Remailers an unsolveable paradox?

[Nomen Nescio]

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Are remailers an unsolveable paradox?

    We want to be able to provide the means for whistleblowers and
others to communicate in a secure and anonymous fashion. Yet we need
to make sure we're not abused too much since sooner or later laws
will catch up with the remailers should abuse sky-rocket.

    Once upon a time all email servers were open relays. This was a
friendly time and spam wasn't invented. As time changed the focus
turned on securing the relaying procedures and has continued until
this day. Yet as we know the flow of spam (most of it coming directly
or indirectly from US) continued to increase, despite even existing
legislation today.

    What are the possible solutions for the remailers? Make all
remailers middleman only and adding the ability to opt-in for
delivery outside the network? Having a network of middleman remailers
and some nymservers that only delivers to other nymserver or opted-in
servers will at least provide some means for people to communicate
between themselves. It would in practise destroy the ability to
contact anyone outside the network though, making the network an
isolated place for a few. Using techniques like Hashcash should be
more or less mandatory even today to make it harder to mailbomb or
send large amounts spam? Why is it not?

    Regardless of what any hardcore cypherpunk or old-timers in the
remailer community may think about any ideas imposing restrains on
the useability of remailers something just have to be made about the
abuse of the system. I also predict that the abuse will increase so
time is ticking in a sense.

    Making sure we have robust remailing services in one shape or
another and at the same time have some kind of at least indirect
acceptance from legislators and also a low degree of spam flowing
through are essential goals.

    The average naive and ignorant redneck will never ever understand
the principal arguments for free speech that makes remailers useful.
The average american do not think and analyze what is told to him.
You will probably today find millions of americans who believe that
Saddam and Al-Qaeda did business just because Bush and the
administration lied about that initially, even though it's more or
less confirmed today that those links were not there.

    The rednecks also vote however (to some extent) and that's why it
will be a piece of cake to strike against the remailers if the
politicians would like to. And they will, if and when serious abuse
were to happen more often utilizing remailers. What would happen if
it was found (or simply suspected or claimed) that some terror deed
was planned using remailers? How long time would it take for us to
see new laws being proposed? Not long. And don't forget that anyone
(like Tom Ridge himself) could send bogues messages through the
system trying to 

    Since providing a true non-censoring remailing service and at the
same time safeguard against spam and abuse are therotically
incompatible I guess remailers are indeed a paradox waiting to be
shut down sooner or later by politicians if we're not open to at
least discuss some aspects of how these services are operated.


Johnny Doelittle


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> Effective today, Lemuria will be going middlemen.
> 
> Sometime around the middle of the month, Lemuria will go away.
> 
> This is final.
> 
> 
> The main reasons are that I've lost my faith in the usefulness of
> the remailer network. I have indications that the remailer network
> is
> being massively abused, on the scale where the legitimate mails are
> a tiny fraction that would be better served using other means.
> 
> There are two main reasons for my thoughts. One is I have looked at
> the bounces I receive, and compared their numbers to my statistics.
> According to that data, without having run a statistically
> significant analysis, the major traffic coming through Lemuria is
> Spam, with
> threats and harrassment a second. I realize that in the no-bounces,
> the fraction of legitimate mails will be higher, but even assuming
> a factor of 10, it is still a negligable part.
> 
> Second, I've the mail attached below yesterday. In case you can't
> read german, it is essentially spam advertising the mixmaster
> software and some book and/or software I haven't tested, might be a
> mixmaster
> client, might be a trojan. This is a sign for me that the anonymous
> remailer network is being used systematically for abuse, on a large
> scale. I don't want to be a part of that.
> 
> As mixmaster has no features whatsoever to prevent this crap, and
> the "encrypted only" switch doesn't do what it should do, and
> legitimate traffic is close to zero anyways, I'll be taking Lemuria
> down and
> leaving the remailer community.
> 
> It was an interesting time, and between frog, the SciTol fanatics
> (from both sides) and a couple really cool people, I've learned a
> lot about society that I'm not sure I really needed to know. :)