Re: Remailer Musings

[Joseph Urbanski <strops@netcom.com>]

On Wed, 20 Apr 1994 wcs@anchor.ho.att.com wrote:

> 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
> 
It seems to me the obvious solution to this problem, is for someone (with 
the means & incentive) to set up remailers in countries outside the 
jurisdictions of the US (and other countries with similar copyright laws) 
that simply REFUSE to track points or origin.  Yes, the remailer has to 
be capable of determining point of origin in order to be able to 
function, but by no means must it be set up to do so.  The world is a big 
place, and don't think it would be too dificult to find a place where the 
local authorities would have no interest in enforcing US copyright laws. 
Or maybe we can talk Bill Gates into installing a T1 to antarctica ;-)

-Jay 
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Joseph J. Urbanski Jr. <strops@netcom.com>
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