Re: The Coming Police State

[Matthew J Ghio <mg5n+@andrew.cmu.edu>]

> - New systems. I've said it before: we had some early wins with the
> Cypherpunks remailers, but follow-ons have been slow in coming. We
> often see a spate of good ideas--such as on digital money, or
> steganography, or the like--but then these ideas don't become
> "standards." This could be for a variety of reasons, so I'm not casting
> stones here. But it's a phenomenon we should think about and try to
> resolve. Let's find a way to get more "outposts" in cypherspace built,
> deployed, and maintained. Voice PGP, as mentioned above, would be
> a natural one.
>
> - Remailer sites in non-U.S. countries. This needs to be a higher
> priority.  Get a robust remailer, using PGP or ViaCrypt PGP (for
> bulletproof legality reasons), in at least a dozen countries. Digital
> postage will help incentivize remailer operators to get into the
> business, to maintain the systems in a less-lackadaisical way (no
> offense, but seeing remailers drop like flies as student accounts
> expire or vanish mysteriously is not confidence-building). The
> "second generation remailer" stuff needs to be incorporated at least
> partly.

Just to throw some statistics into the works here.  I've been keeping
logs of usage of my remailer and my remailer list server... (which I
know is horribly uncypherpunkish- unfortunantly I've found it to be
necessary. (Originally, I had no logs.)  Every few days, someone will
toss a screwball message into my mail filter that doesn't have the
proper headers and it'll foul things up.  For example, today I got a
message from "xxx@cosmos".  His mailer did not use the FQDN... I get a
lot of other crap like that too.)  But the logs provide some relevant
statistics...

In the last two weeks, I've had requests for the remailer list requests from:

Unknown country (ie .com .org .edu), probably mostly US, but not
necessarily: 77
(breakdown: .com 25 .edu 43 .org 3 .net 6)

.gov: 1  (nasa, btw)

.ca 9
.uk 6
.de 6
.au 3
.it 1
.se 1
.ch 1
.nl 1
.no 1

----

Total requests: 107

The problem is not lack of interest, but lack of usage.  These stats are
just for the last two weeks (2/24-3/10); my software has been
operational for more than a month.  Probably close to 200 people have
requested the info.  I think it would be a fair assumption to say that
most never used a remailer or just experimented with it once or twice. 
Probably only a small fraction actually used one of the remailers.  I
suppose the learning curve is just too steep for most people, or the
remailers are just too much trouble, or they're just not useful enuf.

Of these 107, only 16 got an anon address from my remailer.  Even fewer
tried using it.  And although I mention where to get the software,
exactly zero of my 100+ interested people have actually set up a
remailer themselves.  And the hacktic.nl never seems to have gotten off
the ground either.  (And the caltech remailer seems to be gone. :(   And
I'm using too many ands.:)

I agree, we need more remailers outside of the US.  But I think we need
more than just remailers.  We have remailers.  We have software.  We
need a PLAN.