Re: Scientologists may subpoena anonymous remailer records

[jpb@miamisci.org (Joe Block)]

At 4:12 PM 4/10/96, Steve Reid wrote:
>The problem with that, of course, is that the remailer has to keep a
>record of who owns each anonymous account, so that it can direct the
>replies to the anonymous person. These records could be siezed.

Sameer will certainly correct me if I'm wrong, but remailers like c2 store
an encrypted header that is a path through the remailer system.

Since each nesting level is encrypted to that level's remailer, the other
levels only know which remailer to pass the message along to.  If you
really want to be secure, run your own remailer so that nasty folk can't
tell which of the encrypted messages are for you, and which your machine is
passing along.  I'd have a seperate account that I used solely for pointing
these c2 style messages to that had a procmail setup that would add a copy
of each message to my real mailbox and generate a random garbage file that
was a random number of bytes smaller than the incoming mail and premail it
through the remailer chain until it hit a /dev/null address.  That way, for
every message that entered your remailer one would exit for the benefit of
any traffic analysts.  I'd also make sure that the c2 address passed
through my remailer at least twice.

>BTW, has anyone out there created an anonymous web forwarder? I'm sure
>there are a lot of people out there who don't like the idea of having
>their email address in the log files of dozens of web servers... Creating
>a simple web forwarder wouldn't be hard.

I can't stand netscape's mailer and newsreader so I use Eudora Light and
just have netscape set to a bogus email address.

Joseph Block <jpb@miamisci.org>

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