agents loiter in
certain airports?  A large anonymity set is your friend, and is almost 
always necessary, but not sufficient.)


Adam


-- 
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
					               -Hume





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