About lawyers and spoliation

[Tim May]

At 12:54 PM -0500 8/3/01, Aimee Farr wrote:
>Bear wrote, quoting me:

>>  I've got a nice protocol for running a fully-encrypted mailing list
>>  stegoized in images on a web/FTP site, which would be totally invisible
>>  to non-participants - but such a list can't be announced publicly
>>  so of course nobody could find out about it and join it, without
>>  also letting the law know about it and join it.
>
>Interesting.

Banal, actually.


>>  And the list goes on.  Every time you try to get something used by
>>  more than a dozen people, it cannot be secret.
>
>"Three make keep a secret, if two of them are dead." -- Benjamin Franklin,
>1728.

A platitude which misses the point of modern PK and DC-Net sort sorts 
of approaches. The "security" of chained remailers is of course not 
perfect, but it does not depend on the naive attacks which Ray 
Dillnger claims make the security as bad as he claims. Nor is his 
"stegoized mailing list" even the slightest bit interesting.

Well-trod ground. What is it about some of you people who don't even 
bother to learn the basics?



>>  And regulation of anything on the internet can happen, because EVERY
>>  IP address is in principle traceable.  Oh, it may take a week or
>>  two -- they may have to slap your ISP with an order to preserve logs
>>  and wait for the next time something happens if you're on DHCP, or
>>  they may have to get the cooperation of one or more other governments
>>  if your login trail runs outside their jurisdiction -- but ultimately,
>>  it's traceable.
>
>Hm. For an equally-relevant proposition, See United States v. White, 401
>U.S. 745 (1971); United States v. Miller, 425 U.S. 435 (1976).
>
>I've seen predictions that by 2005-7, your IP will be biometrically
>associated. (I have nothing to back to that up, but the source was
>credible.)

IP addresses have nothing to do with attacks on remailers and DC-Nets.

Do some reading. Start with Chaum's 1981 paper on untraceable e-mail, 
read at least the first 5 or 7 pages of his 1988 paper on dining 
cryptographers nets, and then move on to the other list-related 
sources.


--Tim May


-- 
Timothy C. May         tcmay at got.net        Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns