OK, I'll keep this brief. Yes, the postal service delivers anonymous mail. Yes, you can make anonymous telephone calls using pay phones. But like all hastily construed analogies, they fail in the magnified specifics. The problem here is that the fragile remailers being built right now are operated by *individual users*, while these other services are parts of vast public infrastructures. Now, until anonymous servers become part of the vast public infrastructure (I'll give us all the benefit of the doubt on this one), operators will be *extremely* vulnerable to what goes through their remailers. All this idealistic ranting about free speech is really inspiring (uhm, occasionally) but it doesn't help people whatsoever (in fact, it clearly is a very strong turn-off!) who want to establish remailers and anonymous posting services *right now*. For their sake, please switch off the impassioned speeches for unattainable lofty heights. (My previous message is my own feeble gesture of penance.) These people will go somewhere else if they find that our ideas are hopelessly naive, impractical, unrealistic, etc. Somehow, I just get the feeling that people won't be quite so uninhibited and be a bit more subdued when the first cypherpunk operator is jailed on contempt-of-court charges for refusing to decrypt his log/alias files, or prosecuted for destruction of evidence, or whatever. (Or maybe this would be a call-to-arms on the level of the Alamo or Pearl Harbor.) Mr. Ringuette is discerning in his view that some talking-past-each-other is going on based on issues of time frames and assumed/hidden agendas; and that the issue is the most serious one facing us *right now* is right on target. Please accept some minor sacrifices in the short term for some vast gains in the future. I think if we take the position that some ugly and gross mechanisms for anonymity limitations are put into place right now, they can be training wheels that will eventually mostly be taken off in the future, but in the meantime help to convince the world of our `good faith' intent, and serve as practical models for future systems. (What, you say we don't have good faith or practical systems? Maybe I'm seriously deluding *myself*.)