Official Anonymizing

Greg Broiles gbroiles at well.com
Wed Sep 5 09:17:30 PDT 2001


At 07:34 AM 9/5/2001 -0700, John Young wrote:

>Thanks for the cites of Gatti.
>
>Greg's disclosure of C2Net's sales is appreciated. Perhaps not
>surprising. What would be surprising, maybe, would be disclosure
>as ZKS did in its earliest days, of reporting on meetings C2Net was
>having with law enforcement officials about its technology.

Didn't happen - at least not within my knowledge. I don't think we'd have 
been willing to have one, given our crypto export control stance (and 
paranoia about law enforcement) at that point. Given the state of the law 
at that time (lots of this was before Patel's rulings in _Bernstein_, 
during the ITAR period before BXA took over crypto regs, and way before the 
export liberalization), we weren't at all sure we weren't going to be 
arrested and made examples of, cf. Dmitry Sklyarov.

Law enforcement never asked for a meeting, probably because of (a) 
ignorance of or disinterest in the technology, or (b) if they did 
understand it, they also understood that we were essentially selling 
Apache-SSL (from a technical standpoint), so if they wanted a copy to beat 
up on, they could build it themselves - they didn't need an RSA license to 
legitimize their internal/research copies.

We did get a moderate amount of interest in the remailers/anonymizers which 
ran at C2 in the early days, and later were run somewhere else but whose 
domain name was held by C2; callers on that topic generally got a nice long 
explanation of how remailers work, how we didn't know the identity of the 
person running the remailer nor its physical location, why we supported 
remailers as free speech tools, and how as a provider of DNS lookups we 
never had any logs of activity in the first place to disclose, whether or 
not we had wanted to, court order or not. Complainers pretty much went away 
after getting the explanation, save for one publisher of avant-garde fonts 
who never did give up trying to cajole or scare us into giving out the 
information we didn't have, and/or shutting down DNS to the privacy stuff.

I think ZKS' technology is more interesting and more threatening to law 
enforcement than our web crypto tools were - there's still not a lot of 
evil or disorder that goes on related to, literally, the web - I get the 
impression that law enforcement is a lot more interested in IRC, email, and 
other communications which are either more personal and immediate, or much 
less personal and immediate (like Usenet). Web sites are still relatively 
static, which means their providers are pretty easily identified, which 
means not so much bad stuff happens there.


--
Greg Broiles
gbroiles at well.com
"We have found and closed the thing you watch us with." -- New Delhi street kids





More information about the cypherpunks-legacy mailing list