From: Hal <74076.1041@CompuServe.COM>
Date: Sat, 19 Dec 92 16:52:59 PST
To: CYPHERPUNKS <CYPHERPUNKS@TOAD.COM>
Subject: Remailers.
Message-ID: <921220004532_74076.1041_DHJ42-1@CompuServe.COM>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Responding to Edgar Swank's message:

> We've already discussed use of PGP by pedophiles to encrypt
> incriminating diaries.  It gets better.  PGP and remailers can
> be used to encrypt and ship "kiddy porn" GIF files. Even private
> possession of such material is a serious crime in the USA. A chain
> of anonymous and encrypted remailers could be used to drop kiddy porn
> into newsgroups like
>  
>   alt.sex.pictures
>  
> I'm sure that would create quite a stir!

This could easily happen soon, as news of these remailers spreads.
There's been talk on the net about a student at an Ivy League college
who is being investigated by the FBI for allegedly posting illegal
images containing child pornagraphy.  Once people find out about
anonymous remailers, especially ours with their chaining capabilities
and encryption, they will realize that such posts can be made with
almost total safety.  Presumably this may increase the number of
people who would attempt it.

> Perhaps Duncan or another attorney would like to comment on legal
> liability of remailers in these kinds of situations. I don't think
> there's currently any law on what records remailers would have to
> keep; if you didn't have them, you couldn't give them up.
>  
> If this becomes a problem, expect legislation regulating or even
> outright banning remailers. However, if remailer code has spread
> over many national boundaries, such legislation may not be effective.

My guess is that it will not be feasible to ban remailers, since it
would be hard to draw the line between completely automated remailers,
and simple manual forwarding of a message that someone sent you, which
happens all the time and can hardly be made illegal.

I suspect that instead the approach would be to claim that remailer
operators are responsible for the material their remailers produce,
regardless of its original source.  So if child porn comes out, I
am guilty of sending child porn.  I can argue that my remailer was
automatic and that I shouldn't be held responsible for what comes out
of it, but my guess is that this argument will be rejected on the
grounds of personal responsibility, and because no one forces me to
run a remailer which sends out anything that comes in to it.

Such a policy would be a plausible extension of current Internet
policies, IMO.  RFC 822, the document which describes the format of
Internet mail message, in session 4.4.2 discusses the "Sender:" field,
and says, "Since the critical function served by the 'Sender' field
is identification of the agent responsible for sending mail and
since computer programs cannot be held accountable for their behavior,
it is strongly recommended that when a computer program generates a
message, the HUMAN who is responsible for that program be referenced
as part of the 'Sender' field mailbox specification."  [Capitalization
in the original.]  The need for a person to take responsibility for
each piece of mail that is sent would tend to lead to the policy
I mentioned.

With such a policy in place, if enforced by law, I don't think people
would run remailers in this country because of the legal risks.  There
would still be the international remailers, though.

> By the way, no-one has yet responded to my request to add features
> to Eric's remailer to 1)remove the "sig" after "--" and 2)Anonymously
> post to newsgroups available at the remailer site.  Both these
> features are present in the Australian remailer at Pax. Unfortunately
> that remailer seems less secure than Eric's in that it keeps more or
> less permanent records of its users at the remailer site and it
> doesn't seem to be able to chain to other remailers.
> 
> --
> edgar@spectrx.saigon.com (Edgar W. Swank)
> SPECTROX SYSTEMS +1.408.252.1005  Silicon Valley, Ca

It should be possible to chain from Pax to our remailers, getting the
best features of both.  Pax could be the first remailer in the chain,
stripping the sig.  The message could then go through our remailers,
providing non-traced security, at least if you can find someone who
does not keep logs.

Anonymous posting can be done already.  Anyone can post to most newsgroups
by sending mail to certain addresses.  One such system is at Berkeley.
Send to, e.g., sci-crypt@ucbvax.berkeley.edu to post to sci.crypt.  There
is another such system running in Austin, TX, I believe, but I don't
have the corresponding net address handy.  So this capability is already
provided by our (or anyone's) remailers.

One reason I haven't looked at stripping the .sig is due to an email
discussion I had about a month ago with Eric Hughes.  Eric strongly
felt that message bodies should be preserved as much as possible by the
remailers, in accordance with the general principle of Internet mail
forwarding.  Too much mangling is done already by mail gateways,
and adding more changes might be harmful.  Obviously, the remailers can't
avoid doing some processing of the message body, what with the "::"
pasting tokens and PGP decryption, but Eric felt that unnecessary
changes should be minimized.  I know Eric is working on some new
remailer concepts so I want to defer to him on this issue for now.

Hal Finney
74076.1041@compuserve.com

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