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Re: FW: [Asrg] 0. General

2003-10-22 12:48:20
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Brad Knowles writes:
At 2:25 PM -0400 2003/10/21, Denny Figuerres wrote:

 Anonimity:  as far as I am concerned if someone wants me to recive a
 message they should be willing to identify them selves.
 This does not mean you can not recive an email from an "unknown" party,
 but it does mean that I should be able to read a valid
 Email header that is not lying to me.

      There are human rights workers around the world that have their 
lives literally depending upon being able to send anonymous e-mail. 
You will literally be responsible for the murder of tens, hundreds, 
thousands, maybe millions of people, if you do not account for this 
issue.

This is important, I agree.

But IMO, something like the PGP remailers and/or hushmail are the key
systems to support this form of free speech -- it should *not* be part of
the core SMTP protocol.  Here's why:

As it stands, SMTP is *not* anonymous for such people.   It takes a lot of
technical know-how to send an anonymous email that cannot be tracked to
your ISP, who then have your phone number in their call records.   For
example, I know right away that your mail was sent by 216.194.225.101
at Wed, 22 Oct 2003 15:02:10 -0400.   No matter what header data you
insert or remove, you can't hide that tracking data.

To avoid this, you may use open proxies.  But for a whistleblower, this
still would not be safe, if there was enough law enforcement interest; an
authoritarian state would just have to sniff the unencrypted traffic going
*from* the source *to* the proxy to catch "troublemakers".

More likely, a sensible whistleblower would be using systems like
hushmail, Peekabooty, Freedom Network, and (if they're techie) the PGP
remailers network.  (Most nowadays seem to use hushmail.)

These can be volume-throttled, do not provide spammable bandwidth, or use
CAPTCHAs, so they become useless for bulk mail spamming -- but remain
*very* useful for free speech, since they *are* fully encrypted and
*designed* for whistleblowing activity.  

- --j.
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