Subject: [Asrg] Maintaining Anonymity in an Authenticated System

From: Philip Miller <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 02 Jul 2003 15:00:35 -0400

In all the discussion of authenticating individual senders rather than 
the servers and MTAs they're using, we've all forgotten that there are 
circumstances in which anonymity is a requirement.  Think of corporate 
whistle-blowing situations, in which someone wishes to send an anonymous 
message to an entity like a media organization or the SEC.  In a world 
in which all transmissions are undeniably authenticated to a sender, 
this becomes impossible.
Anonymous transmission is indeed a feature of our current systems, not a 
bug.  Any new system or authentication layer on top of what already 
exists needs to maintain that.

Philip Miller

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From: Yakov Shafranovich <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 02 Jul 2003 15:46:44 -0400

At 03:00 PM 7/2/2003 -0400, Philip Miller wrote:

>In all the discussion of authenticating individual senders rather than the 
>servers and MTAs they're using, we've all forgotten that there are 
>message to an entity like a media organization or the SEC.  In a world in 
>which all transmissions are undeniably authenticated to a sender, this 
>becomes impossible.
>bug.  Any new system or authentication layer on top of what already exists 
>needs to maintain that.

One interesting observation that was made that spammer usually do not use 
CyberPunk anonymous remailers to send spam or any other kind of anonymous 
remailers. There must be a reason for that, perhaps because they see no 
need to do so. However, you are definitely right, anonymity is important.

One distinction that can be made perhaps, that a trusted system could be 
implemented for bulk email only, thus allowing anyone to send a single 
message anonymously once.

The question remains -  can a trust system allow for anonymity?