From: Clark Reynard <clark@metal.psu.edu>
Date: Thu, 25 Mar 93 23:38:26 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: To be a bit more clear
Message-ID: <9303260733.AA28484@metal.psu.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Since, after all, the difficulties of broadcasting either anonymously
or under one's actual name are not really pronounced; given Ringuette's
idea of multiple remailing sites, perhaps several thousand, only a
few dozen sites would be necessary to serve as remailers to the
larger numbers of anonymous sites; this makes it difficult to trace
(unfortunately far from impossible); since each post of a person
would seemingly originate from a different site, and in additionit would arrive at that different site from a different point of origin
(since NNTP would not begin logging path until after it travelled
from site to site via email).  Now, to avoid the (inevitable) possibility
that one or many of the reposters would have been killed (or simply
gone down due to incompetence) each of the actual addresses would have
a list of possible sites to attempt to post the message from; 

the essential fact here is that there is no real way to guarantee
this so-called 'minimal moderation.'  the possible ways of circumventing
it, either by telnetting to different nntp ports manually and simply
coming from different sites, or by setting up a number of anonymous
remailers to actual anonymous posting sites (none of them having
a full list of possible hosts, to avoid a single person from knowing
all of them, makes it essentially impossible to track someone
determined to post anonymously; people have tried for literally
YEARS to avoid anonymous messages.  they ain't done it yet,
thank god.  a lot of people with useful information do not
wish to reveal their names, and this is their right.

of course, it will be abused as well, as it always has, but this
is simply something to be tolerated or ignored.  the backbone
doesn't have to carry these messages, and if it doesn't wish to,
another 'backbone' will arise that will.  

fc