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Re: Remailer Musings
Philippe Nave suggests that an anonymous remailer should do more than
delete the originator's origin from a message, it should also try to
hide its own origin. In some networking protocols, you can do an ok
job of that - dialup networks that don't validate origins, for instance,
though even there the Phone Company may be able to trace who called whom.
With other protocols, you can't cover your tracks very well -
TCP/IP messages do carry their originator's IP address, and there's
no way you can stop the receiving mailer from logging your address
even if you lie to it when generating mail headers; some mailers
not only log your address, but refuse to accept connections if you're lying.
So they're going to find you anyway, if they're determined enough;
the strength in the remailer system comes from the service provided
by the remailer itself, and having the remailer forge its address on
outgoing connections may annoy the people it connects to as much as
being a remailer in the first place. Remailers become much more
effective when you have a bunch of them in multiple countries,
which makes it much harder for governments to pressure operators,
especially if they want to avoid publicity.
On the other hand, copyright laws are a sticky situation;
Europe and the US operate under common conventions, and there may
be more the US can do in, say, Finland for copyright violations
than they can do for gambling or income tax evasion for a remailer
at credit-suisse.com.ch .
Bill