- cypherpunks-legacy@lists.ogf.org

Piercing anonymitiy and censorship
by Theodore Ts'o 02 Mar '93

02 Mar '93

I noticed that in several postings, people have made the jump that revealing the real person (or the previous hop in a remailer chain) from an anonymous remailer is tantamount to censorship. I'd like to call into question that assumption. In many ways, I have a lot of sympathy with the Libertarian position --- whether or not I think it would realistically work as a system of governement is another question. In any case, I don't like censorship in any form. But disclosing who sent a particular piece of anonymous mail is not the same as censorship. I believe in free speach, but today, if someone violates the responsibility that goes along with free speach --- by yelling at the top of his/her lungs at 4am in the morning, when I am trying to sleep, or by libelling or slandering me ---- I have legal recourse; I can call the police and have him/her arrested for disturbing the peace, or I can sue him/her for libel or slander. But by making anonymous remailers airtight, you are removing the possibility for recourse, and thus removing the burden of personal responsibility from the sender of these messages. Perhaps there are people who believe Free Speech should be so much of an absolute that you should be allowed to scream at the top of their lungs at 5am in the morning in a residential area, and that libel and slander laws shouldn't exist. But it's not fair to call that a mainstream position. And it is unreasonable to assume that as an axiom. - Ted P.S. It is true that by revealing the identity of an user of a remailer, you are breaching their privacy --- however, most people also don't believe that the right to privacy is absolute. It certainly isn't explicitly listed in the U.S. Constitution. While, I also believe very strongly in a right to privacy, there are certainly times --- for example when someone is operating under a false name to commit fraudulent acts --- that a person's privacy should be breached. While it is much simpler to say "the right of privacy is always supreme over all other considerations", or "the right of free speech is supreme over all other considerations," that is a very simplistic view which I don't believe is very realistic. In any case, it is certainly not widely held.

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RE: she's at it again :-)
by Pat Farrell 02 Mar '93

02 Mar '93

In Message Mon, 1 Mar 1993 18:29:29 -0600, Karl Barrus <elee9sf(a)Menudo.UH.EDU> writes: > In the March 1993 IEEE Spectrum magazine on pp. 16-17, Dorothy >Denning again floats her support for digital telephony bill in an >article entitled "Wiretapping and cryptography". See also the March 1993 Communications of the ACM. Altho there is little new on the topic for most folks on this list. Sigh. Pat Farrell Grad Student pfarrell(a)cs.gmu.edu Department of Computer Science George Mason University, Fairfax, VA PGP Public key availble via finger #include <standard.disclaimer>

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Yanek Martinson
by root＠rmsdell.ftl.fl.us 02 Mar '93

02 Mar '93

> I tried to respond directly to Yanek Martinson > <yanek(a)novavax.noval.edu> directly without success. ^ I'm yanek(a)novavax.nova.edu (note, no l). -- Yanek Martinson yanek(a)novavax.nova.edu

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Re: she's at it again :-)
by pmetzger＠shearson.com 02 Mar '93

02 Mar '93

> From: Karl Barrus <elee9sf(a)menudo.uh.edu> > The article is very interesting, containing many oxymorons: > > "On the contrary, implementation of an intercept capability together > with appropriate security measures is more likely to lead to > telecommunication systems that are "smarter," more secure, and of > commercial interest to other countries." > > "while often labeled as "anti-privacy," wiretapping actually serves to > protect the privacy of law-abiding citizens and the business > interests of corporations" Ugh. File under "Abeit Macht Frei" along with slogans like "Freedom is Slavery". Perry

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Re: anon.penet.fi hacking
by edgar＠spectrx.saigon.com 02 Mar '93

02 Mar '93

On Feb 23, Hal said: Unless Eli's suggestion works - having our remailers put out a random "From:" line (perhaps just on mail to Penet?) might cause Penet to issue a new pseudonym for that apparent new user. This would be kind of wasteful from Penet's perspective - all those pseudonyms are never going to be re-used. But it might allow this form of chaining, without compromising the pseudonym of the remailer operator. I would be cautious about a random "From:" line. I think penet will probably reject input that at least has does not have a valid (but not necessarily truthful) return address. For a while, Miron Cuperman's wimsey remailer was generating a bogus >From address, something like "yeltsy(a)kremlin.vax.ru". I tried chaining this to penet to post to newsgroups, but my anonymous messages never appeared in the newsgroups. This was because, I think, penet sends a confirmation back to the sender. Since "kremlin.vax" is not in penet's net tables, this would cause the confirmation send to fail; my hypothesis is that this also causes the newsgroup post at penet to fail. One good From address to generate, at least for wimsey, would be pool0(a)extropia.wimsey.com but you would need to add some boilerplate explaining to the recipient that "pool0" is a group address and a return message may be seen by up to (number? 10-100?) persons unless it is encrypted. Wimsey could also establish its own penet password and automatically insert it whenever it detected a "to" address ending in penet.fi. It could also substitute the penet anonxxxx address for "pool0" in the above boilerplate. This would allow a penet return to pool0. Note that I don't mind too much if people know that they can reach Edgar Swank through pool0, because pool0 is also an address for many other people, so I can "plausibly deny" that any particular message addressed to pool0 is for me. I'd like to point out that so far the wimsey remailer is the only useful remailer from my point of view because it's the only one which allows me to delete the automatic sig. This is because it only forwards encrypted text and discards any appended unencrypted text. The other remailers were supposed to add a "kill line" to do the same thing, but as far as I know this never happened. -- edgar(a)spectrx.saigon.com (Edgar W. Swank) SPECTROX SYSTEMS +1.408.252.1005 Silicon Valley, Ca

