Reailers: To Log or Not to Log?

[nobody@kaiwan.com (Anonymous)]

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Tim May pondered:

> And even that last remailer may be able to claim ignorance (and win in
> court) if he can show that what he mailed was unreadable to him, i.e.,
> encrypted to the recipient. (This is another reason I favor a goal of
> "everyone a remailer.")

The only problem I see with the "everyone a remailer" concept is 
that, in the presence of traffic analysis, a locally generated 
message will show up as an imbalance between incoming and 
outgoing messages, will it not?

> With canonical remailers, and no logging, earlier remailers should be
> safe.

That brings up an interesting point -- does the very act of 
logging remailing activity, specifically the recording of sources 
and destinations of forwarded messages perhaps open the operator 
up to INCREASED liability?  IOW, if the remailer is being used in 
the furtherance of a "crime", the presence of a log which records 
the details of such traffic might be used as an argument that the 
operator "should have known" that suspicious, possibly illegal, 
activity was going on and possibly being considerd CRIMINALLY 
NEGLIGENT for not stopping it.  Has he/she torpedoed any 
possibility of a "Sgt. Schultz" ("I know nuuuuthing!") defense by 
gathering detailed evidence and then not acting on it?  Perhaps 
"Don't ask, don't tell" is a better policy...

Also, I suspect that if increased activity on a remailer is 
useful in thwarting traffic analysis, then foreswearing the 
keeping of logs should serve to INCREASE the throughput as users 
gain confidence that any "footprints" they might leave behind are 
promptly erased.

 -- Diogenes

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