Re: Scientologists may subpoena anonymous remailer records

Timothy C. May (tcmay@got.net) wrote:
|At 8:12 PM 4/10/96, Steve Reid wrote:
[...]
|>I don't really know much about remailers, but I don't think there's much
|>to know... If I'm mistaken about any of the above, I'm sure someone will
|>correct me.
|
|Glad to oblige. I note also that Jim Byrd and Jim Warren are unclear on
|some details. (To Jim Byrd, that "alumni account at Cal Tech" that you
|mentioned was one of the Cypherpunks remailers at Caltech that our own
|pioneering Hal Finney runs.)

Incorrect.  The account was tc@alumni.caltech.edu, which is not the same
as Hal's remailer at hal@alumni.caltech.edu.  Just an odd coincidence they
were on the same machine. 

There's a whole saga about how CoS tracked the guy down, it's quite a
story.  Rather than go into it here and leave things out or confuse them
further, check out
http://www.cybercom.net/~rnewman/scientology/anon/penet.html for a clear,
concise explanation of the whole bizarre affair.  Check out Ron's "CoS vs
the Net" page while you're at it, at
http://www.cybercom.net/~rnewman/scientology/home.html. 

|Cypherpunks remailers account for something like 29 out of 30 of all the
|world's remailers, by site count, though not volume. Sophisticated users
|know that the Cypherpunks model is the only robust one; Julf's approach 
|has an ecological niche, but is highly vulnerable to the very subpoena 
|approach used recently (not "several years ago" as Jim Warren says).

It's also suceptible to hacker attack, as happened a few years ago. 
"Information wants to be free" is not a political statement, it's a fact
of nature.  One property of information is that it tends to spread.  If
you don't want the information to spread, don't store it.

        RA

agent@l0pht.com (Rogue Agent/SoD!/TOS/attb) - pgp key on request
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