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Re: A novel (?) return address idea
by wcs＠anchor.ho.att.com 02 Mar '93

02 Mar '93

Joe Thomas's proposal for anonymous return addresses is nice: return_addr = printable_encoding( encrypt( K, (salt, userid) ) ) userid = substring( n, decrypt( K, print_to_binary( return_addr ) ) ) where userid is the remailer's pointer to the real email address / pubkey, K is a secret key in the remailer, and salt is different for each message. (printable encoding may need to be monocase for some mailers.) If you used DES encryption, you could do 32 bits of UID and 32 bits of salt, you can turn the 64 bits of cyphertext into 13 printable characters using an obvious 5bit encoding; a good choice for a mailer is to prepend an x x<13_char_encoding> ( e.g. xabcdefghijklm ) and not have any real UIDs starting with x, so your mail delivery program can easily tell what to hand to the remailer-reply process and what to deliver more normally. Aside from being nice round numbers, this lets you support 4 billion users with 4 billion messages each, but is this really the right balance? Many users, like x<13rand>@remailer.foo.com, will only send a few messages, while a few others, like mailer-daemon(a)crypto.bank.com, will send lots. Should we perhaps use a Class A - Class B - Class C approach like IP addresses, with the bits broken up 16/48 - 32/32 - 48/16 or maybe 24/40 - 32/32 - 56/8? Unlike IP, of course, these address spaces are local only, and the user probably shouldn't know the userid number - the class is really just advisory. X-Anon-Request-New-UserID: C X-Anon-Request-User-Class: C could be used to request a new / reused userid of class C. Ideas for the extra-secure implementations: - it might be interesting to use a separate internal secret key to store the mapping from (real-email, userid) -> email-publickey. Hiding the mapping from real-email <-> userid is tougher. - if you really want longer userid+salts much bigger than this, you've got to handle email names noticably longer than 16 characters, or play games with hashing to reduce the size of the email name. The main motivation would be to use encryption other than DES, such as a public-key system with blocks longer than 64 bits, but hashing increases the amount of information you have to store, and the annoyance of deciding how to age it, avoid overload, etc. Bill Stewart # Bill Stewart wcs(a)anchor.ho.att.com +1-908-949-0705 Fax-4876 # AT&T Bell Labs, Room 4M-312, Crawfords Corner Rd, Holmdel, NJ 07733-3030

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Libel UK
by Tony Kidson 02 Mar '93

02 Mar '93

In message <9303011958.AA24443(a)soda.berkeley.edu> you write: > Perhaps Tony Kidson could tell us some of the effects of libel law in > the UK. The US law, which grew out of British law, seems to have gone > in the direction of reducing the power of a libel complaint, while > British law has done the opposite. I can't speak for the UK, but > those who live there could. In the UK, We don't have a first amendment :-( The law has developed in such a way that anybody with funds available can silence criticism by issuing a writ. There is much more protection for public figures. for example Robert Maxwell, proprietor of Mirror Group Newspapers (& Pergammon Press amongst others) robbed his companies blind. Everybody knew that he was a crook, but nobody could say so because he had the financial clout to silence everybody who said so with libel writs. The UK needs anonymous posting far more than the US does. Regards Tony Kidson +-----------------+-------------------------------+--------------------------+ | Tony Kidson | PGP 2.1 Key by request | Voice +44 81 466 5127 | | Morgan Towers, | | E-Mail | | Morgan Road, | This Space | tony(a)morgan.demon.co.uk | | Bromley, | to Rent | tny(a)cix.compulink.co.uk | | England BR1 3QE |Honda ST1100 ==*== DoD# 0801 | 100024.301(a)compuserve.com| +-----------------+-------------------------------+----------------------------+

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Re: anonymity + untraceable digital money = potential problems
by Tony Kidson 02 Mar '93

02 Mar '93

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volume
by swc＠uc1.ucsu.edu 02 Mar '93

02 Mar '93

I know better than to send an unsubscribe message to the whole list, but... I really like this stuff. I intend fully to set up my own remailer Real Soon Now :-) Unfortunately, the rigors of grad study + running a struggling business don't permit me to keep up with all the reading. So, thanks all, I'll be back this summer. -- Stuart W. Card <swc(a)uc1.ucsu.edu>

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Yanek Martinson <yanek@novavax.noval.edu>
by swc＠uc1.ucsu.edu 02 Mar '93

02 Mar '93

I tried to respond directly to Yanek Martinson <yanek(a)novavax.noval.edu> directly without success. Could someone please directly e-mail me a good address for him? Thanks. -- Stu Card <swc(a)uc1.ucsu.edu>

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