From: Jim Choate <ravage@ssz.com>
Date: Wed, 1 Oct 1997 08:28:07 +0800
To: cypherpunks@ssz.com (Cypherpunks Distributed Remailer)
Subject: Re: Remailers and ecash (fwd)
Message-ID: <199710010018.TAA16914@einstein.ssz.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text



Forwarded message:

> Date: Tue, 30 Sep 1997 22:52:09 +0200 (MET DST)
> Subject: Re: Remailers and ecash (fwd)
> From: nobody@REPLAY.COM (Anonymous)

> Jim Choate <ravage@ssz.com> wrote:
> 
> > What besides raising hell anonymously, laundering money, and defeating
> > merchant purchase traffic analysis are commercial anonymous remailers
> > good for?
> 
> Avoiding spam.  Anyone who doesn't use remailers is sure to get their
> mailbox full of crap.

Using an anonymous remailer does nothing to reduce spam. It doesn't even
make it harder for them to send it to you, they just don't know who you are;
hardly a requirement for most spam that I have seen.

> Employment related concerns.  I know of many people on this list who
> have had problems along these lines.

How in the world would an anonymous remailer help me get or keep a job?

Are you perhaps refering to whistleblowing? If so, being anonymous will do
nothing in most cases because you have to be willing to stand up and say you
saw what you saw non-anonamously in court. Otherwise the company will just
claim it ain't so and that you are some chicken-shit ex-employee with a
grudge, the DA will buy it too unless you reveal your identity which sort of
defeats the whole point of anonymity.

Now it might be useful for other forms of whistleblowing, ala Pentagon Papers,
where the source is irrelevant except for idle curiosity. But considering the
frequency at which this sort of stuff happens it hardly qualifies as a reason
to stay in business day after day. 

> The rest of your comment is utterly stupid. How many people do you
> know who use remailers to launder money?  Zero, I'd bet.

If it is a commercial remailer using ecash payments then every user is
laundering money - strictly speaking. The point being that with such a
system in place it becomes trivial to anonymously launder your money into
ecash and then using another account turn it back into real money. The nice
thing about this is that you don't loose anything in the process, unlike
regular underground money laundering where you might get 60% return (if you
are lucky and got a big gun). I'll leave it as an excercise to the reader as
to how this can be used to avoid taxes at nearly every level.


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