Re: DejaNews and Alta Vista Search Tools, and Privacy Implications

[Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>]

At 03:28 AM 12/27/95 -0800, tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May) wrote:
>Anyway, a point of clarification of a point, lest there be the belief that
>_all_ Cypherpunks are opposed to comprehensive Web search tools:
......
...offshore...
......
>Face it, every single word written by any of us to any Usenet newsgroup,
>going back to the beginning of Usenet, and expanding out to many
>ostensibly-private mailing lists, will fairly soon be searchable. 

The Internet not only makes it easier for everybody to get their
15 minutes of fame, it guarantees that anything stupid you've said 
in public over the last 15 years will be available to the entire world.
So deal with it...  I'm more bothered by people indexing what I read.

What kinds of Cypherpunk technology can we use to affect this?
I don't think we need to do too much work on _increasing_ data collection;
the commercial markets will figure that one out fast enough,
though understanding technical possibilities enough to stay ahead is good.
Remailers and nymservers are obvious starts on the information-hiding end,
and even the basic non-encrypted cypherpunks remailers are good enough
for most applications.  The problem is getting them widely deployed.
I've seen a couple of web-page-based remailers, and they're probably
easy to deploy widely; they're not very secure without SSL, but they're
a start, and people on SSL-equipped systems can run them securely.
Anon web proxies are more work to deploy, but they're not mysterious,
and the main limits to deploying them are economics.

Nymservers, however, are still pretty new - technology like anon.penet.fi
is generally good enough for most people if you've got an operator you trust,
and an economic base that makes it worth running them.  But the more secure
nymservers are still complex, and probably not something the average hacker
can just pop up and run - we probably need to explore them more before
it'll be easy to do.

While I like getting services provided through community spirit, like most of 
the remailers, I suspect Tim's right that pay-per-use privacy services
are going to evolve, and probably dominate.  Among other things, they're in
the balance between the couch-potato on-line services and real Internet
connections; they're probably more likely to be offered by people who want
full-time connectivity, and will be used to offset the slightly higher costs
of real service.  However, partly due to patent issues, and partly just to
convenience, I don't think they all need to use fully-anonymous digicash
for every transaction; most of them can get by with service-provider tokens 
that may be paid for by digicash or by less-anonymous systems.

One of the main threats I see to privacy services is the Exon bill -
it's pretty obvious that most US service providers will have to limit
access to people over 18, in spite of any of the Good Senator's claims
otherwise.
If the Feds start making examples of people before any serious court cases
get decided (or after, if the good guys lose), that probably means 
that service providers will have to check ID to protect themselves.
There may be a market for services that validate that their customers
are over 18, but provide anonymity within that.

#--
#				Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, stewarts@ix.netcom.com, Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281
# .... Heading back to The Big Phone Company