Military Snooping

[John Young <jya@pipeline.com>]

Lucky Green posted the message below elsewhere which 
raises provocative questions about military snooping on 
the Net to combat anonymizers and remailers:

[Forward]

At the FC'97 rump session, Paul Syverson from NRL presented 
a paper titled "Onion Routing". The description of the system 
sounds very much like Wei Dai's PipeNet. However, the 
development team seems to be unaware of PipeNet
and the discussions about it that we had in the past.

NLR has currently five machines implementing the protocol. 
Connection setup time is claimed to be 500 ms. They are looking 
for volunteers to run "Onion Routers". It appears the US military 
wants to access websites without giving away the fact that they 
are accessing the sites and is looking to us to provide the cover 
traffic. What a fortunate situation.

They said that the source would soon be on the web page, but so 
far it has not appeared.

http://www.itd.nrl.navy.mil/ITD/5540/projects/onion-routing/

[End forward]

For those who don't want NRL snooping on their accesses, we've 
put three of the Onion-Routing papers at:

   http://jya.com/onion.htm

   http://jya.com/privnet.htm

   http://jya.com/hri.htm  (a conversion from PDF)