Re: The Earliest CP Remailer *DID* Emphasize Anonymity

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

At 11:05 AM 9/2/96 -0700, Tim wrote:
>No, the focus was at _least_ as much on providing anonymity as on
>protection from eavesdroppers or traffic analysts. More so, actually.
>How do I know this? Well, I was the one who did the presentation on
>Chaumian mixes at the first meeting, describing them as remailers and using
>paper envelopes-within-envelopes to illustrate the concept.
>Later that day, in the "Crypto Anarchy Game" we played to educate the

Thanks for the history correction; I got involved with Cypherpunks about
a year after the initial meeting/game, so I'm going on other people's
comments about the intent of mixes and remailers.  Out of curiousity,
did either spam or blackmail show up during the first run of the game?

>And all of the early uses were explicitly to anonymize the sender, not to
>deter eavesdropping (which conventional crypto works well for, anyway).

Keeping the sender's identity hidden from the recipient is a different
problem than keeping either of them hidden from Untrusted Third Parties.
Conventional crypto is fine for keeping message content secure from
eavedroppers, but isn't enough to prevent traffic analysis;
that requires either mixes or at least message pools or broadcasts.

> Kleinpaste .... Julf ....
I've also been pleased by how long Julf's remailer stayed in business.


#			Thanks;  Bill
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