Re: paper on remailers in the intelligence community

[tbyfield@panix.com (t byfield)]

At 12:37 AM 2/7/96, Timothy C. May wrote:

>But more seriously, any mil-info complex effort to demonize remailers must
>of course invoke one of the Horsemen. At this time, "Russian Mafia
>terrorists" is the putative focus of joint U.S.-Russian intelligence
>activities, and was even the plot of the latest James Bond movie.

        Yup. <sigh>
        In essence, remailers and other anonymizing/pseudonymizing
techniques democratize "deniability"--the MO of circumventing the law that
states have arrogated to themelves. Institutional dynamics aside, the
proverb that "A man reveals his character best when describing that of
another" applies to governments, too, I think: we can expect governmental
and paragovernmental anti-anonymity arguments to focus on the most extreme
ways in which governments have used their power to modulate identity--i.e.,
law-breaking.
        I don't want to start up a Cypherpunk[TM]-approved PR debate, but I
do think we (quote unquote) might do well to think a bit about some
arguments that can sidestep the arguments we can reasonably anticipate.
Plenty of folks have very recognizable nyms, so... nym as PO box, nym as a
way of tracking who's tracking you (like misspelling your name this or that
way when you know the organization you're giving it to will sell it), nym
as backup (for when your mailserver's down [yeah, I know...]). Anonymity,
after all, is only one of many possible uses for a remailer. No one could
possibly require that your email address bear your first and last names in
recognizable form--so what's so different about a nym?
        In terms of the fundamental issues, these are sidelights,
obviously, but they could come in handy. US culture has a deep-seated
mistrust of unstable identities (viz., the "con man") going back a century
or more; fighting on behalf of unstable and multiple identities will be an
upstream swim. But we might do pretty well arguing that remailers are more
similar to than different from net.staples--nutty email addresesses,
multiple addresses, etc.
        Sometimes the best way to win an argument is to refuse to have it.

Ted