Re: dispatches from the front lines of anonymity

[Seth Morris <Seth.Morris@lambada.oit.unc.edu>]

> accept PGP-encrypted messages, but I was thinking of making a.w a
> special case where id's aren't allocated at all, and every message would
> just come from "an000000" or something. Is this a good idea? Pros are
> that it would make it very hard to track down the real poster, cons that
> it would be impossible to tell the different posters from each other,
> thus not enabling informers to earn good or bad reputations, unless they
> include key signatures or something.

	I like the idea, but would this make it impossible to respond
anonymously and/or privately to a whistleblower? I couldn't write back
privately to compare evidence if I didn't want to go public with my
information yet (assuming that I had a similar interest, of course).
 	Of course, if they have included a public key I could post an
encrypted message to them, but is the idea to create a newsgroup where
much of the traffic could conceivably be encrypted E-mail?
	But, on yet another hand (I feel like I'm in _A Mote in God's 
Eye_), if a regular informational posting in a.w discussed these issues,
a whistleblower would be warned to post a publik key, a nom de guerre, and
(maybe) a regular anon ID, if they wished, or to join an anon pool.

 	To repeat: I do like the an00000 idea. But I think people may want 
E-mail response.

 Seth <seth.morris@launchpad.unc.edu>
	(Yay, I finally figured out +clearsig=on ! Now I need an option to
add a oublic-key block to a message before signing automatically!)