Distributed anonymous posting (was Re: Many Important Items...)

[Eric Hughes <hughes@soda.berkeley.edu>]

>Anonymous posting has been around as long as
>Usenet, in the form of forged messages.  

This is an excellent point of rhetoric.  Perhaps we should teach mail
and news forgery as a technique to the defense of privacy?   1/2 :-)

>I have been working through a few ideas for the design of a
>_distributed_ anonymous posting service, 

>[...] secret sharing might be used for remailer private keys.

I have convinced myself that some form of secret sharing will be
necessary for a distributed system that is robust against single point
failure.  You don't want single point manipulability, either, if you
can get it.

There are two basic ways to proceed: hard nodes, difficult to take
down, or soft nodes, easy to reconfigure around.  Both approaches
should be looked at.

Hard nodes are more difficult politically; soft nodes are more
difficult technically.

A soft node necessity: a directory lookup service, distributed,
sharing data.  Merely specifying the first point of contact and
alternate paths doesn't cut it.  You don't want to have to retry a
bounced message so many times.

Who here knows enough about sendmail to consider the eventual
feasibility of integrating pseudonym lookup into mail transfer?

Eric