Thoughts on remailers

I have recently encountered a situation (ongoing in the newsgroup
alt.zines) in which some person has been sending a woman harassment mail
and threats, etc in an anonymous manner. She has tried to put his name on
her kill list, but he uses a different ID each message. I assume that he
is telneting to the mail port, so analysis of the message headers will
show what system the message is from. I will be happy as soon as she can
kill all his messages and ignore him. But during conversation with her, I
mentioned that it was a good thing he wasn't useing a cypherpunk remailer,
else we would never be able to identify the source. She responded with the
comment that she could just kill all messages incoming from the remailers
and be done with it if that were the case, which gets me thinking...
The remailers are perfect for those who would harrass and abuse others.
Freedom of speech with 0 responsibility, etc. They are also good for many
other things, and the amount of junk mail going through them must be FAR
less than the usefull traffic, however we all have seen or heard about
what a few obnoxious people can do. The problem I forsee is that junk
mailers and porno-grams like the ones I've been dealing with this week
will start using our remailers as their method of choice, and once word
gets around of that, many, many people could put all the remailers in
thier kill lists, thinking "Why would anybody need to send ME anonymous
mail?", and the effectiveness of the remailers would be drasticly reduced.
Then again, maybe it won't be a problem. I'm realy not sure, but it's
worth a little thought.

Happy Hunting, -Chris Odhner

We just discussed a related issue on another list I subscribe to.  I
feel that we want accountability along with anonymity in many
circumstances.  You can deny service to 'bad apples' with out
compromising the identities of anyone who uses your service.  Not even
the identiy of the 'bad apple' need ever be know to you.  Chaum
discusses how this can be achieved cryptographicaly.  Is anyone
working on an implementation?

j'
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