From: jalicqui@prairienet.org (Jeff Licquia)
Date: Tue, 17 Jan 95 12:27:23 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: (none)
Message-ID: <9501172027.AA24378@firefly.prairienet.org>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Mats Bergstrom wrote:
>On Tue, 17 Jan 1995, Name withheld on request wrote:
>
>> wonders to what end remailers are being put by people who are worried
>> about being "sold out".
>
>The fundamental principle here is that an e-mail message is just so
>many bits of 1's and 0's. It can never, in it's own capacity, steal,
>molest or kill. It is therefore not unethical to run a no-log 'fortress
>remailer' and auto-delete ALL complaints, without exception. It might
>not be feasible to do so if one wants to stay out of jail, but hope-
>fully this will change with the rapid increase in country domains
>and the soon-to-come digicash market. Discussions of programming to
>make fortress remailers work and to make them easily exportable to
>African Linux-boxes are interesting. So are discussions of expected
>repercussions on society. Ethical discussions of what is abuse or not
>are better left to the clergy.

Here comes the clergy! :-)

I'm sure that when your hypothetical remailer comes up and I decide to spam
you with your own words (now I wouldn't do that, now would I? ;-), your
sysadmin will be comforted by knowing that it's only ones and zeros filling
his hard disk.  He would be especially comforted if I spammed
postmaster@wherever.you.are rather than your own account in a move to
protect your own anonymity.

Advocating a remailer such as you describe is only possible in a world where
anonymity is considered the supreme good, a goal to achieve no matter how
many other ethical rules we break.  In the real world, however, there will
always be problems with "acceptable use" and "abuse", along with the
additional problems with establishing policy and so on.