FBI moves to route internet through central servers: Another dagger in the Heart of Freedom in America

[Mark Henderson]

On Sat, Oct 27, 2001 at 11:06:51AM -0700, keyser-soze at hushmail.com wrote:
> - re-awaken FidoNet

FidoNet, ugh. Would the software even work under most current 
operating systems?

uucp still lives in pretty much every UNIX and UNIX-like operating 
system and it moves email well. 

It would be a simple matter to get uucp going for a mail link with
some sort of over the wire encryption. It has been about ten years 
since I've dealt with this, but as I recall each email message went
via a uux of rmail (uux was remote command execution - sort of like
rsh over a modem). There is no particular reason why one couldn't
encrypt before sending and decrypt upon receipt. Mostly just a
modification to sendmail.cf and a modification to rmail. Of course
this really just solves the problem for a single hop uucp link.

People did a lot of multi-hop uucp. I remember trying to work out the 
right "bang path" to get mail across the country to people I was 
corresponding with quickly. Of course, you end up with the same 
problems. Traffic can be monitored. multi-hop uucp means there are 
lots of very easy interception points. This doesn't really get around 
the whole problem, uucp is just something different to monitor, still 
subject to traffic analysis, and you'd need real end to end 
encryption of email messages via something like pgp/gpg anyway. 

The only thing a large multi-hop uucp network would give us is that 
it would allow us to do is decentralise and control our own mail 
paths, so monitoring would be harder, in that sense. In a large 
enough network, one could even use a different path for each message. 

I wonder if my old Telebit modem still works. It is in a box somewhere...

---
Mark Henderson, mch at squirrel.com, mch at informationanarchy.org
 "Heilir fsir. Heilar asynjur. Heil sja in fjvln}ta fold." - Sigrdrmfumal
OpenPGP/GnuPG keys available at http://www.squirrel.com/pgpkeys.asc