From: nobody@alumni.cco.caltech.edu
Date: Wed, 25 Nov 92 23:12:31 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: No Subject
Message-ID: <9211260713.AA01656@alumni.cco.caltech.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


This entire business may be pretty simple.  If we have anonymity
both ways, (where one or neither party knows the others physical
location), then who cares about the content of the message? 
 
You might as well send it in plain text,  Except you need RSA
just for the signitures so you know you aren't being spoofed.

*RSA signatures ARE money.*

Unless money (accouting, proof) is needed, you don't need RSA.

What you do need is anonymity. {Of course throwing RSA on top
of it with RSA encoded regular keys is a nice touch (no sense in giving
anything away.)}

----

Now listen up kiddies, what you are playing with is sedition,
conspiricy, and the like.  In other words plain old politics.
Adding mumbo-jumbo (crypto) technology doesn't change a thing.

If you want to do this, it is a simple matter of building a large
enough cooperative group.

How big?  Well bigger than the Hells Angels, Maybe a thousand
people.  I don't know.  Depends on how rough it gets.

But the proceedure is just mutual backscratching.  We all accept
and forward anonymous mail for each other.  So long as it is coded,
we can deny knowledge of the contents.  That can go a long way as
long as the basic activity (of forwarding) itself is not proscribed.

There have been several suggestions here how this would be done.

You send mail to a cooperative site, who forwards it.  That same site
will receive replies.  You collect your mail with specific commands to
dump the accumulated contents to some other node.  It would be moderately
tough to bug one node.  A quick second skip would make it almost 
impossible to track, 3 quick skips to eternity.

But the trick is to have a large net of standardized, cooperating sites.

There have been suggestions to throw cypher-money into this equation
to pay for the operation of the "MIXes" or the operators of the servicing
nodes.  But that won't work.  In a hostile environment money won't
buy civil disobedience.  It's like you can't pay somebody else to
go to war for you.  We all have to shoulder part of the risk.  We should
evolve some standard "remailer/replier daemon" and run them as a common
service.  It is just our civic duty.

The list of cooperating, volunteer sites would be published in a plain
text group.  You are either on the list or you aren't.

Just the presence of such a cypher mob should stop the forces of darkness.

-Gilbert