Anonymous Remailers

[Matt Thomlinson <phantom@u.washington.edu>]

Yes, those of us who run remailers sometimes run them from university 
accounts. Such was my case.

The university of washington (without knowing it :) supported remailing 
at one time, through phantom@mead.u.washington.edu. I am not root here 
(and never will be!), and such access is not needed to set up a 
remailer. Instead, Hal Finney has written up a few remailer scripts 
which depend only on your ability to create a .forward file, and have 
perl available. (oh, also about.. ~1Mb for all of the scripts + PGP + 
keyring). 

There were no problems with my remailer and it was well-used. No scripts 
of incoming or outgoing mail were kept. The remailer lived for a few 
months last year, which actually isn't bad when you consider it was based 
on a student account with a nazi-like administration. :)

The death-blow was a remailer target complaining to me about someone 
sending unsolicited mail to them through my remailer. Instead of replying 
to my account (phantom@mead), they saw that the header had "nobody@mead" 
on it, and when mail to that address bounced, they sent to postmaster.

The mail to the postmaster was very polite and simply asked that the mail
cease, either by taking away the remailing ability from the perpetrator or
blocking the destination address. Of course, the postmaster didn't know
anything about this, and when he looked into it, he was quite suprised. 

I was able to keep it limping for about another week. I got support from 
a few cypherpunks around here, people on the list like JDraper, TMay, 
etc., and from others including Whit Diffie, Neal Koblitz, etc.

I might have been able to fight the shutdown, but I saw it as a losing 
battle.

In any case, no, it takes no special abilities to run a remailer; 
everything is pretty much packaged for ease-of-use. Every administration is 
going to act differently if/when/how they find out about it. Make your 
own judgement, I suppose.


mt

Matt Thomlinson                               Say no to the Wiretap Chip!
University of Washington, Seattle, Washington.
Internet: phantom@u.washington.edu      	    phone: (206) 548-9804
PGP 2.2  key available via email or finger phantom@hardy.u.washington.edu