From: nobody@kaiwan.com (Anonymous)
Date: Tue, 6 Sep 94 16:04:34 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: The Ethics of Remailers
Message-ID: <199409062304.QAA03012@kaiwan.kaiwan.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


>From ghio@kaiwan.com Mon Sep  5 12:16:28 1994
>Sender: owner-cypherpunks@toad.com
>Precedence: bulk

> Date: Fri, 2 Sep 1994 11:09:40 -0600
> From: Patrick Juola <juola@suod.cs.colorado.edu>
> To: cypherpunks@toad.com
> Subject: Needed for a computer ethics class
>
>
> Does anyone have a concise, citeable statement about why anonymous
> remailers are a good thing?  Some sort of position statment by
> Julf would be ideal.  Similarly, if anyone has something for the
> *other* side of the coin, I'd love to see that.
> 
> I'm in the process of writing a course on computer ethics for
> the University of Colorado at Boulder and I think anonymous
> remailers would be a good subject for an essay assignment, but
> I need enough material (ideally, primary source material) to
> lay the groundwork first.
> 
>         Patrick

>>No, but it's something that I often get asked.  I would be interested to hear
>>examples of good things that people are using my anonymous remailer for.

Well about the best example I can think of is Canadian related. In Ontario
Canada there is a ban in effect on a trial of a young lady named Karla
Homolka. Karla and her (ex) hubby (who is presently incarcerated awaiting
trial) are likely guilty (certainly Karla was found guilty at her trial)
of pretty heinous acts of murder, torture etc.

So heinous, that the judge banned all publication of the details surrounding
Karla's trial. However, when he did so, he apparantly hadn't heard about
Internet, because now its quite likely alot of the details have slipped
through the cracks.

The remailers have been used to protect anonymous sources posting to the
Internet in order to help the public circumvent the ban. If they didn't
exist, then its quite likely that circulation of the info....even on
Internet, would have been made more difficult. The remailers, with their
chaining abilities have certainly helped the spread of the info.

Other than that, it's likely the remailers are useful for certain politically
sensitive operations (ie circumventing ITAR) or socially sensitive (ie in
discussions that the politically correct go up in arms about (ie gay rights..
for or against).

And then of course there is the old stand-by use of posting stories to
alt.sex.stories, etc :>