Anonymizing Scam

[John Young]

Below are strange statements coming from Lance Cottrell.
Is there no anonymizer that is not sucking up to the TLAs?
Worse, has there ever been?

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http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/internet/11/20/privacy.reut/index.html

One company that is still making money off privacy is
Anonymizer.com, a San Diego-based company that offers
anonymous Web surfing for $50 a year, or $5 a month. The
company has 20,000 active subscribers, said President Lance
Cottrell. 

"We're still seeing very strong growth," Cottrell said. "Most
people are looking to prevent their boss, insurance company,
spouse, ISP (Internet Service Provider) from knowing where
they're going." 

Even so, Anonymizer.com began a push six months ago to
market its service to corporations, including law and investigation
firms, and the U.S. government, he said. 

"Intelligence agencies have been using us for years, especially
since September 11," Cottrell said. "They use us to keep an eye
on bad guy sites" with covert monitoring. 

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The pattern: initial big deal about helping the public protect its
privacy, then boom, a later revelation it was impossible to
continue ...  well, the reasons vary, but the cover story is always
the need for money, the Judas rationale.

Meanwhile, the fabulous surfing data archive allegedly inviolate, or
never retained, or no way to ever know who was using the
service, that is the data all free-gift marketers aim to collect.

Were any anonymizing archives ever trashed or truly protected
against concurrent snarfing? Is Safeweb laughing like ZKS,
like Lance? First, the US, then EU, then CN, all the way to
MD.

What does this say about commercial anonymizing services,
and remailers? And crypto, especially free PGP, and the honeypot
AES?