holographic remailing & the scientologists

["Vladimir Z. Nuri" <vznuri@netcom.com>]

it seems that anonymous remailing has split into two basic
areas, each with distinct requirements and demands and problems:

1. private mail, sent to another email address

2. posts to Usenet or other forums such as mailing lists.


now, interestingly, apparently most of the extremely heavy 
political backlash has come against (2), causing Hal Finney
for example to advocate or suggest that remailers not be 
designed for posting but be limited to emailing to individual
users somehow. (he didn't mention how mailing lists would be
handled, but one might screen out email addresses that
are "known mailing list addresses" or something like that)

regarding (2), with scientology, I was trying to imagine
how one could accomplish the same feature of distributing
information anonymously in a "public place", 
but without giving the scientologists
the ability to track a particular origination of the email,
even remailers.

Chaum's DC net idea is a useful approach. here I'd like to 
suggest another.

some time ago someone had the amusing idea of cutting up the
PGP binary code, UUencoded, and putting all the zillions of
pieces in peoples signatures. each person would send mail
to the signature server to pick up one of the 1/n pieces,
and they would put it in their messages.

frankly, I think this was a great idea that we could explore
some more. in a sense, it stores data "holographically" over
all kinds of different people's messages. imagine a system in which
the scientology documents are stored in people's signatures,
and someone writes software to go and recombine the documents
based on finding signatures "out there".

this could be applied to one newsgroup by having remailers post
only tiny pieces of the material, but with enough on the newsgroup
at any time to recombine them all with the software, but far
too many pieces for the scientologists to attack all the remailers
they are sent through. (people could post them through their regular
email addresses). furthermore anyone posting a piece has
a sort of minor plausible deniability. ("I just copied the
signature from so-and-so as a protest, I have no idea what it
refers to")

==

this all suggests to me the following idea. suppose that some
document has been created that someone wants censored. how could
net citizens protest this censorship? one scheme would be for
everyone to put a tiny piece of the document in their signatures.
if you get enough people to do this, it may actually be the case
that at any one time, just because of the randomness of all the
pieces available, the news server has enough messages
archived for a program to scan the message directories and reconstruct
the documents from all the pieces that are found. these "pieces"
could even be stored solely in the netnews header fields.

another idea involves the concept behind "spread spectrum". in
this system, little pieces of data are spit out in different
places, or channels, and the source and the reciever are scanning
the exact same channel at the same time based on exact synchronization.
I guess an analogy to usenet would be tiny pieces of data showing
up in seemingly random newsgroups, but which are followed or "caught"
exactly by the "reconstruction software".

some interesting ideas related to steganography 
that some people might like to play with.

==

for a model of the scientology problem, 
it appears that what we have is a set of email addresses (S) and
a public forum that essentially reaches some large subset of these
people (S2).  a person wishes to send out a secret document
to S2, but he can't do so by posting to the forum, because then
the censors "see" him and shut him down. but what he
*can* do is send lots of pieces to a group of people in S, and
each of these people individually posts their piece. (the censors have
no control over mail sent between individuals, only that posted
collectively). 

possibly, then, there is no single target of "who posted the material"
for the censors to clamp down on, and the information eventually
can be reconstructed by all S2.

==

key ways what I am proposing is different than some of the other
"cut up the anonymous messages and recombine" proposals out there: 

1. the recombination is not done by a remailer. it is done by anyone
who can run software on the newsserver (i.e. reading the directories).
the scientologists or "censors" cannot tell who is doing this.

2. the messages are not completely comprised of the data to be sent.
the data could be stored in headers or the signatures of otherwise
"legitimate" messages.

note that the same scheme could be applied to web pages. you could
store a document "holographically" in which pieces are obtained
at all kinds of different URLs. it would be laughable for the 
censors to try to get court orders against individual pieces.
and furthermore, the entire document is not stored anywhere "out
there" in particular but recombined by anyone. the scientologists
don't know who.

note that I am giving the scientologists a lot more credit for
their enmity than they deserve. they have mostly lost their war
already in many ways, and they aren't a very serious threat
to cyberspace in general, imho. they have shown an amazingly
unabated aggression & zeal against remailer operators, however,
something that could possibly be derailed with a little 
ingenuity.