Re: REM_ail

[jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com>]

At 01:43 PM 10/2/96 GMT, John Young wrote:
>   10-8-96. VV: 
> 
>   "The Remailer Is Dead, Long Live the Remailer. Life After 
>   Penet."  By Dave Mandl (Excellent, Dave, yes!) 
> 
>   By the strict standards of the cypherpunks, a loosely 
>   knit affinity group of the Net's most radical and 
>   technoliterate privacy advocates, Penet's security was 
>   actually on the flimsy side. Its Achilles' heel was the 
>   file --  just begging to be subpoenaed -- that linked 
>   users' real names to their Penet pseudonyms. 
>   Cypherpunk-run remailers, on the other hand, generally 
>   leave no trace of the sender's true identity. In 
>   addition, cypherpunk remailers can be "chained" -- 
>   messages can be routed through several far-flung 
>   remailers before reaching their final destination, making 
>   message tracing all but impossible, even for the remailer 
>   operators. 
>   http://jya.com/remail.txt 
>   ftp://jya.com/pub/incoming/remail.txt 
  REM_ail

Now that Helsingius has shut down Penet, what's to stop him from simply 
LYING about the source of the messages in question, maybe claiming that they 
came from the output of a cypherpunks remailer and are thus permanently 
untraceable?

(one feature it might have been useful for him to have included in Penet is 
the ability of the user to re-address a return address, which would 
presumably erase the original address in the records.  Just sending email 
and some particular password would do it...)


Jim Bell
jimbell@pacifier.com