On Wed 09/20/00 at 08:40 PM +0930, Brian Salter-Duke
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> My efforts in this direction however lead me to the following
> reflections. The L-mix e-mail list has virtually no traffic. The various
> newsgroups that could possibly have people interested in this topic have
> little non-junk traffic. Only three people have expressed interest in
> mixmaster support from the mutt lists. The mixmaster community seems to
> be terribly small. There are some indications that interest in anonymous
> mailers has declined over the last 4 - 5 years [...]
I for one had no idea this was the case and am sorry and alarmed to hear
it. The Mutt community should definitely continue to pursue integrating
mutt with mixmaster and the anon-remailers -- though it's not for me to say
whether this means mixmaster support should be part of mutt proper or as a
stand-alone utility like urlview.
I'd like to hear what others have to say about this, too. And I certainly
hope folks on this list *do* have something to say about it, because
it seems to me that if GPG is worth supporting, so is mixmaster.
If the FBI can't hear your phone conversations, they can still compel the
phone company to turn over their records of your phone calls, showing who
you called, when, and for how long. That's a lot of information.
Using encryption, as we all know, prevents someone from seeing
the actual content of your mail, but this same someone (or any other
someone) can still see the e-mail equivalent of your phone company records
unless you use remailers. Precisely because of that, using them is just
as important as encrypting, but they never *will* be used until it becomes
simple to do so.
We need to make it easy for our parents, for aol users, and for clueless
newbies everywhere to encrypt *and* remail. Otherwise we're pissing in the
wind. We're a miniscule minority who may be able to communicate securely
to each other, but to no one else.
In the year 2000, remailing is a ghetto. Almost no one remails. And that
means that the spooks have won. They see everything.
--
// [EMAIL PROTECTED] //
It is in no way obvious that the freedom to
have a private conversation will survive.
-- Whitfield Diffie
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