Re: Anonymous Remailer threat: Scientologists may subpoena anonymous remailerrecords?

[jwarren@well.com (Jim Warren)]

>To: cypherpunks@toad.com
>Subject: Scientologists may subpoena anonymous remailer records
>Date: Tue, 09 Apr 1996 19:02:39 -0700
>From: John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com>
>
>I thought that most or all of the cypherpunk anonymous remailers don't
>keep records.  Not even on backup tapes.  The whole idea is that there
>aren't logs.  But maybe they have found some remailers that are
>non-cypherpunk.  ...


My understanding is that anon remailers come in two flavors:

All of then anonomize X's msg to Y before forwarding it to Y as being
"from" anonymous source, Z.

The first flavor keeps a record matching X with Z. This allows it to accept
responses to Z that it then re-matches and forwards back to X.

The second flavor simply forwards without retaining any matching records at
all.  Of course, this then prohibits responses to the original msg sender
via that remailer.

My understanding is that the most famous remailer, anon.penet.fi, is of the
first flavor -- and was raided by reps of the Church of Scientology,
several years ago, with a Finnish search warrant, and that this produced
some [much?] of the evidence against their opponent who had allegedly been
splattering COS copyrighted "works" all over the net.  (Interesting
application of private property rights -- protecting religious secrets.)

--jim

And ... if I were a surveillance-oriented government agency, I would insert
"watchers" at appropriate regional and national hubs that would routinely
and automatically monitor every message ever sent to every identified
remailer -- so as to protect against those evil whistle-blowers who dare to
expose such govt's arrogance, abuses and/or wrong-doing, and the one or two
vile terrorists who are stupid enough to use the net for communications
without using world-available uncrackable crypto (that are the U.S. govt's
official excuse for wanting to wiretap us all.)