In his posting "WILL 'HATE SPEECH' BECOME 5th HORSEMAN OF THE APOCALYPSE?" Paul Kneisel <[email protected]> says some interesting things about anonymous remailers. Here are some excerpts, the whole post is about 47K, and may be found at http://venus.soci.niu.edu/~cudigest/CUDS9/cud980 within the next few days, but not right now. _________________________________________________________________________ (snip) You haven't heard much from the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse recently. The dreaded "hackers, terrorists, drug dealers and kiddie pornographers" of cyberspace who once caused Presidents and Prime Ministers to tremble and mothers to herd their children into their beds at sundown have been strangely quiet, if only measured by the absence of significant media reports to the contrary. Perhaps in these modern times the wages of sin are no longer death but just a really tired feeling, as comedienne Paula Poundstone comments. Yet the Four Horsemen once caused millions people off-the-net to call for all manner of controls on the Global Information Superhighway. (snip) The issue of quality encryption and anonymous remailers has also run into difficulties as a mass motivator for additional government control of cyberspace. When export controls on PGP were in place, the labyrinthine procedures necessary to get a copy were likely beyond the capability of most new users. Learning to use it was even more daunting, although considerably assisted by new books like those from O'Reilly and Associates.[10] Anonymous remailer systems introduce yet another level of complexity. By the end of the process, Steve Harris, the author of the "John Doe" front-end software for PGP and remailers, once estimated that only 500 people in the world were sophisticated enough to use the whole system.[11] This represents quite a comedown for a society reared on the dreaded "Red Menace" from the former Soviet Union or the hysteria of a millennia-old Satanic conspiracy sacrificing 50,000 children a year just in the U.S. The mere existence of highly secure encryption systems that potential criminals *might* use does not in itself create a global problem. Andy Oram, an editor at O'Reilly & Associates and the moderator of the discussion list for Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, points out that commercial needs can severely limit the use of technology of anonymity. "Repressive forces have constantly argued that they need to control encryption and anonymous remailers in order to attack pornography. But the vast majority of distributors of pornography can't hide themselves, because they want payment. They have to advertise their presence! They're the last people to hide behind encryption and anonymity." Nor are the remailer systems all that secure against actions using existing laws and technologies (whether overt or covert.) <penit.fi> in Finland, the oldest of the systems, shut down after the owner received a subpoena to deliver the name of a user. The others, as standard computer systems, are as vulnerable to individual attack as any other individual system. We saw a federal armored combat vehicle gradually demolish the fortified headquarters of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. Is the notion of a cyber-siege so outlandish then, where government computer systems would launch simultaneous SYNC attacks against a rogue remailer system if the same government deemed it was actively being used by terrorists? The recent attack by forces supporting the anti-Basque policies of the Spanish government on the Institute For Global Communications (IGC) site indicates "no." Of course the anonymous remailers themselves are not anonymous. The owners and administrators are subject to the same system of social defense (or political attack) as all other individuals in society. A simple court injunction would likely shut them down or result in the arrest on contempt charges of any administrator who disobeyed. (snip) A more Orwellian view was recently expressed by Alan McDonald, "a senior executive with the FBI," who said "that 'extremist' positions on electronic encryption are a threat to normal law enforcement and are elitist and nondemocratic. Insisting that the United States had remained true to the Constitution and to a system of ordered liberties, McDonald says: 'When people don't know much about electronic surveillance, they are fearful of it. But when they know Congress passed laws and the Supreme Court reviewed them and that there are numerous constraints and procedures, then it makes sense to them. It seems rational and balanced'."[14] (snip)